Culture Quotes - Page 5

The first sound a child hears is very important. It determines character. A Muslim child always hears the Azan first. Words in praise of God. Words to live by.

Organizational culture is just like the “Operation System” of the organization, you need reboot periodically to keep it running smoothly.

Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.

What is so incredible and essential about an authentic cultural scene is it rejects a value system based on consumption and productivity and instead celebrates creation, critical thought, aesthetics and expression. That can’t be mass marketed.

Generally, that humble piece of furniture placed on the front veranda of the house officially belonged to the man of the household; the women never slept on it.

You don’t go on bended-knee to petition the official culture for your rights. You have to take them.

How vigilant we must be to ensure that we don’t allow our impression of Jesus to be held captive by the prevailing mores of our secular culture! Rather, it is essential that we continue to return to the Gospels to ensure that the reverse occurs: to allow Jesus to hold our hearts and imaginations captive in response to the dominant thinking of our time. For exiles trying to live faithfully within the host empire of post-Christendom, the Gospel stories are our most dangerous memories. They continue to fire our imaginations and remind us that it’s possible to thrive on foreign soil while serving Yahweh, but it’s the kind of thriving that often rejects popular wisdom. These stories are the standard by which we judge all other stories, all other descriptors of life today. If, after reading these dangerous biblical stories, you can’t imagine Jesus the Messiah as a televangelist, strutting around on stage in a flashy suit, playing it up for the cameras, then you are forced to reject this image and seek another mode of being Christ today.

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular.

Pride is instilled. It's what we carry with us every day of our lives.

An important ethical function of identity politics, in this context, is to highlight that obstacles to the self-development of individuals, and to the formation and exercise of their agency, emerge in complex cultural and psychic forms, as well as through more familiar kinds of socio-economic inequality.

Culture becomes visible when we travel between “ cultures ” and when we look back in time to other “ cultures ” than our own.

Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.

What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.

Most women are all too familiar with men like Calvin Smith. Men whose sense of prerogative renders them deaf when women say, "No thanks," "Not interested," or even "Fuck off, creep.

Amusement has always been the great moving force behind culture.

We can't surrender to the culture. We've minimized the role of fathers, so we've created a generation of barbarians, children who become men without growing up. They stay in boyhood through their 20s and 30s, sometimes their whole lives. They think of themselves first, indulge in pornography, do what they feel like, leave their wives, and culture, and churches to raise their children.

A narcissist with power will attempt to prove in the world only what is already in his head. He can't 'see' otherwise. For him, the 'outside world' is not beyond him and does not question or challenge him and his ideas. He is the world. Others will assent to his distorted worldview, because he is powerful, not because he is believable. If he possesses any reflection, that will be exactly what will gnaw at the narcissist with power most of all: his 'truths' are inauthentic, and he is a human being without integrity. The very narcissism and power he possesses prevent him from an ongoing relationship with the truth, which begins with self-humility and the curiosity this can create in a person.

The point is: what happens in heaven?''Unknowable wonderfulness?' 'Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn't represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.''If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances - and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse - then you don't have life after death; you just have death.

Really good films don't diminish anything, they don't close things off. On the contrary, they open up new insights, they make new thoughts thinkable. They crowd us, they deflate our slovenly lifestyle, our thoughtless way of chattering and pissing away our time and energy and passion. Believe me, films can teach us a huge amount. And they give us a true picture of the way life is."Mari laughed. "Of our slovenly lifestyle, you mean? You mean, maybe they teach us to piss our lives away with a little more intelligence, a little more elegance?

Fixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn around the life of a child or an adult in any consistent way, but if you can surround a person with a new culture, and different web of relationships, then they will absorb new habits of thought and behavior in ways you will never be able to measure or understand. And if you do surround that person with a new, enriching culture, then you had better keep surrounding them with it, because if they slip back into a different culture, and most of the gains will fade away.

When I joined the military it was illegal to be homosexual, then it became optional, and now it's legal. I'm getting out before the Democrats make it mandatory.

After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism

I believe Western culture -- rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. -- is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.

For a nation to be truly great, she must first identify her national values, enumerate her virtues and formulate her value system. But the most tasking of all these is to develop a culture in her people, that will best represent the proclaimed value systems of the nation.

Celebrating Culture is celebrating existence.

You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it's a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.

The cultural past is rigidly deterministic to the extent that the individual is unaware of it. An analogy, of course, is found in any psychoanalytic treatment: the patient is rigidly determined by past experiences and previously developed patterns to the extent that he is unaware of these experiences and patterns.

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

And I'm probably wrong. Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually.

It's because there are too many people who want to stop us having fun. That's the reason.

In an environment where there is a shared vision of excellence, where people can be the best they can be on a daily basis, where they know what is expected of them, understand that reward is linked to performance, and believe they can make a difference because they will be heard, they will make a difference. They will go beyond our expectations and great things will happen.

Modern culture anesthetizes the mind while mainlining the soul with emotional experiences that keep the worldling believing he is really living.

CONFIDENCE is not showing off your VANITY, it’s about to be HUMBLED and KIND to others what are you truly SKILLED and PROFESSIONAL about…

Good art requires the examination of faith issues from a variety of perspectives and voices. Yet for many audience members, the only way a film can be “Christian” is if there is a major altar-call type scene with a dramatic conversion. If the movie isn’t an overt endorsement not only of faith itself but Judeo-Christian morality and/or Protestant culture, then it’s not “Christian.

The quality of a society and of its culture will depend on the status of its unemployed.

Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.

Someone has said that culture is what remains with you after you have forgotten all you have read, and I believe there is much truth in that.

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

What the culture of get rich quick does to our people is People want to get something for nothing.

One of the highest marks of citizenship is fighting for the common defense.

Our life stories are at one and the same time reality, fallacy and fantasy...

I’m very headstrong. Once I’ve caught fire, there’s no dousing the flames—all engines full speed ahead.

We build this country ourselves every day and we have to be, in the most positive sense, totally unreal.

All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us – by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the bottom up, but now we were somehow being spoon-fed this commercial culture top down.

He wanted the show to be fresh to audiences 50 years down the line.

And we convict almost every case, she thinks, because the law requires us to prosecute them for living their way of life.

The villagers considered it lucky to make the New Year's first money transaction with her because she was a prosperous person.

Jesus was trying to present value of a life of vulnerability in which one would have practical and needed experience of the same. It would be a life without baggage, so one would learn to accept others and their culture instead of always carrying along our own country's assumptions and calling them the Gospel.

Ultimately, culture, secular and otherwise, is a collection of survival strategies. The things that look like decoration—poetry, novels, music, dancing—if you strip away all the layers, are mechanisms for coping, surviving, understanding.

...cultural barriers can be overcome relatively swiftly where there is the political will to do so.

There is this common notion that people are shallow and ignorant until they go out and see the world. I, on the other hand, went out and in comparison realized I was in pretty good standing.

[The] tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns...We are now...only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political and economic fields. It is safe to predict that...such social inventions as modern-type Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed toward the adjustment of modern society to modern methods

No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.

Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.

I cannot imagine a truly beautiful world without courtesy being integral to its culture.

A nation lives forever through its concepts, honour, and culture. It is for these reasons that the rulers of nations must judge and act not only on the basis of physical and material interests of the nation but on the basis of the nation's historical honour, of the nation's eternal interests. Thus: not bread at all costs, but honour at all costs.

It is culture that is the bully."

Great philosophers become immortal - they make undeniable impacts on culture.

It takes a huge amount of culture to normalize "crazy", and of course that's its main focus