Quotes about culture (3584 quotes, page 16)

“Since liberalism has become a kind of official party line, we have been enjoined against saying things about races, religions or national groups, for after all, there is no categorical statement without its implication of value, and values begin divisions among men. We must not define, subsume, or judge; we must rather rest on the periphery and display “sensibility toward the cultural expressions of all lands and peoples.””

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

This is a process of emasculation.
Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 59.

Men , People , Religion

“No more would I go along with Plato in exiling the poets, who play on the limbic cortex. Not even they are powerful enough to evoke the whole of man. If we are to survive our own destruction of our world and of ourselves by our advance of culture we had better learn soon to modify our genes to make us more intelligent. It is our last chance, that by increasing our diversity we may be able to make some sort of man that can survive without an ecological niche on this our earth. We may be able to live in gas masks and eat algae and distill the ocean.
I doubt that we have time enough.

We are, I think, nearing the end of a course that left the main line of evolution to overspecialize in brain to its own undoing.
Time will tell.”

Warren S. McCulloch (1898–1969) American neuroscientist

Source: Embodiments of Mind, (1965), p. 347 cited in: Roberto Moreno-Díaz, José Mira, Warren Sturgis McCulloch (1996) Brain processes, theories, and models: an international conference in honor of W.S. McCulloch 25 years after his death. p. 9

World , Intelligence , Thinking , Learning

“Hubert Ronson, as I was to discover later, is the sort of European you are always coming across in Africa. I never made up my mind whether such men leave Europe because their talents are unappreciated in the politer civilisations, or whether they develop them after they arrive. Bullies, thugs, warm-hearted layabouts, at heart they are all the same sentimental, anxious extroverts, with the same endless fund of dirty stories, and the same secret loathing and longing for the cultures they have escaped.”

John Pearson (author) (1930) author

Gone to Timbuctoo (1961), Ch. 11

Men , Secret , Heart

“I don’t listen to anything on the radio but NPR and occasional oldies programs. I can’t comment on the content or format of most commercial radio but I have read the statistics about the step-by-step deregulation of FCC rules that has allowed monopolies like Clear Channel to buy up massive shares of the airwaves. This has damaged our business (music) and our culture (American). The internet is offering bold alternatives but a transistor radio is only $25.00 and not everyone is hooked up through a computer and high speed connection.”

Natalie Merchant (1963) American singer-songwriter

Quotes from NatalieMerchant.com

Music , Business , Reading , Speed

“The principle underpinning the EU is not "We, the people" but "We know better than the people" — not just on capital punishment and the single currency, but on pretty much anything that comes to mind. Not so long ago, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, France's Defence Minister at the time, insisted that the United States was dedicated to the "organized cretinization of our people." As a dismissal of American pop culture — MTV, Disney — this statement is not without its appeal, though it sounds better if you've never had the misfortune to sit through a weekend of continental television. But the reality is that nobody is as dedicated to the proposition that the people are cretins than M. Chevenement and the panjandrums of the new 'Europe.' The EU is organized on this assumption. If, like the Danes and now the Irish, they're impertinent enough to tick the wrong box in referenda on deeper European integration, we'll just keep asking and re-asking the question until they get it right.”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

The slyer virus: The West's anti-westernism (2002)

People , Question , Reality , Time

“I think all aesthetic judgments—all the aesthetic choices we are making—are moral choices. They cannot escape the moral dimension in the broader sense. It has to relate to the philosophical understanding of who we are and how so-called “art and culture” functions in today’s world.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Escape from Propaganda, 2009

World , Art , Understanding , Thinking

“Governments have an obligation to preserve their populations’ cultures as world heritage in accordance with the aim of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to promote diversity and oppose cultural imperialism.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G16/151/19/PDF/G1615119.pdf?OpenElement.
2016, Report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council

World , Education

“In this book I am concerned with certain kinds of communication: communication between parents and children, between associates of the same status, between members of different societies and, through the mediation of various kinds of coding—tools, art, script, formulas, film—between cultures distant from each other in time and place. I shall be concerned to show that we must deal not only with evolutionary sequences, in which our ability to articulate and codify parts of the culture enormously increases our ability to intervene in the cultural process, but also with the coexistence at any period of history of earlier forms of communication side by side with later ones.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. xxxi

Children , Books , Art , History

“Our main plank is Veer Savarkar’s message which he preached at the Calcutta session: ‘Equal rights for all citizens and protection of the culture and religion of every minority’.”

Nirmal Chandra Chatterjee (1895–1971) Indian politician

Nirmal Chandra Chatterjee, Hindu Politics (Calcutta, 1945), p. 74

Religion

“To a few alarmed observers it seemed as though Wall Street were by way of devouring all the money of the entire world. However, in accordance with the cultural practice, as the summer passed, the sound and responsible spokesmen decried not the increase in brokers' loans, but those who insisted on attaching significance to this trend.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Source: The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929), Chapter V, The Twilight of Illusion, Section I, p. 68

Money , World , Way , Summer

“The vast differences in power contributed to faulty social theories of these differences that are still with us today. When a society is economically dominant, it is easy for its members to assume that such dominance reflects a deeper superiority--whether religious, racial, genetic, cultural, or institutional--rather than an accident of timing or geography.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs book The End of Poverty

The End of Poverty" The End of Poverty, 2005

Time

“These proposals included cries for billions of new money for social assistance in the name of “child poverty” and for more business subsidies in the name of “cultural identity. In both cases I was sought out as a rare public figure to oppose such projects.””

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

The Bulldog, National Citizens Coalition, February 1997.
1990s

Money , Business

“I have this massive love for the whole culture of pop music … It has probably been the biggest relationship in my life. It's my fascination, my on-going passion. … I really, really love music. I'm affected by it and uplifted by it, and made to laugh and cry, and almost fall in love with the person who has made me feel so brilliant and communicated so profoundly to me.”

