Culture Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are 'left over.' However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural—and last but not least—political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed.

Johannes Grenzfurthner

The crusade is never off my mind — the exercise I do, the food I eat, the thought I think — all this and how I can help make my profession better-respected. To me, this one thing — physical culture and nutrition — is the salvation of America.

The culture precedes positive results. It doesn't get tacked on as an afterthought on your way to the victory stand. Champions behave like champions before they're champions: they have a winning standard of performance before they are winners.

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

In the act of simply being with another culture there comes the realization of a need for balance, the understanding that there are times when it is better to listen than to ask, better the feel than to think, more appropriate to stay with a silence than to seek answers in speech.

Education is not confined to books, and the finest characters often graduate from no college, but make experience their master, and life their book. [Some care] only for the mental culture, and [are] in danger of over-studying, under the delusion... that learning must be had at all costs, forgetting that health and real wisdom are better.

Louisa May Alcott

But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can't be stilled.

Gregory David Roberts

"72 Virgins" is very suspicious to me. It's a clue. It tells you we're dealing with people from a bartering culture. Because nobody starts with that number; somebody said, "100 virgins!" "50!" "85!" "69!" "79!" "71!" "73!" "72!" "Done!" That's how you got 72.

We are ready to expand the friendly people-to-people exchanges and enhance exchanges and cooperation in science, technology, culture, education, and other areas.

When one of a culture's guiding credos is that "all men are created equal," any person who, say, becomes an expert on, say, nuclear weapons or, say, ecology, i.e., anyone who distinguishes himself through mental excellence, is a nuisance.

Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.

Our sensuous appreciation of the world and of the works created by man has, no doubt, a biological foundation, one shared by all human beings, but that is no use to us when we try to evaluate a Bach fugue or a Dostoevsky novel-or even the simple experience of a landscape, as our delight in the view of a mountain or a waterfall is also determined by the traditions of our culture. The coexistence of different criteria of judgment is, in any case, by now a fact of life. Beethoven cannot be judged or even understood by the standards of Mozart, however much he may have continued them, nor Berg by the standards of Wagner or Richard Strauss, nor Elliott Carter by the values of Ives and Stravinsky.

Consumerism has created a culture that values style over substance, image over reality, and perception over performance.

The proletarian state must bring up thousands of excellent 'mechanics of culture', 'engineers of the soul'.

Apollo without Dionysus may indeed be a well-informed, good citizen but he's a dull fellow. He may even be 'cultured,' in the sense one often gets from traditionalist writings in education.... But without Dionysus he will never make and remake a culture.

The concept of the organic growth of mankind, as we have proposed in this report, is intended as a contribution toward achieving that end. Were mankind to embark on a path of organic growth, the world would emerge as a system of interdependent and harmonious parts, each making its own unique contributions, be it in economics, resources, or culture.
... Such an approach must start from and preserve the world's regional diversity. Paths of development, region-specific rather than based on narrow national interests, must be designed to lead to a sustainable balance between the interdependent world-regions and to global harmony – that is, to mankind's growth as an organic entity from its present barely embryonic state.

Mihajlo D. Mesarovic

Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidty, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness.

The history of Austrian culture and scholarship in the modern era largely paralleled the history of Austrian Jewry.

The Jews must realize that their influence in Germany has disappeared for all time. We wish to keep our people and our culture pure and distinctive, just as the Jews have always demanded this of themselves.

Hjalmar Schacht

The influence of modern physics goes beyond technology. It extends to the realm of thought and culture where it has led to a deep revision in man's conception of the universe and his relation to it.

Thus, if a composer wants to produce music that is relevant to his contemporaries, his chief problem is not really musical, though it may seem to him to be so; it is a problem of attitude to contemporary society and culture in relation to the basic human problem of learning to be human.

Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any,

Wanting to obey Christ but lacking his imagination, we reinterpret the mission of the church through the only framework comprehendible to us—the one we've inherited from our consumer culture.

Every woman should see herself looking uniquely breathtaking, in something tailored to celebrate her body, so that she is better able to appreciate her own beauty and better equipped to withstand the ideals of our narrow-waisted, narrow- minded culture.

Susan Jane Gilman

The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.