quotations about culture
This last exertion of the intellect, its rising to broad views and great principles, constitutes what is called the philosophical mind, and is especially worthy of culture.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
Culture is an accumulation of thoughts, values and objects; it is the social heritage acquired by us from preceding generations through learning, as distinguished from the biological heritage which is passed on to us automatically through the genes.
GRAHAM WALLAS
attributed, Industrial Psychology
Culture is contested, temporal, and emergent ... [one cannot] occupy, unambiguously, a bounded cultural world from which to journey out and analyse other cultures. Human ways of life increasingly influence, dominate, parody, translate, and subvert one another.
JAMES CLIFFORD
introduction, Writing Culture
Consider how culture is conveyed in a multimedia world. Historically grandparents and tribal elders played a central role in recreating, transmitting, and transferring culture. They relied on oral communication along with family, community, or tribal connections. Culture is basically an attitude; it is also learned. It is the learning of shared language and perceptions, which are incorporated in the mind through education, repetition, ritual, history, media, or mimicking. In terms of the media's expanding role, it becomes a shared media culture including influencing perceptions and values. Examples of media systems that attract heavy users are Hollywood movies, MTV, ESPN, soap operas, CNN, the internet, or video games. These systems tend to be the output of global communication giants, such as Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, Sony, and News Corp. Collectively they have the real potential to displace or alter previous cultural values.
THOMAS L. MCPHAIL
Global Communication
Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain -- under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
WILLIAM JAMES
"The Social Value of the College-Bred,", Memories and Studies
The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.
TERENCE MCKENNA
Psychedelic Salon
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle.
ALBERT CAMUS
attributed, Weird Tales, Summer 2011
War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.
MILAN KUNDERA
Immortality
When two cultures collide is the only time when true suffering exists.
HERMANN HESSE
attributed, Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time
The longing to be primitive is a disease of culture.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
Hoist all sail, my dear boy, and steer clear of culture.
EPICURUS
letter to Pythocles
Culture is the basis for human social life. It provides ready-made norms, values, expectations, attitudes, symbols, and other knowledge that individuals use to communicate, cooperate, live in families and other groups, relate to people of their own and opposite sex, and establish political and legal systems.
JAMES G. PEOPLES
Humanity