Siobhan Fahey (1958) singer and songwriter in Banarama and Shakespears Sister

"Mad About The Music" in The Daily Telegraph (13 June 1996) http://web.archive.org/20091027131229/www.geocities.com/djohnl_2000/Interviews/1996_June_Telegraph.html

Love , Life , Music , Feeling

“The Bodo skull and the Kaprina and Shanidar Neandertal skeletons raise the possibility that two distinct, non-spaiens species of Homo had had rituals and cultural practices that we have assumed are only within the capacity of members of our own species.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

Source: What the Bones Tell Us (1997), Ch. 1

“A civilization which is dominated by this matter-of-fact insight must prevail against any cultural scheme that lacks this element. This characteristic of western civilization comes to a head in modern science, and finds its highest material expression in the technology of the machine industry.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: "The Place of Science in Modern Civilization", 1906, p. 355

Science

“Guerrilla decontextualization usually involves partial truths made to look complete. It goes beyond simple defamation of character or slander because it sustains an entire culture devoted to manipulating public perception for the sake of financial, political, or social gain.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(from 2013 essay Putting Text and Meaning to the Guerrilla Decontextualization Test).
From Articles, Essays, and Poems, On Guerrilla Decontextualization

Truth

“Truth', written 'in capital letters', is an orphan in this world, without power and influence… ['Reason'] cannot stand diverging opinions - it calls them 'lies'; it puts itself 'above' the real lives of human beings, demanding, in a way characteristic of all totalitarian ideologies, the right to rebuild the world from the height of 'what it should be', i. e. in accordance with its own 'invincible' precepts. It refuses to recognize the many ideas, actions, feelings, laws, institutions, racial features which separate one nation (culture, civilization) from another… The reason of ordinary people trying to create a better and safer world for themselves and their children (which is reason with a small 'r' and not Reason 'written in capital letters') has very little in common with these ignorant dreams of domination.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Farewell to Reason

pg 102.
Farewell to Reason (1987)

Children , People , Truth , World

“Christianity in our country is a lot like what the Ducksters profess. No longer doctrinaire or demanding, the mishmash of pop-religion practiced in churches across America is an extension of the therapeutic culture: festooned with feelings, mostly misdirected. Untempered by intelligent interpretation of scripture… American pop-theology: light on doctrine, heavy on hellfire and damnation.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Duck Dynasty: A Decoy For Dummies" http://www.americandailyherald.com/pundits/ilana-mercer/item/duck-dynasty-a-decoy-for-dummies, American Daily Herald, December 27, 2013.
2010s, 2013

Religion , Feeling , Intelligence , Light

“In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, 1979, p. 49

People , Parent , Learning

“Let us confidently declare that Christian democracy is not liberal. Liberal democracy is liberal, while Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal: it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues – say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favour of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept.”

Viktor Orbán (1963) Hungarian politician, chairman of Fidesz

Tusnádfürdő speech http://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-minister-viktor-orban-s-speech-at-the-29th-balvanyos-summer-open-university-and-student-camp, 28 July 2018

Family , Democracy , Confidence

“Religious ritual survives cultural transmission by embedding episodes of intense, life-defining personal experiences in public performances. These performances involve sequential, socially interactive movement and gesture (chant, dance, murmur, sway) and formulaic utterances that rhythmically synchronize affective states among group members in displays of cooperative commitment. This is often accompanied by sensory pageantry, which further helps to emotionally validate and sustain the moral consensus.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 16
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

Life , Help , Dance , Personality

“The reason I keep mentioning God is because I believe in God. A lot of people are surprised by that, what with it being 2014 and this being a technologically advanced secular culture. God is primarily regarded as the preserve of thick white people and angry brown people. Since Friedrich Nietzsche (deceased) declared, “God is dead,” we’ve been exploring the observation of British writer G. K. Chesterton, who said, “The death of God doesn’t mean man will believe in nothing but that he will believe in anything.” I’m a good example of that: at thirteen a believer in Lakeside, at eight a believer in biscuits, at seventeen a devoted wanker, at nineteen a fanatical drug user, before winding up in the monastery of celebrity.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Death , God , People , Dead

“There was an NPR story this morning, about the indigenous peoples of Australia, which might make a good column. Apparently they want to preserve their culture, language, and religion because they're slowly disappearing, which is certainly understandable. But, for some reason, they also want more stuff — better education, housing, etc. — from the Australian government. Isn't it odd that it never occurs to such groups that maybe, just maybe, the reason their cultures are evaporating is that they get too much of that stuff already? Indeed, I'm at a loss as to how mastering algebra and biology will make aboriginal kids more likely to believe — oh, I dunno — that hallucinogenic excretions from a frog have spiritual value. And I'm at a loss as to how better clinics and hospitals will do anything but make the shamans and medicine men look more useless. And now that I think about it, that's the point I was trying to get at a few paragraphs ago, when I was talking about the symbiotic relationship between freedom and the hurly-burly of life. Cultures grow on the vine of tradition. These traditions are based on habits necessary for survival, and day-to-day problem solving. Wealth, technology, and medicine have the power to shatter tradition because they solve problems.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

( August 15, 2001 http://web.archive.org/web/20010105/www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg081501.shtml)
2000s, 2001

Life , Men , People , Education

“Improving quality requires a culture change, not just a new diet.”

Philip B. Crosby (1926–2001) Quality guru

Philip B. Crosby (1989), Let's Talk Quality: 96 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask Phil Crosby, p. 47

Change

“Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture.”

Alex Kozinski (1950) American judge

Dissenting in the White v. Samsung Elec. Am., Inc., 989 F.2d 1512 (9th Cir. 1993) ruling. http://notabug.com/kozinski/whitedissent.

