quotations about culture
Culture is a simplification and a lie. It's the currency by which fools navigate the world.
TERENCE MCKENNA
Psychedelic Salon
Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire--not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
Specific, closed cultures like that surrounding comic books have allowed voices to be heard that might not have been audible in a world in which all cultural texts speak the same common language.
MATTHEW J. PUSTZ
Comic Book Culture
One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven.
WALLACE STEVENS
journal entry, June 20, 1899
Each form of the sacrosanct was regarded by members of the culture which gave rise to it as a revelation of the Truth.
ANDRÉ MALRAUX
Voices of Silence
Rather than by your culture spoiled,
Desist, and give us nature wild.
MATTHEW GREEN
The Spleen
Culture which smooth the whole world licks,
Also unto the devil sticks.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Faust
The term "culture" is a priori concerned with people -- people who have needs and seek to meet those needs in various ways. Every culture is an honest attempt to cope with these problems. Some might class them as being "ridiculous", or even "pagan", but they are a valid attempt by that society to do its best to answer the problems that it faces.
DAVID BURNETT
"The Culture Factor,", Third Way, Jun. 15, 1978
The means of transmitting the culture can take a variety of forms (proverbs, stories, art) and can have numerous "carriers" (family, peers, media, schools, church), but the key elements of culture (values, ideas, perception) must be shared by all members of the culture.
LARRY A. SAMOVAR
Communication Between Cultures
Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.
PETER KREEFT
Jesus-Shock
The acquiring of culture is the developing of an avid hunger for knowledge and beauty.
JESSE LEE BENNETT
On Culture
Our world is organized in large measure around groups with pervasive cultures ... membership of such groups ... greatly affects one's opportunities ... If the culture is decaying, or if it is persecuted or discriminated against, the options and opportunities open to its members will shrink.
JOSEPH RAZ
Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics
Culture is the entire accumulation of artificial objects, conditions, tools, techniques, ideas, symbols, and behavior patterns peculiar to a group of people, possessing a certain consistency of its own, and capable of transmission from one generation to another.
CHARLES H. COOLEY
ROBERT C. ANGELL & LOWELL J. CARR, Sociology for Nurses
But though Heaven in every breast hath sown these early seeds of love and admiration, yet in vain, without fair culture's kind parental aid, without enlivening suns and genial showers, and shelter from the blast, in vain we hope the tender plant should rear its blooming head, or yield the harvest promis'd in its spring.
MARK AKENSIDE
The Pleasures of Imagination
When people get immersed in a culture with strong new memes, it tends to be a sink-or-swim proposition. Either you change your mind, succumbing to peer pressure and adopting the new memes as your own, or you struggle with the extremely uncomfortable feeling of being surrounded by people who think you're crazy or inadequate. The fact that you probably think the same about them is little consolation.
RICHARD BRODIE
Virus of the Mind
The generic notion of culture is coined, therefore, in order to overcome the persistent philosophical opposition between the spiritual and the real, thought and matter, body and mind. The only necessary and irreplaceable component of the concept is the process of structuring, together with its objectified results--man-made structures.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Culture as Praxis
take a look outside
those lively arts are on the slide
and culture's just a bore
when you're angry, young and poor
THE DAMNED
"Lively Arts"
Culture is a "fuzzy" concept, in that group members are unlikely to share identical sets of attitudes, beliefs and so on, but rather show "family resemblances", with the result that there is no absolute set of features that can distinguish definitively one cultural group from another.
HELEN SPENCER-OATEY
Culturally Speaking
All the lessons of psychiatry, psychology, social work, indeed culture, have taught us over the last hundred years that it is the acceptance of differences, not the search for similarities which enables people to relate to each other in their personal or family lives.
JOHN RALSTON SAUL
Reflection of a Siamese Twin
The notion of culture is like a window through which one may view human groups. Just as the view changes as one moves from window to window of a building, so the anthropologist's understanding of society changes as he or she moves from one definition of culture to another.
SERENA NANDA & RICHARD L. WARMS
Cultural Anthropology