Quotes about culture (3584 quotes, page 21)

“Paul was undeniably sincere. He believed that in reinterpreting the Christian faith so as to make it acceptable to the Romans he was doing that faith a service. His make-up was imperial rather than democratic. Both by birth and training he was unfitted to enter into the working-class consciousness of Galileans. He was in culture a Hellenist, in religion a Pharisee, in citizenship a Roman. From the first strain, Hellenism, he received a bias in the direction of philosophy rather than economics; from the second, his Pharisaism, he received a bias toward aloofness, otherworldliness; and from the third, his Romanism, he received a bias toward political acquiescence and the preservation of the status quo.”

Bouck White (1874–1951) American author and novelist

Source: The Call of the Carpenter (1914), p. 227

Faith , Religion , Birth , Sincerity

“I was a little confused as a kid because I grew up with my mom, and my mom is black. So, I was cultured in a very 'black' way. But when I go to school, I'm getting called 'white.' They would look at me, and they would curse me out. I didn't understand. I just knew I saw people of all different shades, and I was light. Now, I'm in a much bigger world.”

Rihanna (1988) Barbadian singer, songwriter, and actress

Allure magazine, January 2008.

People , World , School , Way

“While the Constitution guarantees press freedom, it must be used with sensitivity, respect and good judgement in a multi-cultural and multi-religious country such as ours, he said.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Pacific Magazine http://www.pacificmagazine.net
Reaction to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, 7 February 2006

Freedom , Country

“You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behavior. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it's a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.”

George Gerbner (1919–2005) American writer, freelancer and sociologist

George Gerbner, 86; Educator Researched the Influence of TV Viewing on Perceptions, Los Angeles Times, 29 December 2005, 1 December 2014, Oliver, Myrna http://articles.latimes.com/2005/dec/29/local/me-gerbner29,

School , Behavior , Communication , Parent

“And yet, none of this is accidental. As we have seen in the texts that we have surveyed in this book, it is all part of a line. India turns out to be a recent construct. It turns out to be neither a country nor a nation. Hinduism turns out to be an invention – surprised at the word? You won’t be a few pages hence – of the British in the late nineteenth century. Simultaneously, it has always been inherently intolerant. Pre-Islamic India was a den of iniquity, of oppression. Islamic rule liberated the oppressed. It was in this period that the Ganga-Jamuna culture, the ‘composite culture’ of India was formed, with Amir Khusro as the great exponent of it, and the Sufi savants as the founts. The sense of nationhood did not develop even in that period. It developed only in response to British rule, and because of ideas that came to us from the West. But even this – the sense of being a country, of being a nation, such as it was – remained confined to the upper crust of Indians. It is the communists who awakened the masses to awareness and spread these ideas among them.
In a word, India is not real – only the parts are real. Class is real. Religion is real – not the threads in it that are common and special to our religions but the aspects of religion that divide us, and thus ensure that we are not a nation, a country, those elements are real. Caste is real. Region is real. Language is real – actually, that is wrong: the line is that languages other than Sanskrit are real; Sanskrit is dead and gone; in any case, it was not, the averments in the great scholar, Horace Wilson to the House of Commons Select Committee notwithstanding, that it was the very basis, the living basis of other languages of the country; rather, it was the preserve of the upper layer, the instrument of domination and oppression; one of the vehicles of perpetuating false consciousness among the hapless masses.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Books , Religion , Idea , Sense

“First technology, then culture.”

V. Vale (1942) American writer

Interview with V. Vale by Karlynne Ejercito in Bomb Magazine (27 July 2015)

“The widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are 'left over.' However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural--and last but not least--political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Interview with Furtherfield http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=408

Life , Understanding , Success

“We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregard them altogether, saying with regret they were impossible of realisation. Now indeed they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonising problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realisation? … Utopias are more realisable than those 'realist politics' that are only the carefully calculated policies of office-holders, and towards utopias we are moving. But it is possible that a new age is already beginning, in which cultured and intelligent people will dream of ways to avoid ideal states and to get back to a society that is less 'perfect' and more free.”

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) Russian philosopher

Source: The End of Our Time (1919), pp. 187-188. Aldous Huxley used this passage (in French translation) as the epigraph to Brave New World.

People , Age , Dreams , Way

“There are cultures that can only picture their origins and not their ends.
Some are obsessed by both.
Two other positions are possible: only picturing one's end - our own culture; picturing neither beginning nor end - the coming culture.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

Source: 1980s, Cool Memories (1987, trans. 1990), Chapter 1

“The minority must have involvement in society. You can have different cultural practices that you accept. But if you are going to adopt democracy in government, then the government itself must allow the minority to be heard.”

Sheila Jackson Lee (1950) American politician

As quoted in an interview by Rami Eljundi in World Internet News (26 April 2006)

Democracy

“At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. Or perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off all together as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.”

Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1942–2004) Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory

La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness

Way

“Meanwhile, among all its countless other effects upon human culture, Starglider had brought to its climax a process that was already well under way. It had put an end to the billions of the words of pious gibberish with which apparently intelligent men had addled their minds for centuries.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Fountains of Paradise

Source: The Fountains of Paradise (1979), Chapter 16 “Conversations with Starglider” (p. 96)

Men , Way , Intelligence

“In a society, in a culture, which all too often make relativism its creed - relativism has become a sort of dogma - in such a society the light of truth is missing; indeed, it is considered dangerous and "authoritarian" to speak of truth, and the end result is doubt about the goodness of life - is it good to be a person? is it good to be alive? - and in the validity of the relationships and commitments in which it consists.Today, more than in the past, the education and formation of the person are influenced by the messages and general climate spread by the great means of communication and which are inspired by a mindset and culture marked by relativism, consumerism and a false and destructive exaltation, or rather, profanation, of the body and of sexuality.”