Science

“It is important to teach our young about who they are and how culture can empower them to help the greater community. It is very difficult, especially in the age of technology to curb what mass-media and marketing try to tell us who we are, and even more difficult when those closest to you act uninterested. It is an uphill climb, sometimes alone, to find the truth.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

As quoted in interview with Golwg 360, Welsh language online magazine.

Truth , Age , Communication , Help

“What was uncovered at Sidhpur only to be covered up again was verily the tip of an iceberg which remains submerged in hundreds of histories written by Muslim historians, in Hindu literary sources which are slowly coming to light, in the accounts of foreign travellers who visited India and the neighbouring lands during medieval and modern times, and above all in the reports of the archaeological surveys carried out in all those countries which had been for long the cradles of Hindu culture. No systematic effort has yet been made by scholars to see the iceberg emerge from the dark depths and tell its own story in a simple and straight-forward manner. Rare is the historian or archaeologist who had related this vandalism to the theology of Islam based on the Qur’ãn and the Sunnah of the Prophet. On the contrary, the subject has been politicised by the votaries of Secularism who become hysterical by the very mention of the untold story. Politicians in power have made and are making frantic efforts to suppress every tip of the iceberg which chances to surface in spite, of the conspiracy to keep it out of sight. Some of these politicians are masquerading as academicians and selling far-fetched and fantastic apologies for the havoc caused by Islamic iconoclasm.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

Travel , History , Effort , Light

“The Irish had tough times, but little compares to the experience on our soil of black Americans. That experience should be part of every American’s consciousness, and law enforcement’s role in that experience—including in recent times—must be remembered. It is our cultural inheritance.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Law , Time , Parting

“Gautier says, “Baudelaire abhorred philanthropy, progressivists, utilitarians, humanitarians and utopianists.” In other words, Baudelaire condemned Rousseausism in all its forms. Today, Rousseausism has so triumphed that the arts and the avant-garde are synonymous with liberalism, an error enforced by literature teachers, with their humanist bias. I follow the Decadents in trying to drive Rousseauist benevolence out of the discourse in art and literature. The Decadents satirized the liberal faith in progress with sizzling prophecies of catastrophe and cultural collapse.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 429

Faith , Art , Error , Literature

“As today’s form of capitalism is not compatible with our social and cultural value system, sooner or later it will be damaging to the foundations of societies and the values they are built on.
Therefore, capitalism must be upgraded in a way that is compatible with societal and cultural values and with the fairness principle to provide equal opportunities.”

Dirk Helbing (1965) Complex systems scientist

" An Urgent Appeal to Save the Planet, Part IV: Upgrading Today’s Capitalism https://www.theglobalist.com/capitalism-society-equality-sustainability-crowd-funding/" (August 23, 2017)

Way

“Emotional Amoral Egoism indicates that ethnic conflict should be understood in terms of a reaction to a failure to satisfy a group’s basic physiological, security and ego needs due to discrimination, experienced by a group whose relations are premised, above all, on cultural affinities.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Emotional amoral egoism (2008), p.181

Failure

“Justice is paramount to civilisational triumph because of its centrality to human dignity needs, the success of individual geo-cultural domains and the well-being of human civilisation.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.219

Justice , Success

“Ah hate cunts like that. Cunts like Begbie. Cunts that are intae basebaw-batting every fucker that's different; pakis, poofs, n what huv ye. Fuckin failures in a country ay failures. It's nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, tha's what, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don't hate the English. They just git oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots.”

Irvine Welsh book Trainspotting

Renton, "Relapsing: The Glass" (Chapter 2, Story 2).
Trainspotting (1993)

Hate , Failure , Country

“We are now in a period of social transition, a period characterized, that is, by an unusually rapid rate of change of the most important economic, social, political, and cultural institutions of society. This transition is from the type of society which we have called capitalist or bourgeois to a to a type of society which we shall call managerial.”

James Burnham (1905–1987) American philosopher

Source: The Managerial Revolution, 1941, p. 71; cited in: Robert Manley (ed) (1962) Age of the manager http://archive.org/stream/ageofmanager00manl#page/n15/mode/2up. p. xiii

Change

“…The preferred Shofar of Redemption is the Divine call that awakens and inspires the people with holy motivations, through faith in God and the unique mission of the people of Israel. This elevated awakening corresponds to the ram's horn, a horn that recalls Abraham's supreme love of God and dedication in Akeidat Yitzchak, the Binding of Isaac. It was the call of this shofar, with its holy vision of heavenly Jerusalem united with earthly Jerusalem, that inspired Nachmanides, Rabbi Yehuda HaLevy, Rabbi Ovadia of Bartenura, the students of the Vilna Gaon, and the disciples of the Baal Shem Tov to ascend to Eretz Yisrael. It is for this "great shofar," an awakening of spiritual greatness and idealism, that we fervently pray. There exists a second Shofar of Redemption, a less optimal form of awakening. This shofar calls out to the Jewish people to return to their homeland, to the land where our ancestors, our prophets and our kings, once lived. It beckons us to live as a free people, to raise our families in a Jewish country and a Jewish culture. This is a kosher shofar, albeit not a great shofar like the first type of awakening. We may still recite a blessing over this shofar. There is, however, a third type of shofar. The least desirable shofar comes from the horn of an unclean animal. This shofar corresponds to the wake-up call that comes from the persecutions of anti-Semitic nations, warning the Jews to escape while they still can and flee to their own land. Enemies force the Jewish people to be redeemed, blasting the trumpets of war, bombarding them with deafening threats of harassment and torment, giving them no respite. The shofar of unclean beasts is thus transformed into a Shofar of Redemption. Whoever failed to hear the calls of the first two shofars will be forced to listen to the call of this last shofar. Over this shofar, however, no blessing is recited. "One does not recite a blessing over a cup of affliction."”

Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the British Mandatory Palestine

1933 Sermon: The Call of the Great Shofar https://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13794

Love , God , War , People

“Neither economic liberalism nor Keynesianism can conceptualise vocation, virtue or labour value as economic categories, neither can give a primary economic value to intermediate institutions, whether they be the corporate governance of a firm, vocational colleges, regional banks or supporter owned football clubs, they can only conceptualise the state or the market and all forms of particular association are viewed as at best “cultural” or at worst “obstructive”. They can give no conceptual status to place, to the specificity of place and the necessity of institutions in generating virtue and value within it.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Politics, Employment Polices and the Young Generation, Maurice Glasman http://www.lse.ac.uk/economics/newsEventsSeminars/files/MauriceGlasmanPaper.pdf

Support , Football

“There was a time, and not so long ago, when one could score a success also here with a bit of irony, which compensated for all other deficiencies and helped one get through the world rather respectably, gave one the appearance of being cultured, of having a perspective on life, an understanding of the world, and to the initiated marked one as a member of an extensive intellectual freemasonry. Occasionally we still meet a representative of that vanished age who has preserved that subtle, sententious, equivocally divulging smile, that air of an intellectual courtier with which he has made his fortune in his youth and upon which he had built his whole future in the hope that he had overcome the world. Ah, but it was an illusion! His watchful eye looks in vain for a kindred soul, and if his days of glory were not still a fresh memory for a few, his facial expression would be a riddle to the contemporary age, in which he lives as a stranger and foreigner. Our age demands more; it demands, if not lofty pathos then at least loud pathos, if not speculation then at least conclusions, if not truth then at least persuasion, if not integrity then at least protestations of integrity, if not feeling then at least verbosity of feelings. Therefore it also coins a totally different kind of privileged faces. It will not allow the mouth to be defiantly compressed or the upper lip to quiver mischievously; it demands that the mouth be open, for how, indeed, could one imagine a true and genuine patriot who is not delivering speeches; how could one visualize a profound thinker’s dogmatic face without a mouth able to swallow the whole world; how could one picture a virtuoso on the cornucopia of the living world without a gaping mouth? It does not permit one to stand still and to concentrate; to walk slowly is already suspicious; and how could one even put up with anything like that in the stirring period in which we live, in this momentous age, which all agree is pregnant with the extraordinary? It hates isolation; indeed, how could it tolerate a person’s having the daft idea of going through life alone-this age that hand in hand and arm in arm (just like itinerant journeymen and soldiers) lives for the idea of community.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), p. 246-247

Life , Hate , Truth , Youth

“What I aspire to in the 21st century is a global world system that inter-connects each region and country with their unique culture and socioeconomic regime. Globalization thriving amidst diversity is my vision for the next century, and I strongly believe this co-existence of diverse civilizations with global networking will create a much better world than the unilateral imposition of monolithic ideologies, such as market fundamentalism.”

Eisuke Sakakibara (1941) Japanese economist and critic

The End of Market Fundamentalism (1999)

World , Country

“Even personal tastes are learned, in the matrix of a culture or a subculture in which we grow up, by very much the same kind of process by which we learn our common values. Purely personal tastes, indeed, can only survive in a culture which tolerates them, that is, which has a common value that private tastes of certain kinds should be allowed.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1960s, Economics As A Moral Science, 1969, p. 12

Learning , Personality

“Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it.”

Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) American academic

"Freud: Within and Beyond Culture," Beyond Culture (1965)

Exercises

“On-the-job democracy isn't just a lofty concept but a better, more profitable way to do things. We all demand democracy in every other aspect of our lives and culture. People are considered adults in their private lives, at the bank, at their children's schools, with family and among friends--so why are they suddenly treated like adolescents at work? Why can't workers be involved in choosing their own leaders? Why shouldn't they manage themselves? Why can't they speak up--challenge, question, share information openly?”

Ricardo Semler book The Seven-Day Weekend

The Seven-Day Weekend (2004)

Children , People , School , Family

“The distinction between the world of commerce and that of “culture” quickly became the distinction between infrastructure and superstructure, with the former clearly determining the latter.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

“Commerce and Culture,” p. 281.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

World

“Television has already been wholly colonized by corporate interests, which are now laying claim to our schools. The goal is not simply to sell products and strengthen the consumer culture. It is also to create a political culture that equates the corporate interest with the human interest in the public mind.”

David Korten book When Corporations Rule the World

Source: When Corporations Rule the World (1995,2015), p. 149

School

“The divine in Jesus does not denote a violent rupture of the course of human history with the exclusion of all causal connection and all human personality, but it lies at the basis of all this history from beginning to end; it dwells in it as the divine Logos, as the rational aptitude of human nature, as impulse to the true and good, as God-consciousness. All progress in the development of mankind from the lowest grades upward, every achievement of culture which makes rude nature the servant of reason, every formation of higher ethical ideals, and every clarifying and deepening of the God-consciousness, is an effect and a revelation of the divine Logos dwelling in our race.”

Otto Pfleiderer (1839–1908) German Protestant theologian

Source: Evolution and Theology (1900), p. 18.

