quotations about culture
Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.
ALAN MOORE
25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom
Creating culture is just like any other act of construction in that we need raw materials to get the job done. The raw materials for the culture we create consist of cultural elements that either existed before we were born or were created by other people since our birth. We may put these elements together in ways that produce something genuinely new. But there is no other well to drink from, so existing culture puts limits on what we can think and do.
ROBERT J. BRYM
Sociology: Your Compass for a New World
Ideas express themselves in the way people behave; how we dress, eat, sleep, bathe, conduct a meeting, work or get married are all a result of our culture. All these activities, and thousands of other ways of acting which seem so natural and right, are a result of our culture. How else can you eat, but with a knife and fork? Yet millions of people in the world find the knife and fork as strange and awkward as we do chopsticks.
DAVID BURNETT
"The Culture Factor,", Third Way, Jun. 15, 1978
The key to this culture
Never slow down
Keep running with the vultures
HEMBREE
"Culture", House on Fire
Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Literature & Dogma
Whoever controls the media--the images--controls the culture.
ALLEN GINSBERG
attributed, Brain Power
Culture would not be culture if it were not an acquired taste.
J.C. POWYS
The Meaning of Culture
My culture is my identity and personality. It gives me spiritual, intellectual and emotional distinction from others, and I am proud of it.
M.F. MOONZAJER
attributed, Home: The Quest to Belong
As a logically integrated, functional, sense-making whole, culture is not an accidental collection of customs and habits. It is more like an organism, with all parts related to each other in relationships of both harmony and conflict, of both complementary unity and stress and strain.
DAVID W. AUGSBURGER
Pastoral Counseling Across Cultures
There are cultures that can only picture their origins and not their ends.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
If vain our toil,
We ought to blame the culture, not the soil.
ALEXANDER POPE
Essay on Man
Culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact.
ANDRÉ MALRAUX
Voices of Silence
It is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
The men of all culture are the true apostles of equality.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Culture and Anarchy
Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
EDWARD ABBEY
Down the River
It is a pleasant faith that the moral and intellectual advancement of mankind is not intermittent or capricious, but that, by the Creator's beneficent law of culture, as invariable in its operation as the law of gravitation, the world in each succeeding age grows wiser and better than it was.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capacities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
EDWARD B. TYLOR
Primitive Culture
I don't know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they're really good. And there's just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that's the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there's going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don't care whether it's art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don't think so.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2009
Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
preface, Literature and Dogma