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

In a Speech of Benedict XVI at the Inauguration of the Convention of the Diocese of Rome http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2007/june/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20070611_convegno-roma_en.html, at the Basilica of Saint John Lateran (11 June 2007)
2007

Life , Truth , Education , Communication

“A generation ago, a pope with humane intentions said, “Spiritually, we are all Semites.” Despite his humane intentions, he was wrong. Arabs are Semites, and we are not Arabic in our faith and culture. He would have been equally wrong had he said Hebrews or Jews. The culture of the West is not the property of any race or people in its origin. It is biblical. True, much sin is present in Western culture. True, such sin needs to be condemned. But the mind of the West bears the imprint of the Bible. It is not understandable on any other terms.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Writings, The New Racism (1980)

People , Faith , Understanding

“It would be hard to find a single example in history in which a group that cast more than 50 percent of the vote got away with calling itself the victim… Women are the only 'oppressed' group to share the same parents as the 'oppressor'; to be born into the middle class and upper class as frequently as the 'oppressor'; to own more of the culture's luxury items than the 'oppressor'…”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part 1: The Myth of Male Power, p. 40.

Women , History , Parent

“No country has a perfect report card. While some countries have strong points in specific areas, they may have serious lacunae in other areas. For instance, some countries have made enormous progress on civil and political rights, but lag in the implementation of economic, social and cultural rights.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas 2013 Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order
2013

Strong , Perfection , Country

“This shifted the centre of a truly Hellenic civilization to the east, to the Aegean, the Ionian littoral of Asia Minor and to Constantinople. It also meant that modem Greeks could hardly count as being of ancient Greek descent, even if this could never be ruled out.’ There is a sense in which the preceding discussion is both relevant to a sense of Greek identity, now and earlier, and irrelevant. It is relevant in so far as Greeks, now and earlier, felt that their ‘Greekness’ was a product of their descent from the ancient Greeks (or Byzantine Greeks), and that such filiations made them feel themselves to be members of one great ‘super-family’ of Greeks, shared sentiments of continuity and membership being essential to a lively sense of identity. It is irrelevant in that ethnies arc constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i. e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in distinctive myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population. In that sense much has been retained, and revived, from the extant heritage of ancient Greece. For, even at the time of Slavic migrations, in Ionia and especially in Constantinople, there was a growing emphasis on the Greek language, on Greek philosophy and literature, and on classical models of thought and scholarship. Such a ‘Greek revival’ was to surface again in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as subsequently, providing a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: National Identity (1991), p. 29: About Ethnic Change, Dissolution and Survival

Family , Feeling , Literature , Sense

“Cultures and societies consumed each other, as well as animals and men.”

Edmund Cooper book All Fools' Day

All Fools' Day (1966)

Men , Animals

“The denial of becoming by physics estranged science from philosophy… [and] became a dogmatic assertion directed against all those (chemists, biologists, physicians) for whom a qualitative diversity existed in nature… Today we believe that the epoch of certainties and absolute oppositions is over. Physicists belong to their culture, to which, in their turn, they make an essential contribution.”

Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) physical chemist

Cited in: L.P. Foch (1997) " Some Philosophical Influences on Ilya Prigogine's Statistical Mechanics https://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/earleyj/papers/FOCH%20LP7.pdf", at georgetown.edu.
Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (1984)

Nature , Science

“To hide behind culture or tradition to justify anarchy is a gross insult to the very people whose culture or tradition may be paraded to glorify criminal conduct.”

Mahendra Chaudhry (1942) Fijian politician

Speech at a farewell function for outgoing United States Ambassador David Lyon, 15 July 2005 (excerpts)

People

“Rousseau … is aesthetically revolted by the trashiness of what, some twenty years ago, David Riesman called the 'other-directed' personality, which he saw becoming ever-more salient in our society. This is the personality whose whole being is attuned to catch the signals sent out by the consensus of his fellows and by the institutional agencies of the culture, to the extent that he is scarcely a self at all, but, rather, a reiterated impersonation.”

Lionel Trilling book Sincerity and Authenticity

Source: Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), p. 66

Personality

“One might ask why the teachers do not notice the difficulty children have in learning BASIC. The answer is simple: Most teachers do not expect high performance from most students, especially in a domain of work that appears to be as "mathematical" and "formal" as programming. Thus the culture's general perception of mathematics as inaccessible bolsters the maintenance of BASIC, which in turn confirms these perceptions.”

Seymour Papert book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

Source: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980), Chapter 1, Computers and Computer Cultures

Children , Mathematics , Learning , Teachers

“Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

"The Storm Over the University", The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990

“Organizational culture consists of four distinguishable but interrelated components. They include shared basic values, behavioral norms, different types of artifacts, and behaviors… Values can be defined as "a conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection from available modes, means, and ends of action." Norms differ from values by a higher degree of specificity and a higher relevance for actual behaviors (Katz and Kahn 1978, p. 43). The shared values within an organization form the basis for the development of these norms, which legitimate specific behaviors. More specifically, we define norms as expectations about behavior or its results that are at least partially shared by a social group (O'Reilly 1989; Thibaut and Kelley 1959). Artifacts include stories, arrangements, rituals, and language that are created by an organization and have a strong symbolic meaning (Schein 1992; Trice and Beyer 1993). The symbolic meaning of artifacts is more important than any instrumental function (Hatch 1993). In contrast, behaviors refer to organizational behavioral patterns with an instrumental function.”

Christian Homburg (1962) German academic

Source: "A multiple-layer model of market-oriented organizational culture", 2000, p. 450

Behavior , Strong

“There are dangers in the increasing belief that toleration can simply be imposed on people by a variety of new laws and by a bureaucracy specializing in ethnic affairs, cultural relations and human rights. Unfortunately, the laws and regulatory bodies, introduced in the hope of promoting toleration, can be invoked to attack freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and those principles on which minority rights must, in the last resort, depend. A sensible humane immigration policy is more likely than most of these new agencies and laws - present or proposed - to maintain and foster racial toleration.”