God , History , Nature , Personality

“I intrepret the revolutionary process as dialogical cultural action which is prolonged in 'cultural revolution' once power is taken. In both stages a serious and profound effort at conscientização--by means of which the people, through a true praxis, leave behind the status of objects to assume the status of historical Subjects--is necessary.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)

People , Effort

“Since it is hardly likely that contemporary critics seriously mean to bar prose narratives that are unrealistic from the domain of literature, one suspects that a special standard is being applied to sexual themes. … There is nothing conclusive in the well-known fact that most men and women fall short of the sexual prowess that people in pornography are represented as enjoying; that the size of organs, number and duration of orgasms, variety and feasibility of sexual powers, and amount of sexual energy all seem grossly exaggerated. Yes, and the spaceships and the teeming planets depicted in science-fiction novels don’t exist either. The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography or science-fiction from being literature. … The materials of the pornographic books that count as literature are, precisely, one of the extreme forms of human consciousness. Undoubtedly, many people would agree that the sexually obsessed consciousness can, in principle, enter into literature as an art form. … But then they usually add a rider to the agreement which effectively nullifies it. They require that the author have the proper “distance” from his obsessions for their rendering to count as literature. Such a standard is sheer hypocrisy, revealing one again that the values commonly applied to pornography are, in the end, those belonging to psychiatry and social affairs rather than to art. (Since Christianity upped that ante and concentrated on sexual behavior as the root of virtue, everything pertaining to sex has been a “special case” in our culture, evoking particularly inconsistent attitudes.) Van Gogh’s paintings retain their status as art even if it seems his manner of painting owed less to a conscious choice of representational means than to his being deranged and actually seeing reality the way he painted it. … What makes a work of pornography part of the history of art rather than of trash is not distance, the superimposition of a consciousness more conformable to that of ordinary reality upon the “deranged consciousness” of the erotically obsessed. Rather, it is the originality, thoroughness, authenticity, and power of that deranged consciousness itself, as incarnated in a work.”

Susan Sontag book Styles of Radical Will

“The Pornographic Imagination,” pp. 45-47
Styles of Radical Will (1966)

Women , Men , People , Books

“A democratic and equitable international order necessarily functions on the basis of multilateralism and international solidarity. It aims at promoting a culture of peace and dialogue among nations and peoples, fully respecting the sovereignty of States and ensuring that civil society in all countries has ample space to express itself and to enjoy its individual and collective rights and pursue its traditions, culture and identity.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

2018, Report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council

People , Peace , Country

“While political and cultural factors are important as explanations for differences in national technology policy and industrial practices, emergent trends in science, engineering and management are leading to new paradigms for high-technology innovation in both Japan and the United States.”

Lewis M. Branscomb (1926) physicist and science policy advisor

Lewis M. Branscomb, Fumio Kodama (1993) Japanese innovation strategy: technical support for business visions

Science

“And it’s amazing how they trained them, To be racist against themselves in the place they was raised in, You kept us caged in, Destroyed our culture and said that you civilized us, Raped our women and when we were born, you despised us, Gentrified us, agent provocateur divide us, And crucified every revolutionary messiah”

Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist

The 3rd World
Albums, The 3rd World (2008)

Women , Training

“The ultimate goal is not life. It is resurrection. The resurrection of nations in the name of Jesus Christ the Savior. Creation and culture are only means--not the purpose--of resurrection. Culture is the fruit of talent, which God implanted in our nation and for which we are responsible. A time will come when all the world's nations will arise from the dead, with all their dead, with all their kings and emperors. Every nation has its place before God's throne. That final moment, "resurrection from the dead," is the highest and most sublime goal for which a nation can strive. The nation is thus an entity that lives even beyond this earth. Nations are realities also in the other world, not only on this one. To us Rumanians, to our nation, as to every nation in the world, God assigned a specific mission; God has given us a historical destiny. The first law that every nation must abide by is that of attaining that destiny, of fulfilling the mission entrusted to it.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture

Life , God , World , Law

“A college education was for me life-changing. It gave me a life-long passion for reading and learning. It challenged my narrowness and parochialism-really forced open my mind. It deepened my commitment to culture in general and to the higher forms of pleasure. Thus it enriched my life-permanently-by confirming me in habits of mind that would benefit me all my life long. Anyone observing could have seen that happening to me (and my fellow students) at the time. A real education is life-changing. You don't go to classes during the week and get drunk in dance bars on the weekend. You discover a higher level of life and pleasure, and you start living it. If the education takes, you keep living it the rest of your life. […] Education releases you for real joy in the midst of a culture that is abysmally cheap and shabby. The people around you pursue TV, sports, and shopping-- obey the commands of their masters to indulge themselves in every way and not to question the value of what they are fed by the media. But the educated man is critical and even self-critical: he THINKS about things-even things like pleasure. Mindless self-indulgence is no longer enough when you have learned to think.”

Donald Vroon (1942) American music critic

"Critical Convictions", American Record Guide, May/Jun 2002

Life , People , Pleasure , Education

“This time of adversity offers a unique moment of opportunity — a moment we must seize to change our culture. Through the gathering momentum of millions of acts of service and decency and kindness, I know we can overcome evil with greater good. And we have a great opportunity during this time of war to lead the world toward the values that will bring lasting peace.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

War , World , Peace , Evil

“For many years we Communists have struggled for a cultural revolution as well as for a political and economic revolution, and our aim is to build a new society and a new state for the Chinese nation. That new society and new state will have not only a new politics and a new economy but a new culture. In other words, not only do we want to change a China that is politically oppressed and economically exploited into a China that is politically free and economically prosperous, we also want to change the China which is being kept ignorant and backward under the sway of the old culture into an enlightened and progressive China under the sway of a new culture. In short, we want to build a new China. Our aim in the cultural sphere is to build a new Chinese national culture.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

We Want to Build a New China
On New Democracy (1940)
Original: (zh-CN) 我们共产党人，多年以来，不但为中国的政治革命和经济革命而奋斗，而且为中国的文化革命而奋斗；一切这些的目的，在于建设一个中华民族的新社会和新国家。在这个新社会和新国家中，不但有新政治、新经济，而且有新文化。这就是说，我们不但要把一个政治上受压迫、经济上受剥削的中国，变为一个政治上自由和经济上繁荣的中国，而且要把一个被旧文化统治因而愚昧落后的中国，变为一个被新文化统治因而文明先进的中国。一句话，我们要建立一个新中国。建立中华民族的新文化，这就是我们在文化领域中的目的。

Change

“The attack and claim which are so unmistakable in the New Testament were muted and neutralized by the official recognition, the cultural integration and the social control of Christianity as a middle-class institution.”

