CULTURE QUOTES III

quotations about culture

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


Rather than by your culture spoiled,
Desist, and give us nature wild.

MATTHEW GREEN

The Spleen


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


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


Culture which smooth the whole world licks,
Also unto the devil sticks.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Faust


Culture is not a matter of a change of climate.

GEORGE HORACE LORIMER

Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son


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


Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.

EDWARD ABBEY

Down the River


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


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

Tags: Zygmunt Bauman


Culture is a simplification and a lie. It's the currency by which fools navigate the world.

TERENCE MCKENNA

Psychedelic Salon


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 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


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


One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven.

WALLACE STEVENS

journal entry, June 20, 1899


Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

preface, Literature and Dogma


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


The acquiring of culture is the developing of an avid hunger for knowledge and beauty.

JESSE LEE BENNETT

On Culture


Culture will give scope, object, and beauty to life, and raise the soul above the petty things that the daily routine of life is apt to bind us to.

JAMES PLATT

Platt's Essays


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