Culture Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I have a message for the terrorists trying to kill our citizens: we will find you, we will destroy you, and we will win. This is not only a military fight, but we will also require cyberwarfare and financial warfare. It is also an ideological fight. We will confront directly the hateful ideology of Radical Islam — and promote American values, and American culture, and America's system of government.

The writer in America isn't part of the culture of this country. He's like a fine dog. People like him around, but he's of no use.

William Faulkner

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

Theodor W. Adorno

The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness

Theodor W. Adorno

England produces under favorable conditions of ease and culture the finest women in the world. And, as the men are affectionate and true-hearted, the women inspire and refine them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Piety is not an end, but a means: a means of attaining the highest culture by the purest tranquility of soul. Hence it may be observed that those who set up piety as an end and object are mostly hypocrites.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed anddrawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,--those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.

Henry David Thoreau

The Bostonians take their learning too sadly: culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their "Hub," as they call it, is the paradise of prigs.

The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.

I recognize that democracy is going to take different forms in different parts of the world. The very idea of a people governing themselves depends upon government giving expression to their unique culture, their unique history, their unique experiences. But some universal truths are self-evident. No person wants to be imprisoned for peaceful worship. No woman should ever be abused with impunity, or a girl barred from going to school. The freedom to peacefully petition those in power without fear of arbitrary laws — these are not ideas of one country or one culture. They are fundamental to human progress.

The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.

Theodor W. Adorno

The highest stage in moral culture at which we can arrive, is when we recognise that we ought to control our thoughts.

He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We often confuse spiritual knowledge with spiritual attainment. Spirituality is not a matter of knowing scriptures and engaging in philosophical discussions. It is a matter of heart culture, of unmeasurable strength.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Theodor W. Adorno

I believe only in French culture, and regard everything else in Europe which calls itself "culture" as a misunderstanding. I do not even take the German kind into consideration.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The sight of wounded and whipped Zulus, mercilessly abandoned by their British persecutors, so appalled him that he turned full circle from his admiration for all things British to celebrating the indigenous and ethnic. He resuscitated the culture of the colonized and the fullness of Indian resistance against the British; he revived Indian handicrafts and made these into an economic weapon against the colonizer in his call for swadeshi — the use of one's own and the boycott of the oppressor's products, which deprive the people of their skills and their capital.

Danger of our culture. We belong to a time in which culture is in danger of being destroyed by the means of culture.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We wish to fill our culture once more with the spirit of Christianity - but not only in theory.

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.

If you want him defined, here he is: a prime, well-fed beast such as takes medals at the cattle shows, and nothing more, he said, with a tone of vexation that interested her.
No; how so? she replied. He's seen a great deal, anyway; he's cultured?
It's an utterly different culture—their culture. He's cultivated, one sees, simply to be able to despise culture, as they despise everything but animal pleasures.

What we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it,

George Bernard Shaw

Kindliness, friendliness, the courtesy of the heart, are ever-flowing streams of non egoistic impulses, and have given far more powerful assistance to culture than even those much more famous demonstrations which are called pity, mercy, and self-sacrifice.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and having engaged in it more fully than any other people.

Friedrich Nietzsche