Quotes about culture (3584 quotes, page 18)

“[On the victims of the hurricane Katrina] "Here in Idaho, we couldn't understand how people could sit around on the kerbs waiting for the federal government to come and do something. We had a dam break in 1976, but we didn't whine about it. We got out our backhoes and we rebuilt the roads and replanted the fields and got on with our lives. That's the culture here. Not waiting for the federal government to bring you drinking water. In Idaho there would have been entrepreneurs selling the drinking water."”

Jim Risch (1943) American politician

Quoted in Guardian, August 31, 2007. http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/mark_schmitt/2007/08/the_real_hypocrisy_of_idaho_co.html

People , Drink , Understanding , Water

“Values are goals which behavior strives to realize. Any activity that is oriented towards an end is a value-oriented action. To the ancient Greeks, their culture was guided by an attainment of ‘the good life.’ In the early days of Christianity, the ‘good life’ was shifted from this lifetime into the next. Newtonian science and the modern era brought values under rational scrutiny, and a desire for empirical order. Modern capitalism introduced the value of ‘good’ as more production per capita, and ‘better’ as even more production. There is nothing in the sphere of culture which would exempt us from the realm of values—no facts floating around, ready to be grasped without valuations and expectations”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: The systems view of the world (1996), p. 80 as cited in: Sherryl Stalinski (2005) A Systems View of Social Systems, Culture and Communities. Saybrook Graduate School. p. 11.

Life , Behavior , Science

“The great thing about multiculturalism is it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures — the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I think was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society.”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

It's the Demography, Stupid (2006)

Feeling , Idea , Fraud , Thinking

“The pro-imperial dictatorship of Lukashenka keeps the direction of unification with Russia, destroying the national culture and the Belarusian language.”

Vasil Bykaŭ (1924–2003) Belarusian writer

Vasil Bykau, “ЁН ПРЫЕХАЎ, САМ ПАМЁР, УСЁ СПАКОЙНА…” АПОШНІЯ ТЫДНІ ВАСІЛЯ БЫКАВА https://www.svaboda.org/amp/24853764.html // svaboda.org
(in Belarusian)

“The market does not exist in the pure state. It is shaped by the cultural configurations which define it and give it direction.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2009, Cartias in Vertitate (29 June 2009)

“The movement of people and ideas is … more than useful; it is sacrosanct. It forms part of the process by which the whole human race becomes both one and diverse, and makes itself more godlike, by affirming in the individual as well as in the species, its preeminence over the particular social and cultural worlds that it builds and inhabits. Both the movement of people and the movement of ideas can unsettle and frighten us, driving us back into ourselves. They can also inspire us to reimagine and to remake our interests, our ideals, and even our identities, by beginning to detach them from the settings with which we habitually associate them. Each of them is therefore an invitation to open ourselves to the new, in a world in which every man and woman has a better chance to become the original that he imagines himself to be.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Free Trade Reimaginedː The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics (2007), p. 210

People , World , Imagination , Idea

“That the environment does wrongs to man’s mind today none will deny. These wrongs are not done because consciousness imprisons the instincts with the fetters of necessity; but because bourgeois man is unconscious of the determinism of his culture. Because of this the instincts are losing such freedom as they attained, are becoming crippled, and less free. Unconsciousness and inexperience, not consciousness and experience, are the gaolers of modern bourgeois man.”

Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937) British Marxist literary critic, journalist and writer

Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949), Chapter IV: Consciousness: A Study in Bourgeois Psychology

Freedom

“Whether it be in the toleration of sharia courts, or the turning of a blind eye to cultural practices which go against our laws, too often it has been women who have been the victims of those problems. I have always believed that a multi-ethnic society such as ours can be successful if it can be united by a common set of values and sense of identity, instead of a constant emphasis on division. It’s amazing to think that this was once considered outlandish. It can be difficult to explain this crucial difference in a city like London. More than one TV interviewer has asked me how, as UKIP’s Mayoral candidate, I can appeal to such a multicultural place as our capital. But this is to miss the point entirely. Like anybody else, I enjoy the huge profusion of completely diverse cuisine, fashion and music. Indeed the different cultural influences on our city are so big and ingrained it’s easy to take them for granted. But this is not the same thing as ensuring and, indeed, standing up for the common values and laws which should and must underpin any cohesive society. Here, as across Europe, one of those values – enshrined in our legal system – is that everybody is equal before the law regardless of their gender, sexuality or ethnicity.”

Peter Whittle (politician) (1961) British author, politician, and journalist

‘Cultural Cringe’: Women Are The First Victims Of State-Sponsored Multiculturalism http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/13/2764329/ (January 13, 2016)

Women , Law , Music , Fashion

“The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

Sex , History , Nature

“Mindplayers didn't really address a lot about the criminal element of this particular world. Everybody in the Mindplayers world couldn't possibly live like the few people that you saw. A lot of times, a culture almost seems to float on top of its own black market, and things from that filter up through the culture. I get the feeling that this law-abiding peaceful thing that I live in now is almost never-never land - to a certain extent it's not even really real. I spent a decade working for Hallmark cards, which is supposed to epitomise sweetness and light and good living and ethics and morals. But Hallmark, like many American manufacturers, has a lot of things like toys and ornaments manufactured in the Far East, by people in sweat-shops. These are children, old people, poor people, people who don't have enough to eat; we get these things so cheaply because we simply use these people and throw them away. This is what I mean about our culture, our never-never land, floating on top of our underworld.”

