quotations about culture
It is a pleasant faith that the moral and intellectual advancement of mankind is not intermittent or capricious, but that, by the Creator's beneficent law of culture, as invariable in its operation as the law of gravitation, the world in each succeeding age grows wiser and better than it was.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
Rather than by your culture spoiled,
Desist, and give us nature wild.
MATTHEW GREEN
The Spleen
Ideas express themselves in the way people behave; how we dress, eat, sleep, bathe, conduct a meeting, work or get married are all a result of our culture. All these activities, and thousands of other ways of acting which seem so natural and right, are a result of our culture. How else can you eat, but with a knife and fork? Yet millions of people in the world find the knife and fork as strange and awkward as we do chopsticks.
DAVID BURNETT
"The Culture Factor,", Third Way, Jun. 15, 1978
Culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact.
ANDRÉ MALRAUX
Voices of Silence
Culture which smooth the whole world licks,
Also unto the devil sticks.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Faust
All the lessons of psychiatry, psychology, social work, indeed culture, have taught us over the last hundred years that it is the acceptance of differences, not the search for similarities which enables people to relate to each other in their personal or family lives.
JOHN RALSTON SAUL
Reflection of a Siamese Twin
Culture is not a matter of a change of climate.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
Culture is a simplification and a lie. It's the currency by which fools navigate the world.
TERENCE MCKENNA
Psychedelic Salon
Culture is a "fuzzy" concept, in that group members are unlikely to share identical sets of attitudes, beliefs and so on, but rather show "family resemblances", with the result that there is no absolute set of features that can distinguish definitively one cultural group from another.
HELEN SPENCER-OATEY
Culturally Speaking
Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire--not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
I don't know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they're really good. And there's just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that's the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there's going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don't care whether it's art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don't think so.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2009
One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven.
WALLACE STEVENS
journal entry, June 20, 1899
The generic notion of culture is coined, therefore, in order to overcome the persistent philosophical opposition between the spiritual and the real, thought and matter, body and mind. The only necessary and irreplaceable component of the concept is the process of structuring, together with its objectified results--man-made structures.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Culture as Praxis
The term "culture" is a priori concerned with people -- people who have needs and seek to meet those needs in various ways. Every culture is an honest attempt to cope with these problems. Some might class them as being "ridiculous", or even "pagan", but they are a valid attempt by that society to do its best to answer the problems that it faces.
DAVID BURNETT
"The Culture Factor,", Third Way, Jun. 15, 1978
Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
preface, Literature and Dogma
Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.
CARLOS FUENTES
Myself with Others
When people get immersed in a culture with strong new memes, it tends to be a sink-or-swim proposition. Either you change your mind, succumbing to peer pressure and adopting the new memes as your own, or you struggle with the extremely uncomfortable feeling of being surrounded by people who think you're crazy or inadequate. The fact that you probably think the same about them is little consolation.
RICHARD BRODIE
Virus of the Mind
The acquiring of culture is the developing of an avid hunger for knowledge and beauty.
JESSE LEE BENNETT
On Culture
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 notion of culture is like a window through which one may view human groups. Just as the view changes as one moves from window to window of a building, so the anthropologist's understanding of society changes as he or she moves from one definition of culture to another.
SERENA NANDA & RICHARD L. WARMS
Cultural Anthropology