Culture Quotes

If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were educated. But a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

C.S. Lewis

Look at the kind of people who most object to the childishness and cheapness of celebrity culture. Does one really want to side with such apoplectic and bombastic bores? I should know, I often catch myself being one, and it isn’t pretty. I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each. Monocultures are uninhabitably dull and end as deserts.

Stephen Fry

Illusory universality is the universality of the art of the culture industry, it is the universality of the homogeneous same, an art which no longer even promises happiness but only provides easy amusement as relief from labour.

J.M. Bernstein

I have come to the conclusion that just as the Japanese live to work, Asians live to eat.

Anastacia Oaikhena

I lean back and tilt my head so all I see are the clouds in the sky. I'm looking back inside my head with my eyes wide open. I still don't know where I'm going; I decided I'm not crazy or alien. It's just that I'm more like one of those kids they find in remote jungles or forests []. A wolf child. And they've dragged me into this fucking schizo-culture, snarling and spitting and walking around on curled knuckles.

David Wojnarowicz

It’s a great honor, m’ijo. We know that. I’m sure everyone in Ysleta is proud of you. But this is who you are," she said, for a moment scanning the dark night air and the empty street. A cricket chirped in the darkness. "God help you when you go to this ‘Havid.’ You will be so far away from us, from everything you know. You will be alone. What if something happens to you? Who’s going to help you? But you always wanted to be alone; you were always so independent, so stubborn.""Like you.

Sergio Troncoso

New Rule: The White House doesn't have to release the dead Bin Laden photos, but don't pretend we can't take it. We've seen pictures of Britney Spears's vagina getting out of a car. Television has desensitizes us to violence, and porn has desensitized us to people getting shot in the eye.

Bill Maher

One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely. This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical cause the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don't know how to use energy, or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy. Nuclear power, if we are to believe its advocates, is presumably going to be well used by the same mentality that has egregiously devalued and misapplied man- and womanpower. If we had an unlimited supply of solar or wind power, we would use that destructively, too, for the same reasons.

Wendell Berry

The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.

Chris Hedges

To most Americans, a dog is a potential mate. To some Chinese, a dog is potential meat.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It is one of the benchmarks of a culture I always think – the page at which it operates. A good way to measure it is to order a taxi and see how irate local people get if it is late.

Sara Sheridan

People carry around with them internalization's fixed-feature space learned early in life. Man is like other members of the animal kingdom , first, last and always a prisoner of his biological organism. No matter how hard he tries, it is impossible for him to the best himself of his own culture, where it has penetrated to the roots of his nervous system and determines how he perceives the world.

Edward T. Hall

Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.

Edward Abbey

We are all born agnostics. Atheism and theism is sold to us.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The heathen could only be eliminated as a force if their culture was completely erased.

Tariq Ali

We . . . go out into the Waste Land of Experts, each knowing so much about so little that he can neither be contradicted nor is worth contradicting.

G.M. Young

God makes Himself felt in the heart of each person. He also respects the culture of all people...God is open to all people. He calls everyone. He moves everyone to seek Him and to discover Him through creation.

Pope Francis

We came to recognize that our initial thinking about the keys to educational reform was wrong. The key variables weren’t pedagogical. They weren’t financial. They weren’t curricular. They weren’t research. They weren’t any of the usual things we’ve always talked about as the engines of change. The variables were deeply emotional and cultural.

David Edward Goldberg

Wherever you travel to, appreciate the culture and beauty of the place.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Literalness, however, is not the substance from which human culture is made.

Begoña Aretxaga

Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor.

Ryan Lilly

try to visualize all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves.

Steven Hall

When I was young, I thought classical music was only the background noise for cartoons.