Pat Cadigan (1953) science fiction author

Cadigan (1993) in: " Interview with Pat Cadigan, May 1993 http://tamaranth.blogspot.nl/1993/05/interview-pat-cadigan-may-1993.html" in The Hardcore, 1993

Children , People , World , Peace

“[Nietzsche inveighs] against every sort of historical optimism; but he energetically repudiates the ordinary pessimism, which is the result of degenerate or enfeebled instincts of decadence. He preaches with youthful enthusiasm the triumph of a tragic culture, introduced by an intrepid rising generation, in which the spirit of ancient Greece might be born again. He rejects the pessimism of Schopenhauer, for he already abhors all renunciation; but he seeks a pessimism of healthiness, one derived from strength, from exuberant power, and he believes he has found it in the Greeks.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 21

Youth , Optimism

“No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains to wildness, as that which declares that the world as made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

" Wild Wool http://books.google.com/books?id=LcIRAAAAYAAJ&pg=P361", Overland Monthly, volume 14, number 4 (April 1875) pages 361-366 (at page 364); modified slightly and reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 1
1870s

Men , World , Way , Understanding

“In the network economy, success is self-reinforcing; it obeys the law of increasing returns. The great innovation of Silicon Valley is not the wowie-zowie hardware and software it has invented. Silicon Valley's greatest "product" is the social organisation of its companies, and most important, the tangled web of former jobs, intimate colleagues, information leakage from one firm to the next, rapid company life cycles, and agile e mail culture. This social web, suffused into the warm hardware of jelly bean chips and copper neurons, creates a network economy.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

Life , Law , Success

“If we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should become indeed the boonbringer, the culture hero of the day—a personage of not only local but world historical moment. In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i. e., give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C. G. Jung called "the archetypal images." This is the process known to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy as viveka, "discrimination."”

Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Source: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Chapter 1

World

“The Church was the preserver of the remnants of intellectual culture, the sole schoolmistress of the raw peoples. Her clergy long had almost a monopoly of education, and were the secretaries of the nobles, the chancellors and prime ministers of kings.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.4 Why Has Christianity Never Undertaken the Work of Social Reconstruction?, p. 145

People , Education

“There is no conceivable reason why all colored people should not be treated according to the merits of each individual. It is not only the plain duty, but also the interest of us all, to have every colored man take the place for which he is best fitted by education, character, ability, manners, and culture. If others insist on keeping him in any lower and poorer place, it is not only his injury, but our universal loss. Yet which of our white congregations would take a colored pastor? How many of our New England villages would like to have colored postmasters, or doctors, or lawyers, or teachers in the public schools? A very slight difference in complexion suffices to keep a young man from getting a place as policeman, or fireman, or conductor, even on the horse cars. The trades-unions are closed against him, and so are many of our stores; while those which admit him are obliged to refuse him promotion on account of the unwillingness of white men to serve under him.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Speech http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-nations-problem/

Men , People , Education , School

“Austerity is necessary in the military – not in the progressive achievement of economic, social and cultural rights.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order exploring the adverse impacts of military expenditures on the realization of a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/Reports.aspx.
2015, Report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council

“We moved from what cultural historians call a culture of character to a culture of personality. During the culture of character, what was important was the good deeds that you performed when nobody was looking. … But at the turn of the (20th) century, when we moved into this culture of personality, suddenly what was admired was to be magnetic and charismatic.”

Susan Cain (1968) self-help writer

Cornish, Audie (interviewer), "Quiet, Please: Unleashing 'The Power Of Introverts'," NPR, January 30, 2012.

Personality

“One of the crucial yardsticks by which we shall have to judge the results of the new abortion law combined with the voluntary sterilisation law will be whether it tends to raise or lower the total quality of our population. We must encourage those who earn less than $200 per month and cannot afford to nurture and educate many children never to have more than two. Intelligent application of these laws can help reduce the distortion that has already set in. Until the less educated themselves are convinced and realise that they should concentrate their limited resources on one or two to give their children the maximum chance to climb up the educational ladder, their children will always be at the bottom of the economic scale. It is unlikely that the results will be discernible before five years. Nor will the effect be felt before fifteen to twenty years. But we will regret the time lost if we do not now take the first tentative steps towards correcting a trend which can leave our society with a large number of the physically, intellectually and culturally anaemic.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Abortion Bill (As reported from Select Committee), 29 Dec 1969. Singapore Parliament Reports http://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/topic.jsp?currentTopicID=00054060-ZZ&currentPubID=00069213-ZZ&topicKey=00069213-ZZ.00054060-ZZ_1%2Bid015_19691229_S0003_T00031-bill%2B
1960s

Children , Education , Law , Intelligence

“Culture changes with economic development.”

Ha-Joon Chang book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Source: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2008), Ch. 9: 'Lazy Japanese and thieving Germans; Are some cultures incapable of economic development?', Lazy Japanese and thieving Germans, p. 196

Change

“I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.”

