Culture Quotes

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What we kids didn't understand was that we were living in a commercial, commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold. As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. The conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world.

No, there is no world-wide standard for the determination of provincialism. There is only one standard by which to judge men and women, and that standard is not so much one of brains and education as it is of culture and heart. Kindness seems to be the one golden metewand by which to measure how really civilized and catholic one may be.

Thomas R. Marshall

The era of Conceptual art - which was also the era of the Civil Rights Movement,. Vietnam, the Women's Liberation Movement, and the counter-culture- was a real.

Lucy R. Lippard

It is characteristic of the barbarian … to insist upon seeing a thing as it is. The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.

The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men but rather their conqueror, an outlaw who controls the sexual channel between nature and culture.

Considered as the last finish of education, or of human culture, worth and acquirement, the art of speech is noble, and even divine; it is like the kindling of a Heaven's light to show us what a glorious world exists, and has perfected itself, in a man.

The fact that civilization is becoming more intricate must not mean that we treat men for a longer period as immature. Does it not mean, perhaps, the opposite: that we must skillfully make them mature sooner, that we must find ways of handling the intricacy of our culture?

War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon.

Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the "wrong crowd" read like tornado alerts in parent manuals.... It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren't planning to get a Ph. D. from Yale.

Mary Kay Blakely

Our establishment has presided over economic decline and bequeathed a culture of mediocrity. Why join a bunch of losers?

Civilization begins with a rebellion. Prometheus, one of the Titans, steals fire from the gods on Mount Olympus and brings it as a gift to man, marking the birth of human culture. For this rebellion Zeus sentences him to be chained to Mount Caucasus where vultures consume his liver during the day and at night it grows back only to be again eaten away the next day. This is a tale of the agony of the creative individual, whose nightly rest only resuscitates him so that he can endure his agonies the next day.

Economic reforms based on the idea of limitless growth in a limited world, can only be maintained by the powerful grabbing the resources of the vulnerable. The resource grab that is essential for growth creates a culture of rape—the rape of the earth, of local self-reliant economies, and of women.

Throughout this volume, we have felt considerable inconvenience, from the dogmatical classification of plants, and have all along been floundering between species and variety, which certainly under culture soften into each other.

Patrick Matthew

If we want to produce people who share the values of a democratic culture, they must be taught those values and not be left to acquire them by chance.

Where God clings to our culture, to our routines of discourse, He is a phantom of grammar, a fossil embedded in the childhood of rational speech. So Nietzsche (and many after him). This essay argues the reverse. It proposes that any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God's presence.

But, in the late twentieth century, it became more important to many leftists to save Third World culture, no matter how barbaric, from neo-colonialism, than to support equality and democracy. People on the left would defend brutal dictators (Castro, Mao, Pol Pot, Khomeini, et al.) simply because they opposed Western imperialism. As a result, all politics that were derived, no matter how loosely, from Marxism, lost credibility, and finally died in 1989. This was naturally a disaster for communists and socialists, but also for social democrats, for they had lost an ideological basis for their idealism. And, without idealism, politics becomes a form of accounting, a management of purely material interests.

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.

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.

Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.

Marshall McLuhan