Helmut Gollwitzer (1908–1993) German theologian and author

Source: Introduction to Church Dogmatics (1957), p. 12

“The Entertainment Industry on Planet Earth had decided that in order to acquire Layer 7 Data Security, it was necessary to lock up layers 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 so that no technological progress could occur without their permission. This was known by the IT Industry and the Consumer Electronics Industry on the planet to be offensive nonsense, but there was no counterweight to it, and there was no organised consumer dissent sufficient to require them to stand up for technical merit and their own right to run their own businesses without dictation from companies a tenth their size. Not surprisingly, since it is part of the role we play in this political power concentrated in poverty, humility, and sanctity, we brought them to a consensus they were unable to bring themselves to - which is represented in the license by a rule which fundamentally says "If you want to experiment with locking down layer below 7 in the pursuit of data networks inside businesses that keep the business's data at home, you may do so freely, we have no objection - not only do we have no objection to you doing it, we've no objection to your using our parts to do it with. But when you use our parts to build machines which control peoples' daily lives - which provide them with education and culture, build devices which are modifiable by them to the same extent that they're modifiable by you. That's all we want. If you can modify the device after you give it to them, then they must be able to modify the device after you give it to them - that's a price for using our parts. That's a deal which has been accepted.”

Eben Moglen (1959) American law professor and free software advocate

Talk titled The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3, Edinburgh, Scotland, June 26, 2007 http://www.archive.org/details/EbenMoglenLectureEdinburghJune2007text.

People , Education , Home , Business

“All the cultures in human history except the Western industrial civilization have held holotropic states of consciousness in great esteem. They induced them whenever they wanted to connect to their deities, other dimensions of reality, and with the forces of nature. They also used them for diagnosing and healing, cultivation of extrasensory perception, and artistic inspiration. They spent much time and energy to develop safe and effective ways of inducing them.”

Stanislav Grof (1931) Czech pychiatrist

The Cosmic Game - Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness (1997), ISBN 0-7914-3876-7, p. 254.

Way , History , Nature , Reality

“In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

Women , Men , Way

“I think we’re always going to have to operate as part of a multinational force. To do so, we have to understand the history and the culture of each of these conflicts and of the microconflicts in each subregion. Obviously, our multinational partners are invaluable for their perspectives, but we also need strong partnerships with indigenous leaders. As in business, we need negotiation competencies and the ability to map stakeholder interests in particular. When we’re partnering with somebody we need to understand several things: their interests, how they align with our interests, how to build relationships based on mutual trust and common purpose, and how to use those relationships to work together to accomplish the mission.”

H. R. McMaster (1962) 26th United States National Security Advisor

How militaries learn and adapt: An interview with Major General H. R. McMaster http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/how-militaries-learn-and-adapt (April 2013)

History , Understanding , Business , Thinking

“Western intellectuals fail to understand and appreciate the form of society that has given us the ability to alter those defaults. They believe both that the most productive human cultures are almost totally dysfunctional, and that evolved, successful societies may be re-drawn at will by intellectuals with political and cultural power. They write as if relative pockets of Western poverty should occasion our astonishment, when in fact the term, until recently, for almost infinitely worse levels of poverty, was simply "human life."”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

Life , Understanding , Success

“Should or can there be a single standard of behavior for both sexes? Is there such a thing as a biologically rooted female culture that should remain separate from male culture, partly because it is different than or superior to male culture?

Women must convert their love for and reliance on strength and skill in others to a love for all manner of strength and skill in themselves.”

Phyllis Chesler (1940) Psychotherapist, college professor, and author

Women and Madness (2005), p. 346, and see Women and Madness (1972), p. 298 (similar text).
Women and Madness (1972, 2005)

Love , Women , Sex , Behavior

“I grew up in a world, [a] very New Jersey, American, Dominican, immigrant, African-American, Latino world. And, you know, I went to school and it was basically the same. I went to college; it was basically the same, where largely I wasn't really encouraged to imagine women as fully human. I was in fact pretty much — by the larger culture, by the local culture, by people around me, by people on TV — encouraged to imagine women as something slightly inferior to men. And so I think that a lot of guys, part of our journey is wrestling with, coming to face, our limited imagina[tion] and growing in a way that allows us not only to imagine women as fully human, but to imagine the things that we do to women — that we often do blithely, without thinking, we just sort of shrug off — as actually deeply troubling and as hurting another human being. And this seems like the simplest thing. A lot of people are like, 'Really, that's like a huge leap of knowledge, of the imagination?”

Junot Díaz (1968) Dominican-American writer

But for a lot of guys, that is.
NPR interview (September 2012) http://www.npr.org/2012/09/11/160252399/fidelity-in-fiction-junot-diaz-deconstructs-a-cheater

Women , Men , People , World

“The time has come to educate people, to cease all quarrels in the name of religion, culture, countries, different political or economic systems. Fighting is useless. Suicide.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

News conference in Vancouver, B.C. as quoted in The Globe and Mail. (8 September 2006).

People , Education , Religion , Suicide

“I see the tasks of social sciences to discover what kinds of order actually do exist in the whole range of the behavior of human beings; what kind of functional relationships between different parts of culture exist in space and over time, and what functionally more useful kinds of order can be created.”