Matthew Arnold book Culture and Anarchy

Introduction
Culture and Anarchy (1869)

“Pop art is neither an American invention nor an import, yet the terms and names were coined in the US, where they were popularised much faster than in Germany. This kind of art has evolved organically and independently over here, yet at the same time it becomes an analogy to American pop art due to certain psychological, cultural and economical preconditions that are the same in Germany as they are in the US.... For the first time we are showing paintings in Germany that relate to those terms, representing pop art, junk culture, imperial or capitalistic realism, new figuration, naturalism, German pop and other comparable terms.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Quote from Richter's letter to 'Neue Deutsche Wochenschau', 29 April 1963; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1
1960's

Art , Nature , Time , Painting

“There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating ‘holistic’ views as some sort of cure-all… Reductionism implies attention to a lower level while holistic implies attention to higher level. These are intertwined in any satisfactory description: and each entails some loss relative to our cognitive preferences, as well as some gain… there is no whole system without an interconnection of its parts and there is no whole system without an environment.”

Francisco Varela (1946–2001) Chilean biologist

Varela (1977) "On being autonomous: The lessons of natural history for systems theory. In: George Klir (ed.) Applied Systems Research. New York: Plenum Press. p. 77-85 as cited in: D. Rudrauf (2003) " From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology: Francisco Varela's exploration of the biophysics of being http://www.scielo.cl/pdf/bres/v36n1/art05.pdf". In: Biol Res 36: 27-65

Strong , Loss , Parting

“We as leaders, ought to model integrity every day. It starts with how we handle the dilemmas that may seem small. Your decisions and actions set the tone for the culture and reinforce the expectation of others.”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ Live Learn Lead to Make a Difference https://books.google.com/books?id=s0q7mZf9oDkC&lpg=pg=PP1&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2006 p. 147.
On Acting with Integrity

Decision

“Stella Adler was much more than a teacher of acting. Through her work she imparts the most valuable kind of information - how to discover the nature of our own emotional mechanics and therefore those of others. She never lent herself to vulgar exploitations, as some other well-known so-called "methods" of acting have done. As a result, her contributions to the theatrical culture have remained largely unknown, unrecognized, and unappreciated.”

Stella Adler (1901–1992) American actress and teaching coach

Marlon Brando, preface to Stella Adler: The Art of Acting (2000), ed. Howard Kissel, p. 7
About

Nature , Teachers

“The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

"The Drama of the Machines" in Scribner's Magazine (August 1930)

“Considering that our culture invented napalm and nuclear weapons, I'm not sure we're in a position to judge the smaller scale violence of other cultures. But it's important to note that none of the cannibal or headhunting groups were true hunter-gatherers. They had already begun to use agriculture. It is now generally conceded that agriculture usually leads to a rise in labor, a decrease in sharing, an increase in violence, and a shorter life expectancy. This is not to say that all agricultural societies are violent, but rather that violence is by and large not characteristic of true hunter-gatherers.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)

Life

“There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today’s pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

International Herald Tribune (31 October 1990), as cited in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), edited by Robert Andrews, p. 711
1990s, 1990

“In the field of ideas not involving productive activities it is easier to distinguish the division between material and spiritual necessity. For a long time man has been trying to free himself from alienation through culture and art. While he dies every day during the eight or more hours that he sells his labour, he comes to life afterwards in his spiritual activities.
But this remedy bears the germs of the same sickness; it is as a solitary individual that he seeks communion with his environment.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Life , Art , Idea , Time

“We are men and women from many lands, representing a rich variety of cultures. And we have been brought together to work in a great common cause: the survival and progress of mankind. The concept of unity in diversity … underlies our various pursuits at the United Nations.”

Kurt Waldheim (1918–2007) 4th Secretary-General of the United Nations, President of Austria

World-service speech http://www.srichinmoylibrary.com/stsg-8, 1978

Women , Men

“In the act of simply being with another culture there comes the realization of a need for balance, the understanding that there are times when it is better to listen than to ask, better the feel than to think, more appropriate to stay with a silence than to seek answers in speech.”

F. David Peat (1938–2017) British physicist

The Blackfoot Physics (2006)

Feeling , Understanding , Thinking , Silence

“The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture is typified by characterological armoring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This characterolgical armoring of the character is the basis of isolation, indigence, craving for authority, fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

General Survey
The Function of the Orgasm (1927)

Fear , Nature

“The Bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100. Asians score more … the Bell curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. These are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew, The Man & His Ideas, 1997
1990s

Life , Money , Reality

“It is characteristic of the barbarian … to insist upon seeing a thing “as it is.” The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 24.

World , Imagination

“On campuses across this country, embedded in the leadership of every radical "anti-war" protest group, are organizations that promote the culture of Islamic terrorism and its anti-Western, anti-Israeli and anti-American agendas. One that will serve as an example for the others is the radical Muslim Student Association (MSA). The Muslim Student Association is an organization financed by the Saudis and also by student funds at every university where it operates. The ideas and enthusiasms that it promotes among impressionable college students should give every American cause for concern.”

David Horowitz (1939) Neoconservative activist, writer

[David, Horowitz, http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/horowitz.html, "As a former 'Radical,' I see the threat of Militant Islam on our Campuses,", jewishworldreview.com, April 08, 2003, 2010-01-04]
2003

War , Idea , Universe , Country

“It is true that intellectuals who take pains to study every subject from its sources, are few and far between in this country. But it is also true that an intellectual culture cannot grow in an atmosphere where the media is controlled by purveyors of palpable falsehoods or bullied into abject surrender by the thought police of Nehruvian Secularism.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

Pain , Study , Country

“Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio —- empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how —- has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. … Here at home —- within the family, so to speak —- our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.”

