Culture Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Pablo Picasso

Charles Darwin

Erich Fromm

Mao Zedong

L. Ron Hubbard

Robert Bly

Rowan Williams

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

Art is the best possible introduction to the culture of the world. I love it for the buried hopes, the garnered memories, the tender feelings it can summon at a touch. It washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

An army without culture is a dull-witted army, and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.

Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.

Albert Jay Nock

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

What can we say about a marketing culture that so openly feeds and colludes with obsession? The Disney empire has developed this to an unprecedented degree of professionalism.

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.

Stephen Vizinczey

We come after. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?

Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit. It is never a narrowing of the mind or a restriction of the human spirit or the country's spirit.

Jawaharlal Nehru

Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?

Ernest J. Gaines

As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism.

Christopher Dawson

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

I'm interested in the division that Judeo-Christianity has made between human nature and animal nature. None of the other great faiths in the world have got quite that division between us and them. None of the others has made this enormous division between birds and beasts who, as Darwin said, would have developed consciences if they'd had the chance, and us. I think it's one of the scars in Western Europe. I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

As our language wanes and dies, the golden legends of the far-off centuries fade and pass away. No one sees their influence upon culture; no one sees their educational power.

A culture is only as great as its dreams, and its dreams are dreamed by artists.

All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!

Illustration from the late-1900s up through the middle of the 20th century was absolutely amazing. In general, American culture was at its highest skill wise in every aspect of human life in the 1940s. It's all been downhill since then. You just open an old magazine from the 1930s and '40s and look at the illustrations in it. There's nobody alive that could touch the way they could draw back then.

John Kricfalusi

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of 'culture.'

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.

Culture is shared meaning. Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture.

Preservation of one's own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures.

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

Here I am, in Quaker surroundings, whose restful simplicity is most congenial to me. I feel here the earnest desire for genuine growth and culture which founds a slow but sure success. I am confirmed in my division of human energies. Ambitious people climb, but faithful people build.

Julia Ward Howe