Ben Carson

With the evolution of Us came the evolution of Them.The original Them was anyone who wasn’t blood related — Them was pretty much everyone. Over time, as the number of people in Us got bigger, Them got smaller. Them now might mean anyone in any other country. This is a common Them in America, and a Them that only (light use of this word) consists of 95% of the world. Another common Them in America is anyone who isn’t Christian, which is a measly 68% of the world, or roughly 4.8 Billion Thems.In a relatively short amount of time, Us went from being a fraction of a percent of humanity and Them the rest, to some people experiencing an Us of more than two billion other people, far more than were ever alive at the onset of Us and Them.

Sam Killermann

Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.

John Updike

How vigilant we must be to ensure that we don’t allow our impression of Jesus to be held captive by the prevailing mores of our secular culture! Rather, it is essential that we continue to return to the Gospels to ensure that the reverse occurs: to allow Jesus to hold our hearts and imaginations captive in response to the dominant thinking of our time. For exiles trying to live faithfully within the host empire of post-Christendom, the Gospel stories are our most dangerous memories. They continue to fire our imaginations and remind us that it’s possible to thrive on foreign soil while serving Yahweh, but it’s the kind of thriving that often rejects popular wisdom. These stories are the standard by which we judge all other stories, all other descriptors of life today. If, after reading these dangerous biblical stories, you can’t imagine Jesus the Messiah as a televangelist, strutting around on stage in a flashy suit, playing it up for the cameras, then you are forced to reject this image and seek another mode of being Christ today.

Michael Frost

Until she went with him to India the first time after they were married. Then it all made sense, and she realized that the hospitality he displayed to all guests was larger than he was - it was cultural, hereditary, something coded into his DNA.

Thrity Umrigar

A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of its picture of itself. High and popular art are not in competition here. Both may help citizens decide what they are and what they admire. In our age, however, high art has given up speaking to the body of its fellow citizens. It devotes itself to technical displays that can appeal only to other technicians.

E. Christian Kopff

She believed that people born to low caste families were meant to suffer. That was their karma. She had learnt that those who indulge in sinful activities in their previous birth, especially those who humiliated others, would be reborn to low caste families. She firmly believed also that one has to suffer until the sin was paid for through suffering and good deeds.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

We do not need to explain how the Aryans entered and settled in the Dravidian country (tira¯vit»a na¯» t»u), and subjugated and oppressed the Dravidians. Nor do we need to explain how before the Aryans entered the Dravidian country, the Dravidian country had a civilization and arts of the highest rank.

Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

Physical beauty or sexual attraction in a woman was not a criterion in deciding, strengthening, or the survival of such relationships of these villagers.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

Generally, that humble piece of furniture placed on the front veranda of the house officially belonged to the man of the household; the women never slept on it.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

Master Salamon usually set off a little later as neither he nor other male members of their community were in the habit of walking on the road alongside their wives.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

What the culture of get rich quick does to our people is armed robbery and theft becomes the order of the day.

Sunday Adelaja

What the culture of get rich quick does to our people is the escapist mentality becomes prevalent, giving birth to the syndrome of economic refugees.

Sunday Adelaja

For a nation to be truly great, she must first identify her national values, enumerate her virtues and formulate her value system. But the most tasking of all these is to develop a culture in her people, that will best represent the proclaimed value systems of the nation.

Sunday Adelaja

A new movement reinforced by activists such as Buddhist monks, physicians who practised traditional medicine, teachers, farmers, and laborers brought Prime Minister Bandaranaike into the political helm. The leaders of the Davulawatta community considered this election a personal achievement. They saw this as a people's government and appreciated its genuine interest in fulfilling the needs of the common people. They trusted that the present government would eradicate poverty and the caste discrimination, and work to promote self-esteem.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

The more you keep your door closed, the more you will rot! Open your door! Let different ideas, different beliefs, different cultures and different attitudes flow into your mind. Anything different will help you to enlarge your little world! By opening your door, you invite the whole universe to your tiny house! Enlarge your house and enrich yourself! As long as your door remains closed, you shall continue rotting in your poor world!