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian

Foreword to America and the image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought, Meridian Books, 1960, as cited in: Robert Andrews (1993) The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations https://books.google.com/books?id=4cl5c4T9LWkC&lpg=PA207&dq=Our%20attitude%20toward%20our%20own%20culture%20has%20recently%20been%20characterized%20by%20two%20qualities%2C%20braggadocio%20and%20petulance.&pg=PA207#v=onepage&q&f=false, Columbia University Press, p. 207.

Family , Home

“The real struggle today, just as in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, is between a view of the world termed liberalism or radicalism, for which the primary object of government and of foreign policy is peace, freedom of trade and intercourse, and economic wealth and that other view, militarist or rather diplomatic, which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the imposition of a culture and hereditary or racial prejudice. To the good English radical, the latter is so unreal, so crazy in its combination of futility and evil, that he is often in danger of forgetting or disbelieving its actual existence.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

published in Manchester Guardian (1922); in Collected Writings, Volume 17, p. 370

World , Peace , Thinking , Freedom

“Cultural relativism dictates that all cultures are equally moral and valuable—though in practice, Western culture is often presented as inferior to all others, stained as it supposedly is by racism and imperialism.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Source: 2010s, Marked for Death (2012), Ch. 11: "The Facilitators", pp. 177–178

“Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

2000s, After Theory (2003)

Love , Death , Truth , Religion

“Culture is the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously and define in a basic 'taken for granted' fashion an organization's view of its self and its environment.”

Edgar H. Schein (1928) Psychologist

Source: Organizational Culture and Leadership, 1985, p. 6-7

Fashion

“Anime is the most disgusting, sexist, and misogynistic form of media to ever come out of Japan. Anime defiles women and caters to perverts and losers. These cartoons are corrupting teenagers and promoting rape culture.”

Anita Sarkeesian (1983) American blogger

Andrea Hardie (4 October 2014), @JudgyBitch1, Twitter, falsely attributing a fabricated screenshot of an over 140-character tweet to @femfreq
Misattributed

Women , Animals

“Another explanation for the persistence of the paranormal, I submit, is due to the transcendental temptation. In my book by that name, I present the thesis that paranormal and religious phenomena have similar functions in human experience; they are expressions of a tendency to accept magical thinking. This temptation has such profound roots within human experience and culture that it constantly reasserts itself.”

Paul Kurtz (1925–2012) American professor of philosophy

Source: The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 25, (2001), p. 47

Books , Thinking

“Class, conservatives insist, is not really about money or birth or even occupation. It is primarily a matter of authenticity, that most valuable cultural commodity. Class is about what one drives and where one shops and how one prays, and only secondarily about the work one does or the income one makes. What makes one a member of the noble proletariat is not work per se, but unpretentiousness, humility, and the rest of the qualities that our punditry claims to spy in the red states that voted for George W. Bush. The nation’s producers don’t care about unemployment or a dead-end life or a boss who makes five hundred times as much as they do. No. In red land both workers and their bosses are supposed to be united in disgust with those affected college boys at the next table, prattling on about French cheese and villas in Tuscany and the big ideas for running things that they read in books.This sounds like a complicated maneuver, but it should be quite familiar after all these years. We see it in its most ordinary, run-of-the-mill variety every time we hear a conservative pundit or politician deplore "class warfare"”

Thomas Frank book What's the Matter with Kansas?

meaning any talk about the failures of free-market capitalism — and then, seconds later, hear them rail against the "media elite" or the haughty, Volvo driving "eastern establishment."
Part II: The Fury Which Passeth All Understanding, Chapter Six: Persecuted, Powerless, and Blind (pp. 113-114).
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004)

Life , Money , Boy , Idea

“The best approach to this cultural revolution is therefore through family and household, i. e. through the structure of relations between the secondhand generations. In most societies this had been impressively resistant to sudden change, though this does not mean that such structures were static.”

Eric Hobsbawm book The Age of Extremes

Source: The Age of Extremes (1992), Chapter Eleven, Cultural Revolution, p.320

Family , Change

“A culture is like a lens through which people construct their world.”

Subhash Kak (1947) Indian computer scientist

The Circle of Memory, An Autobiography (2016)

People , World

“As Simone Weil— perhaps the strangest and most unlikely Thoreauvian solitary, outcast, and transcendentalist of all— wrote, echoing Thoreau's sense of awareness: "The authentic and pure values— truth, beauty, and goodness— in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object." Or, more tersely yet: "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer."
It is perhaps the saddest, most hopeless thing we can say about our culture that it is a culture of distraction. "Attention deficit" is a cultural disorder, a debasement of spirit, before it is an ailment in our children to be treated with Ritalin.”

Curtis White (1951) American academic

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

Children , Truth , Beauty , Sense

“Our civilization has essentially globalized only the surfaces of our lives. But our inner self continues to have a life of its own. And the fewer answers the era of rational knowledge provides to the basic questions of human Being, the more deeply it would seem that people, behind its back as it were, cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe. Because of this, individual cultures, increasingly lumped together by contemporary civilization, are realizing with new urgency their own inner autonomy and the inner differences of others.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)

Life , People , Question , Knowledge

“By spreading logical culture, we prepare the foundation for a scientific world-view and by doing this we enable development.”