Geoffrey Blainey book All for Australia

All for Australia (1984)

People , Law , Hope , Freedom

“The student should have enough knowledge of his or her cultural tradition to know how it got to be the way it is. This involves both political and social history, on the one hand, as well as the mastery of some of the great philosophical and literary texts of the culture on the other. It involves reading not only texts that are of great value, like those of Plato, but many less valuable that have been influential, such as the works of Marx. For the United States, the dominant tradition is, and for the foreseeable future, will remain the European tradition. The United States is, after all, a product of the European Enlightenment. However, you do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others. Works from other cultural traditions need to be studied as well.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

The Storm Over the University (December 6, 1990)

Way , History , Understanding , Knowledge

“The global role of the United States is perhaps the ultimate chapter in that long period of European expansion which had begun in western Europe, and especially on the Atlantic seaboard, during the 15th century. Europe slowly had outgrown its homeland. Its cultural empire eventually formed a long band traversing most of the Northern Hemisphere and dipping far into the Southern. The modern hub of the peoples and ideas of European origin is now New York as much as Paris, or Los Angeles as much as London. In the history of the European peoples the city of Washington is perhaps what Constantinople - the infant city of Emperor Constantine - was to the last phase of the Roman Empire; for it is unlikely that Europeans, a century hence, will continue to stamp the world so decisively with their ideas and inventions.”

Geoffrey Blainey book A Short History of the World

A Short History of the World (2000)

People , World , Angels , History

“Nevertheless. among all the temptations I will have to resist today. There would be the temptation of memory: to recount what was for me. and for those of my generation who shared it during a whole lifetime. The experience of Marxism. The quasi-paternal figure of Marx, the way it fought in us with other filiations, the reading of texts and the interpretation of a world in which the Marxist inheritance was-and still remains, and so it will remain-absolutely and thoroughly determinate. One need not be a Marxist or a communist in order to accept this obvious fact. We all live in a world, some would say a culture, that still bears, at an incalculable depth, the mark of this inheritance, whether in a directly visible fashion or not.”

Jacques Derrida book Specters of Marx

Injunctions of Marx
Specters of Marx (1993)

World , Way , Fashion , Memory

“The election's coming just in a couple of weeks, and I hope you're praying about your vote. One of the propositions, of course, that I want to mention is Proposition 8, which is the proposition that had to be instituted because the courts threw out the will of the people. And a court of four guys actually voted to change a definition of marriage that has been going for 5,000 years.
Now let me say this really clearly: we support Proposition 8 — and if you believe what the Bible says about marriage, you need to support Proposition 8. I never support a candidate, but on moral issues I come out very clear.
This is one thing, friends, that all politicians tend to agree on. Both John McCain and Barack Obama, I flat out asked them "what is your definition of marriage?" and they both said the same thing. It is the traditional, historic, universal definition of marriage: one man and one woman, for life. … There are about 2% of Americans are homosexual or gay, lesbian people. We should not let 2% of the population determine — to change a definition of marriage that has been supported by every single culture, and every single religion, for 5,000 years. … So I urge you to support Proposition 8, and pass that word on. I'm going to be sending out a note to pastors on what I believe about this, but everybody knows what I believe about it, and they heard me at the civil forum when I asked both Obama and McCain on their views.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

regarding California Proposition 8 to amend the state constitution to not recognize same-sex marriage, as quoted in "News & Views 10/23/2008 Part 3 (Prop 8)" in Pastor Rick's News and Views (23 October 2008) http://www.saddleback.com/blogs/newsandviews/index.html?contentid=1502

Life , Marriage , People , Religion

“We need a philosophy of the individual in society and a political culture that values the social goods that give security, meaning and value to people: home, family, friendships, good work, locality and communities of belonging. These were the concerns of the 19th century debates between social liberals and ethical socialists which created the modern spirit of the left. We need to re-invent a plural and ethical socialism rooted in the ordinary life of the individual producing and relating in society. The central value of this socialism, alongside liberty, is equality.”

Jon Cruddas (1962) British politician

Tribune Magazine, Building the future politics on our toxic present, 15 June 2009 http://www.tribunemagazine.org/2009/06/building-the-future-politics-on-our-toxic-present/

Life , Friendship , People , Family

“America today is a confused society, caught up in a terror war, a culture war, and a media war, where honesty and professional standards have vanished.”

Bill O'Reilly (1949) American political commentator, television host and writer

2007-03-23
The O'Reilly Factor
Fox News
Television

War

“Modern industrial design is based on the principle of conspicuous economy [but] the bourgeois culture which dominates the Western World is founded… on the principle of conspicuous waste.”

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

Lewis Mumford (1930) Modern American design. R.L. Leonard, & ‎C.A. Glassgold (eds.), ‎American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen. p. 9; As cited in: V.T. Clayton et al. Drawing on America's Past, p. 28

World

“I had come back at last, come back to my spiritual home from which I had wandered away in self forgetfulness. But this coming back was no atavistic act. On the contrary, it was a reawakening to my ancestral heritage which was waiting all along for me to lay my claim on its largesses. It was also the heritage of all mankind as proved by the seers, sages and mystics of many a time and clime. It spoke in different languages to different people. To me it spoke in the language of Hindu spirituality and Hindu culture at their highest.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

How I became a Hindu (1982)

People , Home , Time , Waiting

“For it is this cultural revolution that has led to just such a "profound modification in the ideas" of peoples. And those ideas have made Western elites apparently indifferent to the death of their civilization. They do not seem to care if the end of the West comes by depopulation, by a surrender of nationhood, or by drowning in waves of Third World immigration.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, The Death of the West (2002)

Death , People , World , Idea

“"When I published my book "The Origins of the Bulgarians" in 1907, from which it came out that the Bulgarians were something better than what was being thought of for them, I was declared a patriot and, therefore, which is outside the law. Everyone who criticized me has criticized me not in content, not because the data I have stated is untrue, but because I was a patriot who reported facts that the Bulgarians were both valiant and cultural when, in the opinion of my opponents, it was obvious that the Bulgarians were created by nature as a fertilizer on foreign fields … My chauvinism, proving that Thrace and Macedonia were old Bulgarian lands, threatened on the one hand Russia, which aspired to South Thrace as a hinterland of the Dardanelles and on the other hand - Pannonian Slavs who aspired to Thessaloniki. The opinion of Paninese Slavs was also supported by Bulgarian scientists.”