Mehmet Murat ildan

The Temple-like structure at which our heroes seek answers has an interior environment more like a familiar tavern at which C. S. Lewis would be comfortable or, for that matter, at which Christ would be criticized for associating with sinners.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Once information slipped the bonds of gravity and friction, it tended to gather where it was most valuable.

H.W. Brands

A Martial Artist may become A professional fighter but not every Fighter is capable of becoming A martial artist. Martial Arts are about restoration of physical and spiritual balance and fluidity; they are about observing restraints and 'setting example'. Every practice session is A reminder of the play of opposites (yin and yang), . . . .

Soke Behzad Ahmadi

Another anti-theoretical stratagem is to claim that in order to launch some fundamental critique of our culture, we would need to be standing at some Archimedean point beyond it. What this fails to see is that reflecting critically on our situation is part of our situation. It is a feature of the peculiar way we belong to the world. It is not some impossible light-in-the-refrigerator attempt to scrutinize ourselves when we are not there. Curving back on ourselves is as natural to us as it is to cosmic space or a wave of the sea. It does not entail jumping out of our own skin. Without such self-monitoring we would not have survived as a species.

Terry Eagleton

The American Club was for those who preferred to have dinner at six and brunch on a Sunday and avoid the stress of dealing with Greeks and their language.

John Mole

New York's perennial attraction was shopping.

Erik Larson

People think that other international languages are smarter and more business wise. But they have to understand that we have to preserve our culture.

Enock Maregesi

Contrary to popular belief, some animals would not have each chosen to be a human being, if they were given the choice between being what they are and being human.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It will no doubt be agreed that there are multitudes of these defiant, aggressive types in our culture. But they do not frequent psychoanalysts' offices because our competitive culture (in which, to a considerable extent, the individual who can aggressively exploit others without conscious guilt feeling is 'succesful') supports and 'cushions' them to a greater extent than the opposite types. It is generally the culturally 'weak' individuals who get to the psychoanalyst; for in cultural terms they have the 'neurosis' and the succesfully agressive person does not.

Rollo May

At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory; this hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out again, must return to the wild: - Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings - in this requirement they are all alike. It was the noble races which left the concept of 'barbarian' in their traces wherever they went; even their highest culture betrays the fact that they were conscious of this and indeed proud of it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We build this country ourselves every day and we have to be, in the most positive sense, totally unreal.

J.C. Villamere

This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer.

Jeanette Winterson

Every civilisation has had its irrational but reassuring myth. Previous civilisations have used their culture to sing about it and tell stories about it. Ours has used its mathematics to prove it.

David Fleming

He is Your Customer, the Reason behind Your Customs.

Vineet Raj Kapoor

If you can't see past my name, you can't see me.

DaShanne Stokes

I love my culture, I'm very proud to be Kurd.

Davan Yahya Khalil

Cultural products will spread faster and wider when everybody can see what everybody else is doing. It suggests that the future of many hit-making markets will be fully open, radically transparent, and very, very unequal.

Derek Thompson

We have reached the end of one era, and now we don't know what is all around us. Because we're already in a new era, and it is very different from the old one. Science and the world of technology are both changing everything so quickly, even our bodies. So the original ancient culture was present here, but to no avail, at this point in history it has come to stop. It still has some effect, some kind of continuity, but it cannot analyse and reformulate things, it cannot impact things with absolute strength. The age to follow will be full of dangers. It will be full of difficulties. In all likelihood, it will not be a good future for mankind. It is even possible this new era will mean the end of mankind.

László Krasznahorkai

You will get closer to the truths only when you start thinking this way: My religion is not the best religion, my country is not the best country, my culture is not the best culture, and my life is not the best life! The more you move away from arrogance, pride and prejudice, the more you will get closer to the truth!

Mehmet Murat ildan

The fastest way to destroy a culture is to make it multicultural.

Robert Black

The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most “savage” or “barbarous” of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

[I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.

Christopher Hitchens

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