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963) Philosopher, logician

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, (1985b, 142), as cited in Łukasiewicz, 2016.

World

“By the year 2000 we should be able to say that we have learned to live securely, in peace and mutual prosperity among our Asian and Pacific neighbours. We will not be cut off from our British and European cultures and traditions or from those economies. On the contrary, the more engaged we are economically and politically with the region around us, the more value and relevance we bring to those old relationships. Far from putting our identity at risk, our relationships with the region will energise it.”

Paul Keating (1944) Australian politician, 24th Prime Minister of Australia

Election campaign launch, February 14, 1996.

Peace , Learning

“Every now and then, you get people who tend to forget what this country is about, which is a melting pot of races and cultures and freedom of speech.”

Maynard James Keenan (1964) musician

George Varga (October 25, 2001) "The Tool Man: Blistering band's frontman puts his mind to the world's problems", The San Diego Union-Tribune, p. 4.

People , Freedom , Country , Forgetting

“We're really not very good about putting music in a social and political context, particularly classical music. It's all sort of above everything. But in South Africa, everything is politicised. You play a piece of classical music out there and you are making a real cultural statement. Or you play with a marimba band and you are saying something else. I think that's the way things should be. The way people write about music makes it seem completely devoid of social context. And audiences drift away as a result.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

Financial Times, 11/11/1999
On Classical Music

People , Music , Way , Thinking

“It is impossible to over-emphasize the importance of al-Jazari's work in the history of engineering. Until modern times there is no other document from any cultural area that provides a comparable wealth of instructions for the design, manufacture and assembly of machines… Al-Jazari did not only assimilate the techniques of his non-Arab and Arab predecessors, he was also creative. He added several mechanical and hydraulic devices. The impact of these inventions can be seen in the later designing of steam engines and internal combustion engines, paving the way for automatic control and other modern machinery. The impact of al-Jazari's inventions is still felt in modern contemporary mechanical engineering [2].”

Donald Hill (1922–1994) British historian and engineer

Donald Hill, Studies in Medieval Islamic Technology,; as cited in: Salim Al-Hassani. " 800 Years Later: In Memory of Al-Jazari, A Genius Mechanical Engineer http://muslimheritage.com/article/800-years-later-memory-al-jazari-genius-mechanical-engineer," at muslimheritage.com, 2015.

Way , History , Time , Wealth

“We are going through a major economic transformation that is supported by the people, a transformation that will free us from total dependence on oil and restore a culture of work and production.”

Jamal Khashoggi (1958–2018) Saudi Arabian journalist

"Saudi Arabia wasn’t always this repressive. Now it’s unbearable." in The Washington Post (18 September 2017)

People , Support , Dependency

“Business is globalizing so fast that it has led to the often quoted ‘clash of civilizations’. People simply have not had time to get to know and understand people of other cultures sufficiently to live and work in harmony.”

Begum Aga Khan (1963) German philanthropist

International Business and Leadership Symposium address

People , Quotes , Understanding , Business

“A nation lives forever through its concepts, honor, 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 honor, of the nation's eternal interests. Thus: not bread at all costs, but honor at all costs.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

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

“Nationalism is a state of mind permeating the large majority of the people and claiming to permeate all its members; it recognises the nation-State as the ideal form of political organization and the nationality as the source of all creative cultural energy and economic well-being. The supreme loyalty of man is therefore due to his nationality, as his own life is supposedly rooted in and made possible by its welfare.”

Hans Kohn (1891–1971) American historian

Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, Macmillan, 1961 (p.16). Also quoted in Andrew Vincent, Modern Political Ideologies, Wiley, 2009 (p.318).

Life , People , Loyalty

“I wonder sometimes why climbers embrace climbing so ecstatically, with a passion that feels spiritual, even religious. For years, I never questioned this deep love. I simply realized that I had been looking for something for a long time and had somehow miraculously found it before I even knew it was missing. Now, when I consider the mainstream Western culture that produced me, I see there is something seriously missing for a lot of people. An altered experience of reality is fundamental to a spiritual worldview. Perhaps that is what climbers glimpse—sometimes in the mountains, sometimes when reaching deep within to push past physical limits. Many of us have never felt it before, and we will give anything to get closer to it in the only way we know how.”

Steph Davis (1973) American rock climber

High Infatuation: A Climber's Guide to Love and Gravity (2007)

Love , People , Way , Feeling

“Raw artistic talent is abundant. What is truly rare are the cultural circumstances, attitudes, and institutions to develop and perfect it. Few American cities have ever managed to foster a vibrant literary milieu of international significance — perhaps only Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. American literature has most often been an affair of isolated genius or small coterie.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Fallen Western Star," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ewestern.htm Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
Essays

Literature , Perfection

“Calendar Reform is the final act of history, and the first step toward Earth Regeneration in the cradle of galactic culture.”

José Argüelles (1939–2011) American author and artist

Quoted on Calendar Reform and the Future of Civilization, Preparatory Reflections for the World Summit on Peace and Time University for Peace http://www.lawoftime.org/timeshipearth/articlesbyvv/calendarreform.html%20Full%20Text, Costa Rica, June 22, 1999 - June 27, 1999).