Gancho Tsenov (1870–1949) Bulgarian historian

Books , Law , Support , Nature

“Climate change is by no means the sole or even the most significant symptom of the changing interests and values of the West. Still, only societies with high levels of cultural amnesia – that have forgotten the scriptures about man created 'in the image and likeness of God' and charged with 'subduing the earth and all its creatures”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

could have made such a religion out of it.
Quoted in "'I've learnt to speak my mind': 10 excerpts from Tony Abbott's climate change speech in London'" http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/ive-learnt-to-speak-my-mind-ten-excerpts-from-tony-abbotts-climate-change-speech-in-london-20171009-gyxk92.html, Sydney Morning Herald, October 10, 2017
2017

God , Religion , Change

“Sarkozy was elected last year by insisting on immigrants speaking French and insisting that they integrate into the French culture…Obama’s call for Americans to learn Spanish to accommodate the onslaught of Mexican immigrants makes the French government sound like Rush Limbaugh.”

Rachel Marsden (1974) journalist

Contrasting Barack Obama with French President Nicolas Sarkozy
Barack Obama Has Little In Common With Europe http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=27669

Learning

“War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

"Why Are We in Kosovo?", The New York Times (2 May 1999)

War , Imagination , History , Communication

“Pick your myth - we're either Pandora or Prometheus or, frankly, maybe Icarus. We are in a tipping-point era, and we have to either catch up to our abilities, culturally, or some massive global catastrophe will befall us. The planet will live on, but we're going to make it more difficult for us to survive.”

Joshua Jackson (1978) Canadian actor

As quoted in the article 'Free spirit' in NUVO magazine (2010)

“What they have implanted here, which is really a 'gringo' custom, is terrorism. They disguise children as witches and wizards, that is contrary to our culture.”

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) 48th President of Venezuela

Hugo Chávez on Halloween. http://www.breitbart.com/news/na/051101005143.9f6752nt.html
2005

Children

“The historical significance of the Proclamation is not so much that it enacted the emancipation of people of African descent; on the contrary, it was a military strategy. But if we examine the meaning of this historical moment we might better be able to grasp the failures as well as the successes of emancipation. I have thought that perhaps we were not asked to reflect on the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation because we might realize that we were never really emancipated. But anyway, at least we may be able to understand the dialectics of emancipation; because we still live the popular myth that Lincoln freed the slaves and that this continues to be perpetuated in popular culture, even by the film Lincoln. Lincoln did not free the slaves. We also live with the myth that the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement freed the. Civil rights, of course, constitute an essential element of the freedom that was demanded at that time, but it was not the whole story.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities (2013)

People , Failure , Understanding , Freedom

“"What kind of parent would want their children to have servants?" he asks, disgusted by the idea. "The moment a child thinks it is entitled to anything, they think they deserve everything. Why do you think the Core is such a Babylon? Because it's never been told no.
"Look at the Institute you attended. Sexual slavery, murder, cannibalism of fellow Golds?" He shakes his head. "Barbaric. It's not what the Ancestors intended. But the Coreworlders are so desensitized to violence they've forgotten it's to have a purpose. Violence is a tool. It is meant to shock. To change. Instead, they normalize and celebrate it. And create a culture of exploitation where they are so entitled to sex and power that when they are told no, they pull a sword and do as they like."”

Pierce Brown book Morning Star

Source: Morning Star (2016), Ch. 41: The Moon Lord

Children , Sex , Idea , Thinking

“Only the misapprehension that [Paglia] can be wise like lightning could explain her brief appearance, in Inside Deep Throat, to tell us that the cultural artefact in question was 'an epochal moment in the history of modern sexuality.' On the contrary, it was a moronic moment in the history of exploitation movies made by people so untalented that they can't even be convincing when they masturbate.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

On Camille Paglia (New York Times Book Review, March 27, 2005)
Essays and reviews

People , History , Question , Appearance

“The basic bond of any society, culture, subculture, or organization is 'a public image.”

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

Source: 1950s, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, 1956, p. 64, cited in: Carl H. Botan, Vincent Hazleton (2006) Public Relations Theory Two. p. 349. Botan & Hazleton explain: "Citizens have particular images (or conceptions) of their own nation in relations to other nations, and those images reflect specific values and emotions. People in one nation make attributions about those living in other nations even when they have not visited a particular country. When individuals discuss their personal images with others, they contribute to the creation of public images. The public images of nation-states emanate from a “universe of discourse” (Boulding, 1956, p. 15)."

“The great and present danger to American literature is the growing homogeneity of our writers, especially the younger generation. Often raised in several places in no specific cultural or religious community, educated with no deep connection to a region, history, or tradition, and now employed mostly in academia, the American writer is becoming as standardized as the American car--functional, streamlined, and increasingly interchangeable”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

27
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Education , Cars , History , Communication

“Rankovich wants us to turn our borders into a roadhouse with two gates through which Yugoslav, Italian and Greek agents and weapons could go in and out freely, without visas, in order to bring us their "culture of cutthroats", so that Tito may realize his dream of turning Albania into the seventh republic of Yugoslavia, so that the reactionary Italian bourgeoisie may put into action for the third time their predatory intentions towards Albania, or so that the Greek monarcho-fascists may realize their crazy dream of grabbing southern Albania. Because we have not permitted and will never permit such a thing, we are "warmongers."”

