Culture Quotes

What tethers me to my parents is the unspoken dialogue we share about how much of my character is built on the connection I feel to the world they were raised in but that I've only experienced through photos, visits, food. It's not mine and yet, I get it. First-generation kids, I've always thought, are the personification of déjà vu.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

What the new government of Nigeria and other African governments must do, is to start a massive reorientation campaign in the culture of the dignity of labour.

How youMore people will learn about IBM from Wikipedia in the coming years than from IBM itself.

Despite the voices of the culture that would scream otherwise, victory is irreparably tied to the surrender of self. And that explains why so few are truly victorious.

Deep down, people who deliberately distribute other people’s music and stuff feel contempt for professionals. And it’s not just culture — these days lots of people are contemptuous of everything. Without realizing it, they’re searching for things to despise.

And if something is only itself, it doesn't particularly matter.

We need encouragement, not sermonizing, and we need clear-eyed acknowledgement of the situation, not a sanctified gloss that pushes us toward saying, 'I see I must not admit my pain because, after all, I'm a Christian. I'll just have to cover it up.

If privacy had a gravestone it might read: 'Don't Worry. This Was for Your Own Good.

How can any of us even know what to believe anymore? Our culture’s full of so much phoniness and deception. Companies advertise products to make us believe that we will be more beautiful, more healthy, or live longer by consuming their products. We are seduced by lovers who feed their porn addictions when we’re asleep. We’re taught to believe that if we work hard and take risks, that we can achieve our dreams, yet youth unemployment is the highest it’s been in decades. Fairytales tell us that true love exists, but half of all marriages end in divorce.

V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.

There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.

Although Martin Luther's theological message was couched as an exhortation to all Christian people, his frame of reference, the human experiences on which he drew and his emotional sympathies, or almost entirely German.

Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.

Our innocent kids undergo much trouble. Not only do the children of high caste families look down upon our children calling them low caste brats, but even some teachers ridicule them. They beat our children for no reason.

What the culture of get rich quick does to our people is young men only wish to do prestigious work

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

It’s the lifestyle that’s being packaged and sold rather than the actual meaning.

People think that other international languages are smarter and more business wise. But they have to understand that we have to preserve our culture.

Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, it is our duty to furnish it well.

A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures.

The notion of dream interpretation far antedates the birth of psychoanalysis, and probably served an important function in most, if not all, historical societies. In having lost this function, modern man has also lost the best part of his nature, which he obliviously passes on to the next generation of dreamers.

Properly speaking, there are no barbarian standards. Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made. The varying degrees of culture are measured by the greater or less precision of the standards. Where there is little such precision, these standards rule existence only grosso modo; where there is much they penetrate in detail into the exercise of all the activities.

Show me a culture where honesty is considered ridiculous, where nobody's ever accountable for anything, where anger gets admired as a sign of strength, and I'll show you a place where misery is permanent

We are amazing individuals.

Every category has its snobs: music, books, movies. There are so many things a man is only pressured into liking or disliking.

I've often heard people say, “Your country is beautiful, a virtual paradise.” When will the people of Indonesia be as beautiful as their land, with a civilization and culture that contributes to the greater beauty of humankind and no longer smothers and strangles the mind?

Good God, is the man a heathen?’‘Worse, a capitalist with pretensions of culture.

According to the Buddha's doctrine that they believed in, it was not the caste that defined a person high or low. It was one's deeds that mattered.

When we heed God's Word, we are rejecting how the world tries to disciple us.

Explore Art without a campus, it is fulfilling in the unknown.

This is not an issue of geography. He IS of two worlds wherever he goes.

There are heroes and schmucks in all worlds. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in moral struggle against yourself.

It is said culture requires slaves. I say that no cultured society can be built with slaves. This terrible Twentieth Century has made all cultural theories from Plato down seem ridiculous. Little man, there has never been a human culture.

Here was a king who saw his subjects as peers and allies around whom he had growing up rather than semi-alien entities to be suspected and persecuted.

But cheating has always been the purview of fairies, and as we are about to enter their domain, we ought to act in accordance with local customs.

Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster.

Recognizing that God has called you to function as his agent defines your task as a parent. Our culture has reduced parenting to providing care. Parents often see the task in these narrow terms. The child must have food, clothes, a bed, and some quality time. In sharp contrast to such a weak view, God has called you to a more profound task than being only a care-provider. You shepherd your child in God's behalf. The task God has given you is not one that can be conveniently scheduled. It is a pervasive task. Training and shepherding are going on whenever you are with your children. Whether waking, walking, talking or resting, you must be involved in helping your child to understand life, himself, and his needs from a biblical perspective (Deuteronomy 6:6-7).

I even felt a vicarious guilt, like a German meeting Jewish people in Poland who had never heard of the Holocaust, or that there were Jews in America, and trying to explain it to them. Ashea, I wished I could say. Ashea.

Look at this charming donkey!

It always matters who the storyteller is. It’s a lens.

There’s plenty of emphasis on success in our culture, but we have to help people focus on significance as well.

Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again—making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. […] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics.

While art should never become exclusionary and elitist, any culture which fails to support its artists is only contributing to its own impoverishment. (Beyond Religion, p. 122)

Gulliver was soon being read "from the cabinet council to the nursery".

Privileged people can fall into the trap of universalizing experiences and laying them across other people’s experiences as an interpretive lens.

If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves.

The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true--both objectively and subjectively--is habitually provisional.

Public symbols matter. They are one of the ways we tell each other, and the world, what we honor.

Indigenous foods die when no one learns to cook them.

Village life gently swirled around them, with the perpetual ebb and flow of people, scurrying in every direction. The village was a living, organic entity, with blood flowing through its veins, and with a definite pulse and heartbeat. It had its own distinct personality and its own dark caustic humour, and was constantly processing and regurgitating information through its winding, meandering streets.

The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.

The financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession.

When I was a stripper I realized that men and women are equally fucked over about sex but in such different areas, we're blind to the other's pain. So for certain kinds of guys, women are heartless bitches and cock teases and will bleed you dry before giving you a kiss. And for some women, men are asshole jerks who only want one thing. They'll love you and leave you. I don't see it that way. It's the culture keeping them equally ignorant and feeding them nonsense. And then saying, go of and get married!

Certain portions of the earth, escaping utter destruction, become the seedbeds for replenishing the human race, and so it happens that on a world that is not young there are young populations having no culture, whose traditions were swept away in a debacle; they wander over the earth and gradually put aside the roughness of a nomadic existence and by natural inclunation submit to communities and associations; their mode of living is at first simple, knowking no guile and strange to cunning, called in its early stage the Golden Age. [16] The more these populations progress in civilization and employment of the arts, the more easily does the spirit of rivalry creep in, at first commendable but imperceptibly changing to envy; this, then, is responsible for all the tribulations that the race suffers in subsequent ages. So much for the vicissitudes that civilizations experience, of perishing and arising again, as the world goes on unchanged.[Chapter X - 15,16]

Never presume to know a person based on the one dimensional window of the internet. A soul can’t be defined by critics, enemies or broken ties with family or friends. Neither can it be explained by posts or blogs that lack facial expressions, tone or insight into the person’s personality and intent. Until people “get that”, we will forever be a society that thinks Beautiful Mind was a spy movie and every stranger is really a friend on Facebook.

Evil tempts every soul, but a weak soul tempts evil.

Names are powerful and are prophecies of the future. The name you are called is a sign of what you are and what you would become.

Japanese had never seen a Western-style circus, and most of them had probably never seen foreigners, either.