History

“In Nuoro Province of Sardinia Italy and Okinawa Japan there are zones called “blue zones” that are known for having the highest number of centenarians - which are people over age 100. When scientists researched these zones to find out how these people were living so long, they found the least common denominator: These people all had emphasized Ikigai in their cultures. They knew what their reason for being alive was. I have never believed that one man should remain a lifelong politician, therefore, I am imposing my own term limit on this office. Ideas get used up and then the man who had them needs to step aside to make way for the new ones. And so, I strive to become like he whom Plato once apotheosized - the statesman. This means that I know my place, and that is why as a builder and starter, it is now my time to pass the torch of good government on to whomever the public’s wisdom declares a new leader in the upcoming November election.”

Robert Agresta (1983)

Public Release May, 2011, Politicker NJ

Wisdom , People , Age , Way

“Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Democracy and Human Nature http://books.google.com/books?id=akasAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Democracy+means+the+belief+that+humanistic+culture+should+prevail%22&pg=PA124#v=onepage, Freedom and Culture (1939)
Misc. Quotes

Democracy

“Very old money was behind the Crow’s Nest. And enough of it that its Owners didn’t mind losing some every month to keep the place going. It was a kind of eleemosynary institution, created to serve not culture and not dukh, but a thing called the Purpose. And if Ty kept working there for another few decades, perhaps one of the Owners would sit him down one day in the Bolt Hole and deign to tell him what exactly the Purpose was.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Five Thousand Years Later"
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

Money

“There is a powerful expression of our yearning. But now that we have the revolutionary spirit, we must not lose sight of the brotherhood awareness. Temper the revolutionary spirit. Culture identification is needed, but we must not let it lead us to hatred. We can become intoxicated and lose sight of our real goal to fully participate in the political system of the United States.”

Reies Tijerina (1926–2015) American activist

Quoted in Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America by Tony Castro, ISBN 0841503214.

“The structure of the nobility is changed along with that of the state, but it preserves its continuity with the past intact. Knighthood, on the other hand, as the exclusive warrior-class and upholder of secular culture, decays completely. The process is protracted and the ideals of chivalry do not lose their alluring splendour from one day to the next—least of all in the eyes of the middle classes. But behind the scenes everything is set for the fall of Don Quixote.—The decline of the knighthood has been connected with the new methods of warfare introduced in the late Middle Ages, and it has been pointed out that the heavily accoutred cavalry suffered a severe reverse whenever they met the infantry of the new mercenary armies or the foot of the peasant brigades.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter IV. The Middle Ages

Age , Suffering , Change , Past

“As we go further into humanity's past and study its great spiritual cultures, the need for Vedanta becomes still greater. There is no other way of understanding them except through a living culture which is also as ancient as they. Take Egypt, for example. We have happily found plenty of texts bearing on its religion, but the oral traditions through which its spiritual knowledge was transmitted was lost. Therefore, bare texts do not make a meaning as literalists have found. To understand them, "it is necessary that we tum to the Vedanta … because the Upanishads provide the purest metaphysics available to us from the primordial past," as Arthur Versluis, the author of The Egyptian Mysteries, says. He himself followed this method and he found that the study of Vedanta "in-fills" Egyptian studies. His labour resulted in an illuminating study of Egypt's ancient religious tradition.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1992)

Religion , Way , Understanding , Knowledge

“Many people have been taught a social habit, a discourse, for speaking about meaning, which considers only the role of the individual organism, or the individual mind, in the process of making meanings… Mentalistic discourses, by creating a separate realm and locating meanings there, are not useful for understanding the material and social aspects of meaning-making. Mentalistic discourses depend on a common sense view of the separation of mind from body, and individual from society, which has ideological functions in our society. Particular aspects of these discourses deflect attention away from the social, cultural, historical and political dimensions of the meanings we make.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 9

People , Understanding , Sense , Dependency

“And this afternoon, I have a message for the Iraqi people: You will not have to fear the rule of Saddam Hussein ever again. All Iraqis who take the side of freedom have taken the winning side. The goals of our coalition are the same as your goals — sovereignty for your country, dignity for your great culture, and for every Iraqi citizen, the opportunity for a better life.”

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

2000s, 2003, Remarks on the Capture of Saddam Hussein (December 2003)

Life , People , Fear , Freedom

“Third and finally, poetry originated as a form of vocal music. It began as a performative and auditory medium, linked to music and dance and associated with civic ceremony, religious ritual, and magic. (The earliest poetry almost certainly served a shamanistic function.) Most aboriginal cultures did not distinguish poetry from song because the arts were so interrelated as to be porous. Nor did the classical Greek or Chinese cultures two or three millennia ago differentiate poetry from song”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

10
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Art , Music , Dance

“Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up the reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 26

Hate , Music , Understanding , Clothes

“None of the widely touted new technologies and weapons systems "would have helped me in the last three years [in Iraq and Afghanistan]. But I could have used cultural training [and] language training. I could have used more products from American universities [who] understood the world does not revolve around America and [who] embrace coalitions and allies for all of the strengths that they bring us."”