Enver Hoxha (1908–1985) the Communist leader of Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Party of L…

They know very well that if they violate our borders they will have to fight us and the whole socialist camp.
Speeches, Moscow Address

Dreams , Time , Fight

“So it is easily seen that the sexual insignes are nothing in themselves, for any of them, in another time and place, might belong to both sexes, the other sex, or neither. In other words, a skirt does not make the social entity, woman. It takes a skirt plus a social attitude to do it.
But all through history, in virtually every culture and country, there has indeed been a “woman’s province” and a “man’s province,” and in most cases the differences between them have been exploited to fantastic, sometimes sickening extremes.
Why?”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 41 (p. 125)
Venus Plus X (1960)

Sex , History , Time , Country

“At its core, the new economy is based on culture: on the culture of innovation, on the culture of risk, and the culture of expectations, and, ultimately on the culture of hope in the future.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 3, e-Business and the New Economy, p. 112

Hope , Future

“The Bundists did not wait for the Messiah, nor did they plan to leave for Palestine. They believed that Poland was their country and they fought for a just, socialist Poland, in which each nationality would have its own cultural autonomy, and in which minorities' rights would be guaranteed.”

Marek Edelman (1922–2009) Jewish resistance member

"Warsaw Ghetto uprising leader Marek Edelman dies at 90" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/6256830/Warsaw-Ghetto-uprising-leader-Marek-Edelman-dies-at-90.html. The Daily Telegraph. 2009-10-03. Retrieved 2009-10-04.

Waiting , Country

“The gullible European has only too credulously listened to these temptations, sung to the lyrics of the sirens' song—freedom, justice, brotherhood. The fruits of this subversion are apparent today. They are so nakedly apparent that even the most unbiased person, a person who has no idea of the necessary historical relationships, must become aware that he has placed his confidence in crafty and glib leaders, who intended, not his good, but the destruction of all laboriously acquired civilization, all culture.”

Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) German architect and politician

"The Russian-Jewish Revolution", Auf Gut Deutsch magazine, February 1919. Quoted in Roderick Stackelberg, Sally A. Winkle, The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts. Routledge, 2013 (p.50). Also in Barbara Miller Lane and Leila J. Rupp, Nazi Ideology Before 1933: A Documentation. University of Texas Press, 2014 (p.12).

Justice , Confidence , Idea , Freedom

“The Hopewell fused elements of the Adena, the Archaic, and other Woodland patterns of life. Thus, it cannot technically be identified as a culture. …Rather, the Hopewell people were an amalgam of many societies whose customs varied greatly, but who were bound together by… a cult of the dead and a trade bond… a network of trade linked widely separated areas of the continent.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Life , People , Dead

“A liberal public is interesting to have as an audience. It is for that very reason that corporations make such an effort to ally themselves with cultural institutions.”

Hans Haacke (1936) conceptual political artist

Deborah Solomon " The Way We Live Now: 3-26-00: Questions for Hans Haacke; School for Scandal http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/26/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-3-26-00-questions-for-hans-haacke-school-for-scandal.html," in: The New York Times Biographical Service, Vol. 31 (2000), p. 588
2000s

Effort

“After the war, Japan was occupied by the allied forces, and based on peace and democracy as values to be upheld, established the Constitution of Japan, undertook various reforms and built the foundation of Japan that we know today. I have profound gratitude for the efforts made by the Japanese people at the time who helped reconstruct and improve the country devastated by the war. I also feel that we must not forget the help extended to us in those days by Americans with an understanding of Japan and Japanese culture. Today, more than sixty years since the end of the war, we have seen that, in the face of major disasters such as the Great East Japan Earthquake [March 11, 2011], there are so many people in Japan who value the bonds between people, can deal with various situations calmly, and work hard towards reconstruction. I have found this most reassuring.”

Akihito (1933) Emperor of Japan

War , People , Peace , Feeling

“What I love about fiction is the way this form of expression allows an author to wrestle an idea to the ground, as opposed to the bumper-sticker dialectics that pass for political and philosophical discourse in most sectors of our culture. In the age of mass communication, we need the quiet, contemplative and often ambiguous medium of the novel more than ever.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), P. S. (p. 13)

Love , Age , Way , Communication

“We need a new England where all religions and colours feel proud of our flag and recognise how important our identity and culture is.”

Tommy Robinson (1982) English right-wing activist

Interview with Jamie Bartlett, «'The guards don't run the prison, Islam does': my interview with a 'reformed' Tommy Robinson», The Telegraph (17 June 2014) http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/jamiebartlett/100013835/the-guards-dont-run-the-prison-islam-does-my-interview-with-a-reformed-tommy-robinson/
2014

Religion , Feeling

“Noting that architecture can no longer keep up with the world: "The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding. Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.”

Rem Koolhaas (1944) Dutch architect (b.1944)

interview in Iconey http://www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2715:rem-koolhaas--icon-013--june-2004, Icon 013, (June 2004)

World

“We know, deep down, that repression is not the wave of the future. We know that the desire for freedom is not confined to, or owned by, any culture; it is the inborn hope of our humanity. We know that free governments are the only way to ensure that the strong are just and the weak are valued. And we know that when we lose sight of our ideals, it is not democracy that has failed. It is the failure of those charged with preserving and protecting democracy.”