Robert Staughton Lynd (1892–1970) American sociologist

R.S. Lynd (1939) Knowledge of What? p. 125-6, cited in Karl William Kapp (1976), The nature and significance of institutional economics http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6435.1976.tb01971.x/abstract. in: Kyklos, Vol 29/2, Jan 1976, p. 209

Behavior , Science , Time , Parting

“The expression of aggression is conditioned both biologically and culturally and it can be learned. On the other hand, proper upbringing can completely eliminate aggressive behavior, but it must be remembered that biological conditions remain present and aggression can easily be restored.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Wojnar, Anna (April 2011): O mózgu interdyscyplinarnie. Alma Mater”, 134–135, pp. 24–25 (in Polish).

Behavior , Learning

“General systems theory, in a sense, is no news at all, as Von Foerster found out when he attempted to organize a conference of general systems people and anthropologists. In a sense, the situation is comparable to that found by the Committee for the Study of Mankind, in which a committee that included Robert Redfidd tried to get each discipline to consider its relationship to the concept of Mankind. Anthropologists replied, "we are related already," and so they were. Something similar may be said of attempts to date in mathematical anthropology. The kind of information that a computer program can finally provide, on a level of a particular culture, is simply a reflection of how detailed field work has been done, and to the careful field worker, on kinship, for example, it provides no illumination.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1970s, Changing Styles of Anthropological Work, 1973, p. 8

People , Mathematics , Sense , Study

“Today, no great Western nation has a birthrate that will prevent the extinction of its native-born. By century's end, other peoples and other cultures will have largely repopulated the Old Continent. European Man seems destined to end like the 10 lost tribes of Israel—overrun, assimilated and disappeared.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

"If God is Dead..." https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/if-god-is-dead/ (April 26, 2016), Chronicles
2010s

People

“Our culture puts enormous emphasis on "socialization", on the supposedly supreme virtues of establishing close relations with others.”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

“Cultural and behavioral scholars are uneasy about this use of their studies. Fortunately, the intellectual tide has begun to turn. Increasing numbers of economists have come to realize that standard economic theory is just as applicable to the scarcity problems that confront low income countries as to the corresponding problems of high income countries.”

Theodore Schultz (1902–1998) American economist

"The Economics of Being Poor," (1979)

Behavior , Problem , Study , Country

“I see art-making, especially that which comes from the margins of the mainstream, as a site of resistance, a way of interrupting and intervening in those historical and cultural fields that continually exclude me, a sort of gathering of forces on the borders. For the dominant hegemonic stance that has worked to silence and subdue gender and ethnic difference has also silenced difference based on sexual preference.”

Harmony Hammond (1944) artist

From Women, Art, and Society: Fourth Edition (2007) by Whitney Chadwick ISBN 0-500-20393-8.

Art , Way , Silence

“Anti-Americanism thus defined is less a popular prejudice than a parti pris of the political, cultural and religious elites.”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

Source: 2000s, Anti-Americanism (2003), p. 143

“Connected yet alienated - that is the paradox of our global digital culture. We have access to so many things, yet we are increasingly incapable of seeing those things, or ourselves, in any meaningful context.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

“Today, as we are coming to understand better the circular processes through which culture is developed and transmitted, we recognize that man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him. Learning, which is based on human dependency, is relatively simple. But human capacities for creating elaborate teachable systems, for understanding and utilizing the resources of the natural world, and for governing society and creating and creating imaginary worlds all these are very complex. In the past, men relied on the least elaborate part of the circular system, the dependent learning by children, for continuity of transmission and for the embodiment of the new. Now, with our greater understanding of the process, we must cultivate the most flexible and complex part of the system; the behavior of adults. We must, in fact, teach ourselves how to alter adult behavior so that we can give up postfigurative upbringing, with its tolerated configurative components, and discover prefigurative ways of teaching and learning. We must create new models for adults who can teach their children not what to learn but how to learn and not what they should be committed to, but the value of commitment.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

1970s, Culture and commitment, 1970

Men , Children , World , Way

“Mathripala Sirisena: Let me explain the facts. First, let's look at my brother who is Chairman of the Telecom company. You have to differentiate between nepotism, and members of the family getting involved in governance. When you take the telecom institution, it's a mix of state and private sector. Importantly, it comes under a different ministry: it's an institution that comes under a different minister. My brother hasn't been involved in governance in any instance. On the other side, you mentioned my son-in-law, he has in no way been given a powerful position. He has only a minor position on my personal staff. Then you mention my son. Usually, we all know that when you go to the UN General Assembly, there are a certain number of seats allocated to each country's delegation. It's only in accordance with that allocation that government representatives from here attended. I must very clearly say: my son was not included in that number. I totally reject describing this as nepotism. Because in politics, we also need to look at people's understanding, our culture. So within these issues, we have to look at the way the government acted, before I came to power and how we act today. So I must clearly say no member of family has been involved in governance at any point.”

Maithripala Sirisena (1951) Sri Lankan politician, 7th President of Sri Lanka

Talk to Al Jazeera - Sri Lankan president: No allegations of war crimes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udGmG-eqJ6o

People , Family , Law , Way

“We must become better at asking and do less telling in a culture that overvalues telling. It has always bothered me how even ordinary conversations tend to be defined by what we tell rather than by what we ask. Questions are taken for granted rather than given a starring role in the human drama. Yet all my teaching and consulting experience has taught me that what builds a relationship, what solves problems, what moves things forward is asking the right questions.”

Edgar H. Schein (1928) Psychologist

Edgar H. Schein (2013). Humble Inquiry; The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. p. 3-4

Star , Question , Problem

“Someday I’ll do an historical survey and in-depth analysis of lipstick color names and it will be an accurate reflection of our evolving culture.”