James Mattis (1950) 26th and current United States Secretary of Defense; United States Marine Corps general

Speaking at a professional conference on military transformation, urging the Pentagon to invest in efforts that would "diminish the conditions that drive people to sign up for these kinds of insurgencies." Breaking the Warrior Code (February 2005) http://spectator.org/archives/2005/02/11/breaking-the-warrior-code

World , Universe , Help , Training

“A healthy and humanitarian system of education would have placed all these facts before our young men and women coming from the Muslim community, and put to them the following proposition: These are the words and deeds credited to Muslim kings, saints, and theologians by the historians of Islam in medieval India;…. we do not want you to evaluate these words and deeds and tenets in terms of any non-Islamic religion or culture; our only appeal to you is to evaluate them in terms of natural human reason, man's natural moral sense, and elementary principles of human brotherhood without resort to the casuistry marshalled by the mullahs and sufis, or the apologetics propped up by the Aligarh and Stalinist schools of historians…”

Sita Ram Goel book The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

Women , Men , Education , School

“The women's movement is rooted in the belief that we don't even need men. All it will take is one natural disaster to prove how wrong that is. Then, the only thing holding this culture together will be masculine men of the working class. The cultural elite — women and men — will be pleading for the plumbers and the construction workers. We are such a parasitic class.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Playboy interview (May 1995)

Women , Men , Nature

“Biological evolution is a system of constant divergence without subsequent joining of branches. Lineages, once distinct, are separate forever. In human history, transmission across lineages is, perhaps, the major source of cultural change. Europeans learned about corn and potatoes from Native Americans and gave them smallpox in return.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"The Panda's Thumb of Technology", p. 65
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

History , Learning , Change

“According to … the French counterrevolutionaries and German Romantics, … the corpus of prejudices was a country’s cultural treasure, its ancient and tested intelligence, present as the consciousness and guardian of its thought. Prejudices were the “we” of every “I”, the past in the present, the revered vessels of the nation’s memory, its judgements carried from age to age. Pretending to spread enlightenment, the philosophes had set out to extirpate these precious residua. … The result was that they had uprooted men from their culture at the very moment when they bragged of how they would cultivate them. … Convinced that they were emancipating souls, they succeeded only in deracinating them. These calumniators of the commonplace had not freed understanding from its chains, but cut it off from its sources. The individual who, thanks to them, must now cast off childish things, had really abandoned his own nature. … The promises of the cogito were illusory: free from prejudice, cut off from the influence of national idiom, the subject was not free but shrivelled and devitalised. … Everyday opinion should therefore be regarded as the soil where thought was nourished, its hearth and sanctuary, … and not, as the philosophes would have it, as some alien authority which overwhelmed and crushed it. … The cogito needed to be steeped in the profundities of the collective mind; the broken links with the past needed repairing; the quest for independence should yield to that for authenticity. Men should abandon their scepticism and give themselves over to the comforting warmth of majoritarian ideas, bowing down before their infallible authority.”

Alain Finkielkraut (1949) French essayist, born 1949

Source: The Undoing of Thought (1988), pp. 25-26.

Men , Age , Soul , Intelligence

“So why is Japan different? Why do its top officials – and this trend extends across senior government posts – resign office, seemingly at the drop of a hat? The theories are endless, most of them relying on oft-repeated but simplistic stereotypes about the supposed centrality of honor, saving face, and respect in Japanese culture… Japan's problems are too vast, and its strengths too great, to be ruled by something as capricious and frivolous as the whims of the majority.”

Max Fisher American journalist

Max Fisher, "Why Do Japanese Prime Ministers Keep Resigning" http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/06/why-do-japanese-prime-ministers-keep-resigning/239850/ (3 June 2011), The Atlantic.

Problem

“For some reason, contemporary America believes that it can reject its uniquely successful melting pot to embrace a historically dangerous and discredited salad-bowl separatism. Is there any evidence from the past that institutionalizing sects and ethnic grievances would ensure a nation’s security, prosperity, and freedom? America’s melting pot is history’s sole exception of e pluribus unum inclusivity: a successful multiracial society bound by a common culture, language, and values. But this is a historic aberration with a future that is now in doubt…”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, Diversity: History's Pathway to Chaos (2016)

History , Freedom , Success , Past

“So we already have the evidence of the dichotomy that runs through our culture. We all engage in purposeful activity, and we judge ourselves and others in terms of success in achieving the purposes that we set before ourselves. Yet we accept as the final product of this purposeful activity a picture of the world from which purpose has been eliminated. Purpose is a meaningful concept in relation to our own consciousness of ourselves, but it is allowed no place in our understanding of the world of facts.”

Lesslie Newbigin (1909–1998) Christian missionary

Foolishness to the Greeks. Eerdmans, 1986, 77-78.

World , Understanding , Success

“Greek mathematics reveals an important aspect of the Greek genius of which the student of Greek culture is apt to lose sight.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Preface p. v
A History of Greek Mathematics (1921) Vol. 1. From Thales to Euclid

Mathematics

““And do not think,” Manisfree said, “that we absolve ourselves from blame in this situation. Although we teachers purport to know more than other men, we have usually chosen to remain aloof from public life. Practical, hardheaded men of the world have always frightened us; and those men, in their hardheaded way, have brought us to this.”
“Nor is aloofness our only failure,” said Hanley of Anthropology. “Let me point out that we have taught—badly! Our few promising students became teachers, thus insulating themselves as we had. The rest of our students sat through the sleep-provoking drone of our lectures, eager only to depart and take their places in a mad world. We did not touch them, Joenes, we did not move them, and we did not teach them to think.”
“In fact,” said Blake of Physics, “we did quite the contrary. We managed to equip most of our students with a definite hatred of thinking. They learned to view culture with the greatest suspicion, to ignore ethics, and to consider the sciences solely as a means of making money. This was our responsibility and our failure. The outcome of that failure is the world.””