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

2010s, 2017, Speech at "Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In the World" event (2017)

Hope , Way , Democracy , Failure

“The Working Man as yet sought only to know his craft; and educated himself sufficiently by ploughing and hammering, under the conditions given, and in fit relation to the persons given: a course of education, then as now and ever, really opulent in manful culture and instruction to him; teaching him many solid virtues, and most indubitably useful knowledges; developing in him valuable faculties not a few both to do and to endure,—among which the faculty of elaborate grammatical utterance, seeing he had so little of extraordinary to utter, or to learn from spoken or written utterances, was not bargained for; the grammar of Nature, which he learned from his mother, being still amply sufficient for him. This was, as it still is, the grand education of the Working Man. As for the Priest, though his trade was clearly of a reading and speaking nature, he knew also in those veracious times that grammar, if needful, was by no means the one thing needful, or the chief thing. By far the chief thing needful, and indeed the one thing then as now, was, That there should be in him the feeling and the practice of reverence to God and to men; that in his life's core there should dwell, spoken or silent, a ray of pious wisdom fit for illuminating dark human destinies;—not so much that he should possess the art of speech, as that he should have something to speak!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

Life , Wisdom , Men , God

“The most common of all follies,' wrote H. L. Mencken, 'is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.' In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints… and gods.”

Steven Pinker book How the Mind Works

Source: How the Mind Works (1997), p. 554

Death , God , People , Truth

“Union of civilizations and conjugation of cultures and religions is a must which has occurred and will continue to happen in several dimensions. The quality of this union will bring about the fate of our world.”

Elia M. Ramollah (1973) founder and leader of the El Yasin Community

360 Doctrines and Comprehensive Theories, Union of Civilizations

Fate , World , Religion

“The last bastions of resistance to evolutionary theory are organized religion and cultural anthropology.”

Napoleon Chagnon (1938–2019) American anthropologist

How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/napoleon-chagnon-americas-most-controversial-anthropologist.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 by Emily Eakin, The New York Times. February 13, 2013

Religion

“We need to create an enterprise culture, a society where successful entrepreneurs are respected and admired, not treated with suspicion and disdain. And in which we see less envy of other peoples' achievements and mistrust of commerce, and a greater readiness to get out there and join in the process.”

Norman Tebbit (1931) English politician

Speech to the Institute of Directors' Annual Conference (26 February, 1985).

People , Success , Envy

“A reference framework is required in order to locate events in time and space. With some contractions and omissions, Figure 1.1 shows the conventional divisions for the classical and medieval periods. Even before the birth of the idea of nationality, it is quite acceptable to refer to specific countries, such as Greece and Italy, whose boundaries are well defined. It is also usual to refer to areas in which there is felt to have been some degree of cultural unity —— for example, the Roman Empire and Islam. Sometimes space and time are embraced by one image: the Roman Empire can mean either the first four centuries of our era or the area under Roman dominion. Used with care, these concepts have value for some historical purposes, but they can be very misleading. In the first place, we have to bear in mind the shifting of frontiers; in AD 750, for example, the Iberian peninsula was predominantly Muslim while Asia Minor was Christian — by 1450 the reverse was the case. Also, and this can be more serious, the conventional divisions are associated most closely with political and military realities, and often have little bearing on intellectual or social activities.”

Donald Hill (1922–1994) British historian and engineer

A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times, (1985), 1. Introduction.

Idea , Birth , Reality , Time

“The indirect influence of Christianity has been to quicken Hinduism to life. The cultured Hindu society has admitted its grievous sin against the untouchables. But the effect of Christianity upon India in general must be judged by the life lived in our midst by the average Christian and its effect upon us. I am sorry to have to re record my opinion that it has been disastrous. It pains me to have to say that the Christian missionaries as a body, with honourable exceptions, have actively supported a system which has impoverished, enervated and demoralised a people considered to be among the gentlest and most civilized on earth…”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Young India (13 July 1924), reprinted in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume 24, New Delhi, 1967, p. 476.
1920s

Life , Pain , People , Support

“While [European] national cultures were concocted to distinguish one economic unit of capital from another, civilizational thinking was invented to unify these cultures against their colonial consequences. Islamic, Indian, or African civilizations were invented contrapuntally by Orientalism…in order to match, balance and thus authenticate ‘Western Civilization’.”

Hamid Dabashi (1951) American academic

For the Last Time Civilization. http://iss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/3/361

Thinking

“The (racial and cultural) difference is to be celebrated, not fried or criticised, and we are so much richer for it.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Message to cadets at Xavier College in Ba, Fiji, 27 July 2005.

“What is God-given is what we call human nature. To fulfil the law of our human nature is what we call the moral law. The cultivation of the moral law is what we call culture.”

Zisi (-481–-402 BC) Chinese philosopher

Opening lines, p. 104
Variant translations:
What is God-given is called nature; to follow nature is called Tao (the Way); to cultivate the Way is called culture.
As translated by Lin Yutang in The Importance of Living (1937), p. 143
What is God-given is called human nature.
To fulfill that nature is called the moral law (Tao).
The cultivation of the moral law is called culture.
As translated by Lin Yutang in From Pagan to Christian (1959), p. 85
The Doctrine of the Mean

God , Law , Nature

“To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men’s sexual—and hence social—confidence while undermining that of women.”

Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth

Source: The Beauty Myth (1991), Chapter 5 : 'Sex', p. 139

Women , Men , Way , Confidence

“That explains why it is the seer and not the scholar who has all along dominated the scene in Sanãtana Dharma. That explains why it is the saint and not the pandit who has always sat at the centre of Hindu society. That explains why it is the mystic and not the man of letters who has ruled the roost in Hindu culture. The most honoured names in Hindu history, above even those of the heroes, are the names of seers, sages, saints, and mystics - Vyasa, Valmiki, Yajnavalkya, the Buddha, Bhagvan Mahavira, Shankara, Ramanuja, Gorakhnath, Kabir, Nanak, Tulsidas, Mira, Ramakrishna, Raman - to mention only the most notable in a galaxy of great names.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Defence of Hindu Society (1983)

History

“What the BJP government claims to offer, what all scholarly historians want, and what is loathed by the Marxists who have dominated the cultural and educational establishment since decades, is glasnost: openness, an end to the dead hand of Marxist dogma in Indian history-writing. However, it is quite wrong to say that the Sangh Parivar takes this job “very seriously”. It took three years before relieving leading Marxists of their influential positions (Prasar Bharati, NCERT, IHC). Most of its new nominees were not up to the job, some because of ill-health (e. g. K. S. Lal and B. R. Grover, both now deceased), some because they had never functioned in an academic setting. It should not be forgotten that for decades, at least since ca. 1970 when the Marxists led by P. N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan were given a lot of effective power in this sector in return for their support to Indira Gandhi, distinctly non-Marxist young historians found their access to an academic career blocked by the Marxist hegemons. Of the new textbooks, some are impeccable and are welcomed as undeniable improvements, e. g. Meenakshi Jain’s presentation of the Muslim period, arguably the most sensitive and controversial part of the series. Some of the others, by contrast, have been criticized or ridiculed even by fair-minded observers.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, The Problem with Secularism (2007)

Health , Education , History , Support

“I think I’ve always thought of culture as DNA. I don’t know a lot about genetics, but I understand some of it and I think that what you really want are the genes that are positive to hyper-express themselves in culture.”

Marissa Mayer (1975) American business executive and engineer, former ceo of Yahoo!

fortune.com http://fortune.com/2013/10/17/transcript-marissa-mayer-at-fortune-mpw/.

Understanding , Thinking

“The sudden and abrupt deletion of all individuals occupying the lower bands of the Tone Scale from the social order would result in an almost instant rise in the cultural tone and would interrupt the dwindling spiral into which any society may have entered.”

L. Ron Hubbard book Science of Survival

Source: Science of Survival (1951), p. 170.

“But foremost, I do not subscribe to the view that Islamic culture and democracy cannot be reconciled.”

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (1954) 12th President of Turkey from 2014

As quoted in Erdogan: "Democracy in the Middle East, PluralIism in Europe: Turkish View" http://www.turkishweekly.net/article/8/erdogan-democracy-in-the-middle-east-pluraliism-in-europe-turkish-view-.html, The Turkish Weekly (October 12, 2004)

Democracy

“So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tried to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As [Lewis] Hyde… puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage." This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly funny to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing by trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
Essays

Way , Feeling , Time , Country

“Despite the heavy-handed subterfuges of "multiculturalism" and "diversity is our strength," the underlying reality is that within a few generations, any living culture will dissolve into an innocuous and half-remembered "cultural heritage" and the descendants of separate and even intransigent groups will become interchangeable consumers, voters, and employees. If they don't, they'll end up prisoners, and that also suits the empire of nothing.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Pg 32
Becoming A Barbarian (2016)

Reality

“People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture…So, if you want good race relations, you have got to allay peoples' fears on numbers…we do have to hold out the prospect of an end to immigration except, of course, for compassionate cases…We are not in politics to ignore peoples' worries: we are in politics to deal with them.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

TV Interview for Granada World in Action (27 January 1978) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=103485
Leader of the Opposition

People , Fear , Country

“The computer's most profound aesthetic implication is that we are being forced to dismiss the classical view of art and reality which insists that man stand outside of reality in order to observe it, and, in art, requires the presence of the picture frame and the sculpture pedestal. The notion that art can be separated from its everyday environment is a cultural fixation [in other words, a mythic structure] as is the ideal of objectivity in science. It may be that the computer will negate the need for such an illusion by fusing both observer and observed, "inside" and "outside."”

Jack Burnham (1931) American art historian

It has already been observed that the everyday world is rapidly assuming identity with the condition of art.
Jack Burnham (1969). "The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems" in Edward F. Fry, ed. (1970). On the Future of Art. New York: The Viking Press, p. 103; as cited in: Edward A. Shanken. "The House That Jack Built: Jack Burnham's Concept of 'Software' as a Metaphor for Art" http://www.artexetra.com/House.html in Leonardo Electronic Almanac 6:10 (November, 1998)

World , Art , Reality , Science

“Through massive immigration and official dhimmitude from European leaders, Muslims are accomplishing today what they have tried but failed to do for over a millennium: conquer Europe. If current demographic trends continue, France, Holland, and other Western European nations could have Muslim majorities by mid-century. … Europe is now reaping what it has long sown. Bat Ye'or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, chronicles how this has come to pass. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication in pursuit of shortsighted political and economics benefits. She observe that today, "Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important poste-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a 'civilization of dhimmitued,", i. e, Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society withits traditional Judeo-Christian more rapidly disappearing."”

Robert Spencer (1962) American author and blogger

Stealth jihad: how radical Islam is subverting America without guns or bombs, 2008, ISBN 9781596985568, pp. 270-273 http://books.google.com/books?id=3eLfhvNQBkgC&pg=PA270

… France and Germany have pursued a different strategy, attempting to establish the European Union as a global counterweight of the United States—a strategy that involves close cooperation with the Arab League.

Travel

“Cognitivism bridges the chasm between what the writer C. P. Snow has called the "two cultures" — the widening gap between the world view of the scientist and the humanist. The Caltech philosopher W. T. Jones has called this the crisis of contemporary culture.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

New Mindset on Consciousness (1987)

World

“A new large-scale war will end with the destruction of human culture and civilization. Therefore, this this trial must contribute toward preventing such degenerate wars in the future, and toward establishing rules whereby human beings can live together.”

