CULTURE QUOTES IV

quotations about culture

But though Heaven in every breast hath sown these early seeds of love and admiration, yet in vain, without fair culture's kind parental aid, without enlivening suns and genial showers, and shelter from the blast, in vain we hope the tender plant should rear its blooming head, or yield the harvest promis'd in its spring.

MARK AKENSIDE

The Pleasures of Imagination


take a look outside
those lively arts are on the slide
and culture's just a bore
when you're angry, young and poor

THE DAMNED

"Lively Arts"


The greatest discovery any alien anthropologist could make about our culture is our overriding response to failure: If it didn't work last year, do it AGAIN this year (and if possible do it MORE).

DANIEL QUINN

Beyond Civilization


The state is the nursing mother of human culture.

JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON

The Nation and the Ethics of War and Preparedness: An Address


One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.

EDWARD T. HALL

The Silent Language


Culture is a fuzzy set of attitudes, beliefs, behavioural conventions, and basic assumptions and values that are shared by a group of people, and that influence each member's behaviour and each member's interpretations of the "meaning" of other people's behavior.

HELEN SPENCER-OATEY

Culturally Speaking


The family is both the fundamental unit of society as well as the root of culture. It ... is a perpetual source of encouragement, advocacy, assurance, and emotional refueling that empowers a child to venture with confidence into the greater world and to become all that he can be.

MARIANNE E. NEIFERT

Dr. Mom's Parenting Guide


The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.

JOEL SALATIN

Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal


Culture would seem ... first and foremost, to be the knowledge of what makes man something other than an accident of the universe, be it by deepening his harmony with the world, or by the lucid consciousness of his revolt from it.

ANDRÉ MALRAUX

attributed, Malraux : An Essay in Political Criticism


Culture is the way we live. It is the clothes we wear, the foods we eat, the language we speak, the stories we tell, and the ways we celebrate. It is the way we show our imaginations through art, music, and writing.

BOBBIE KALMAN

What Is Culture?


You have to taste a culture to understand it.

DEBORAH CATER

attributed, A Queen in the Kitchen


Culture is at once the expression and the reward of an effort, and any system of civilization which tends to relax effort will suffer a corresponding depreciation of culture.

GEORGES DUHAMEL

In Defense of Letters


Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, our religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice.

NEIL POSTMAN

Amusing Ourselves to Death


The one thing that seems certain when trying to define culture is that there is no agreement on a single definition of the term.

ABEL ADEKOLA & BRUNO S. SERGI

Global Business Management


Our aim is to stop the life cycle of the enemy culture and replace it with our own.

GEORGE L. JACKSON

Blood in My Eye


All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Prisms


Partial culture runs to the ornate; extreme culture to simplicity.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought


Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.

PETER KREEFT

Jesus-Shock


To hide behind culture or tradition to justify anarchy is a gross insult to the very people whose culture or tradition may be paraded to glorify criminal conduct.

MAHENDRA CHAUDHRY

speech, Jul. 15, 2005


That is the secret of all culture: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles--that which can provide these things is, rather, only sham education. Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack the tender buds of the plant.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Untimely Meditations