Robert Sheckley book Journey Beyond Tomorrow

Source: Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962), Chapter 9 “The Need for the Utopia” (p. 74)

Life , Men , Money , World

“The puzzle gets solved when one contemplates the character of Indian Secularism and finds that is no more than a smokescreen used by the Muslim-Christian-Communist combine in order to keep India's national society and culture at bay. … They are simply projecting their self-images on to those whom they view as their enemies. …. I have documented elsewhere how Pandit Nehru hounded out or silenced everyone… whom he suspected of having some Hindu feeling or sympathy for some Hindu cause… and how he objected to every Hindu symbol in India's public life. The country had been partitioned by the remnants of Islamic imperialism. But he blamed it on "communalism", a word by which he always meant Hinduism.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu and Hinduism, Manipulation of meanings, 1993.

Life , Feeling , Communication , Silence

“My publication was for a fine purpose. Certain snobs may now look down on it and call it common or even pornographic, but until the end of the war, I had Hitler's greatest respect, and Der Stürmer had the party's complete support. At our height, we had a circulation of 1.5 million. Everybody read Der Stürmer, and they must have liked it or they wouldn't have bought it. The aim of Der Stürmer was to unite Germans and to awaken them against Jewish influence which might ruin our noble culture.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

To Leon Goldensohn, April 6, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

War , Support , Reading

“It’s hard to stand behind a people and culture in revolutionary transition when you are constantly worried about their irreplaceable and breakable artifacts.”

Grace Paley (1922–2007) American writer and activist

"The Expensive Moment"

People

“I was wondering the other day, why it is we turn pop figures into idols? I have a theory, of course. I think we have this need to be cool, that there is this undercurrent in society that says some people are cool and some people aren't. And it is very, very important that we are cool. So when we find somebody who is cool on television or on the radio, we associate ourselves with this person to feel valid ourselves. And the problem I have with this is that we rarely know what the person believes whom we are associating ourselves with. The problem with this is that it indicates there is less value in what people believe, what they stand for; it only matters that they are cool. In other words, who cares what I believe about life, I only care that I am cool. Because in the end, the undercurrent running through culture is not giving people value based upon what they believe and what they are doing to aid society, the undercurrent is deciding their value based upon whether of not they are cool.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Life , People , Feeling , Problem

“How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted – on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments, and in the face of chronic failures of therapeutic intervention in all of the major classes of mental illness… – is something that sociologists of science and popular culture have yet to fully explain.”

Paul Churchland (1942) Canadian philosopher

Paul Churchland. The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul. (1st ed.). MIT Press. 1995. pp. 181: Talking about Freudian analysis.

Failure , Science

“Marginalised bodies do marginalised work. Bodies that are garroted and controlled can be persuaded to do work that is underpaid and overlooked. Slavemaking is a social science, and nowhere is that science more expertly demonstrated than in the continued ability of contemporary industrial culture to persuade women perform the vast majority of vital domestic and caring labour without expecting reward or payment.”

Laurie Penny book Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

Source: Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2010), Chapter Four

Women , Science

“The EU violates just about every green principle going. It is the opposite of local; it is destructive to the natural world; it wipes out cultural distinctiveness; it is anti-democratic; it puts the interests of banks and corporations before the interests of its working people. Why – when – how – did the Green Movement abandon its commitment to localism and democracy, and jump into bed with a beast like this?”

Paul Kingsnorth (1972) English writer and environmentalist

"Brexit Reconsidered: a Modern Day Peasants’ Revolt?", Counterpunch http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/21/brexit-reconsidered-a-modern-day-peasants-revolt/ December 21, 2016

People , World , Democracy , Nature

“The question poses itself whether we should look on with folded arms while those Germans of the Baltic countries who, despite all the persecution, all the misery and all the difficulties have stuck to the German language and German culture, are being slaughtered…It would be incomprehensible if we, who have exerted ourselves for the freedom of ethnically foreign nations, failed to let our hearts beat first of all for the Balts, who are our own flesh and blood…If to-day you go to Riga or Mitau, you will be confronted by such a pure, unadulterated Germanism that sometimes you would wish it could be united with Germany…When, in addition to Courland, we have also occupied Latvia and Estonia, then I hope that the day will also come when this old German soil will lie under the protection of the great Reich…This does not mean annexation of these territories. But it does mean a free Baltic in close dependence on Germany, under our military, moral, political, and cultural protection. I think it would be one of the finest aims of this world war if we could merge this piece of loyal Germanism with ourselves as intimately as it desires to be merged…The Baltic Germans have completely preserved their German culture: a shining example for the Americanized grandchildren of German grandfathers.”

Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Speech in the Reichstag (19 February 1918), quoted in W. M. Knight-Patterson, Germany. From Defeat to Conquest 1913-1933 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1945), pp. 149-150.
1910s

War , Lie , World , Hope