Andrea Lewis (writer) Microsoft employee

“ Fire and Ice http://www.cadillaccicatrix.org/andrea_lewis.htm,” Cadillac Cicatrix (2009)
2000-09

Color

“We Scots derive a strong sense of identity from our nationhood. Scotland has always retained a unique culture and character - not defined in opposition to our neighbours, but by ourselves and our basic values. We Scots have made great contributions in the world of philosophy, economics, science and letters. We were the first country in the world to adopt free education for all. And our legal system is a unique hybrid of the civil and common law traditions.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Vision for Scotland in the European Union (December 12, 2007)

World , Education , Law , Sense

“In September 1979, on Defence of Pakistan Day, there was a long article in the Pakistan Times on Bin Qasim as a strategist. The assessment was military, neutral, fair to the soldiers of both sides. It drew a rebuke from the chairman of the National Commission on Historical and Cultural Research.
“Employment of appropriate phraseology is necessary when one is projecting the image of a hero. Expressions such as ‘invader’ and ‘defenders,’ and ‘the Indian army’ fighting bravely but not being quick enough to ‘fall upon the withdrawing enemy’ loom large in the article. It is further marred by some imbalanced statements such as follows: ‘Had Raja Dahar defended the Indus heroically and stopped Qasim from crossing it, the history of this sub-continent might have been quite different.’ One fails to understand whether the writer is applauding the victory of the hero or lamenting the defeat of his rival?””

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

Naipaul, V. S. (1981). Among the believers: An Islamic journey. New York: Knopf.

History , Understanding , Time , Victory

“Culture is also something that can not be stagnant.”

Mahendra Chaudhry (1942) Fijian politician

Interview with Fiji Live, 22 August 2005

“I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, "I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith." That's just a long-winded religious way to say, "shut up," or another two words that the FCC likes less.”

Penn Jillette (1955) American magician

2000s, There Is No God (2005)

God , People , Faith , Way

“I am unable to distinguish clearly between your religious ceremonies and apparently identical behavior at the sporting and cultural functions you have transmitted to me.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Fountains of Paradise

Source: The Fountains of Paradise (1979), Chapter 16 “Conversations with Starglider” (p. 94)

Behavior , Sport

“You have drunk deep at the springs of western knowledge. While you will not hesitate to absorb for your benefit and for the national good the best elements in western culture and thought, you will not in any case permit the destruction of the vital elements of your own civilisation.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Bombay University Convocation on 17th August 1937.

Spring , Knowledge

“Lincoln is, both culturally and in terms of his economic thinking, firmly and immovably located in the center of what we can call liberal democratic thought in the 19th century. He is very much market oriented, with tremendous confidence in the power of a capitalist society to transform for the better, and he believes in opening the possibilities of that society to as many as possible. To him, that’s what’s coterminous with liberty.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

Confidence , Thinking

“Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device. For that tiny fraction, the copyright creates incentives to produce and distribute the creative work. For that tiny fraction, the copyright acts as an "engine of free expression."
But even for that tiny fraction, the actual time during which the creative work has a commercial life is extremely short. As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.”

Lawrence Lessig book Free Culture

Free Culture (2004)

Life , Books , Music , Time

“Man today can do more than the culture heros and half-gods; he has solved many insoluble problems. But he has also betrayed the hope and destroyed the truth which were preserved in the sublimations of higher culture. To be sure, the higher culture was always in contradiction with social reality, and only a privileged minority enjoyed its blessings and represented its ideals. The two antagonistic spheres of society have always coexisted; the higher culture has always been accommodating, while the reality was rarely disturbed by its ideals and its truth. Today's novel feature is the flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture by virtue of which it constituted another dimension of reality. This liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the “cultural values,” but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 56-57

God , Truth , Hope , Problem

“[N]early every political evil can be found on display in China: slavery, discrimination, religious persecution, xenophobia, tyranny, mass-political indoctrination, colonialism, cultural genocide, and so on. And yet, the outcry against these things in America and the West is a tiny fraction of what it was with regard to South Africa in the 1980s or Israel today. Why? Some of the political answers are pretty obvious — and have much merit. A few that come to mind: China is non-Western, and many of these sins are supposed to be unique to white Europeans; China is a victim (or “victim”) of colonialism, and so we shouldn’t judge it harshly; China is very powerful, and realpolitik dictates that we be diplomatic; and so on.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, When Evil Becomes Inconvenient (2018)

Evil

“The Raelian Movement is an atheistic religion that perfectly merges science and spirituality, and it includes many female priests. Men and women must rise above their previous cultural conditioning and look to the future with a new awareness encompassing beauty and femininity.”

Raël (1946) Author of Raëlism and founder and current leader of the Raëlian Movement

Spanish Raelian Movement supports Zapatero's female majority cabinet http://raelianews.org/news.php?extend.278, Raelianews.org (May 14, 2008).

Women , Men , Religion , Beauty

“If men are not regenerated by Christ, and if they will not submit to His calling, to the cultural mandate, they will be crushed by His power.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Source: Writings, The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), p. 730

Men , Christ

“Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.”

Juan Ramón Jimenéz (1881–1958) Spanish poet

"Poetry and Literature" (1941), as translated in Selected Writings (1957).

Literature

“A community which is inspired by feelings of ill-will towards other communities is low and ignoble. I entertain the highest respect for the customs, laws, religious and social institutions of other communities. Nay, it is my duty, according to the teaching of the Quran, even to defend their places of worship, if need be. Yet I love the communal group which is the source of my life and behaviour; and which has formed me what I am by giving me its religion, its literature, its thought, its culture, and thereby recreating its whole past as a living operative factor, in my present consciousness.”

Muhammad Iqbál (1877–1938) Urdu poet and leader of the Pakistan Movement

Sir Muhammad Iqbal’s 1930 Presidential Address to the 25th Session of the All-India Muslim League, Allahabad, 29 December 1930 (from University of Columbia website http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_iqbal_1930.html)

Love , Life , Religion , Law