Albert Speer (1905–1981) German architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany

Nuremberg trials, (31 August 1945)

War , Future

“Muslims demand what they call "respect". And this is how we give them respect. Our elites are willing to give in. To give up. In my own country we have gone from calls by one cabinet member to turn Muslim holidays into official state holidays, to statements by another cabinet member, that Islam is part of Dutch culture, to an affirmation by the Christian-Democratic attorney general that he is willing to accept sharia in the Netherlands if there is a Muslim majority. We have cabinet members with passports from Morocco and Turkey. Muslim demands are supported by unlawful behaviour, ranging from petty crimes and random violence, for example against ambulance workers and bus drivers, to small-scale riots. Paris has seen its uprising in the low-income suburbs. … I call the perpetrators "settlers."”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Because that is what they are. They do not come to integrate into our societies, they come to integrate our society into their Dar-al-Islam. Therefore, they are settlers.
2000s, Speech at the Four Seasons, New York (25 September 2008)

Support , Holiday , Parting , Country

“The genocide is a result of a loss of respect and culture. The young people do not respect or listen to their elders - If I am allowed to return, I will encourage intermarriage among the groups so that we can become one people again.”

Kigeli V of Rwanda (1936–2016) Rwandan king

[Alexandria, Barabin, Rwanda King Kigeli V speaks at CSUN, 2005-11-01, California State University-Northridge, http://sundial.csun.edu/2005/11/rwandakingkigelivspeaksatcsun/, Daily Sundial, 2010-03-12]

People , Loss

“To further the appreciation of culture among all the people, to increase respect for the creative individual, to widen participation by all the processes and fulfillments of art — this is one of the fascinating challenges of these days.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

"The Arts in America" in LOOK magazine (18 December 1962), p. 110; also reported in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1962 http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx, p. 907 and inscribed on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C.
1962

People , Art

“I've always believed that any instrumentalist is basically just an accompanist to the singer and the words. That's born out of being a fan of records before I was a fan of guitar players -- I'm interested in melody, lyrics, and the overall song. I don't like to waste notes, not even one. Who was it that said, "The reason why all those guitar players play so many notes is because they can't find the right one"? I like to put the right note in the right place, and my influences have always been those kinds of players. Keith Richards comes to mind, and I really like Nils Lofgren's soloing, because he's so melodic. I love John Lennon's rhythm playing, and George Harrison was an incredible guitarist.
There's a lot of guitar culture that I don't like at all. I find the traditional idea of the guitar hero to be really irrelevant to the 1990s. I don't think that young people are that impressed with some guy brandishing Spandex trousers and a hideously shaped guitar, playing that kind of masturbatory, egotistical noise. Being a soloist who wants to just display virtuosity is a dated philosophy, and I don't think there's any room for it in pop music. It's the last stand of late-'60s/early-'70s rockism, and it should have gone a long time ago.”

Johnny Marr (1963) musician

from an interview by Joe Gore, Guitar Player(January 1990).

Love , People , Music , Guy

“People can go to the extreme like what we saw during the Cultural Revolution. For instance, in China, when people take everything into their own hands, then you cannot govern the place. … [It] was the people taking power into their own hands. Now that is what you mean by democracy if you take it to the full swing.”

Donald Tsang (1944) Hong Kong politician

As quoted in "HK's Tsang apologises for gaffe" at BBC News (13 October 2007) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7042941.stm
Variant transcription or translation:
If you go to the extreme you have the cultural revolution for instance in China. Then people take everything into their hands, then you cannot govern the place. … It was people taking power into their own hands. This is what we mean by democracy.
As quoted in "Hong Kong leader apologises for democracy gaffe" at AFP (14 October 2007) http://web.archive.org/web/20070609092458/http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5h_ytPeUlA7mXw3eMQ6WHSo_emsLw

People , Democracy

“Gloria Estefan was a huge influence for me. Of course, she was one of the few Latina women around who had this major international success. She sang in Spanish and English, and she was very much the sort of woman I recognised from my culture. I go to her home, and I think that she is a woman who has got it just right. She has her music, she has her family, she has her relationship. I admire her so much because she has always put her family before everything. All her priorities are in place and she is still an amazingly creative artist.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

comment by "close friend" Jennifer Lopez, arts.guardian.co.uk (March 30, 2007)
2007, 2008

Women , Family , Music , Home

“This article aims at proposing some elements for a grounded theory of the network society. The network society is the social structure characteristic of the Information Age, as tentatively identified by empirical, cross-cultural investigation. It permeates most societies in the world, in various cultural and institutional manifestations, as the industrial society characterized the social structure of both capitalism and statism for most of the twentieth century.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society (2000), p. 5

Age , World

“Strength of our culture to some extent has compensated the lack of formal education. That is how people could vote wisely in these massive elections. After all, it was the ordinary, illiterate people who exercised the votes in the general elections we have had. And they seem to have voted with sufficient knowledge of affairs, of their interests, and this is remarkable indeed. But that is no substitute for education, and we have to have a full formal education for all our people and what I find sad is that it is an eminently practicable thing to do; in a matter of 5 years, India could be made literate.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

People , Education , Sadness , Exercises

“Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age we're living in... All cultures have had means and techniques of expressing their immediate aims – the Chinese, the Renaissance, all cultures. The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source, they work from within.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Source: 1950's, Interview by William Wright, Summer 1950, p. 140

Age , Art

“Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Anagogic Phase: Symbol as Monad

Religion , Understanding

“It is not fair to accuse the Arabic language of being old-fashioned and static as if it were independent from what we mean and do, or unaffected by the outcome of our deeds. It is our language, and we are ultimately responsible for its static condition. It is our duty to restore it to its glory so that it can return to what it used to be hundreds of years ago – the language of science and literature, a language of building bridges to other civilizations, a language that affected others through its scientific and cultural achievements, pushing them to learn it.”

Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned (1958) wife of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani

Speech in Doha; quoted on official website http://www.mozabintnasser.qa/en/Pages/ArticlePreview.aspx?ArticleGuid=ed017dde-d770-42a3-80e7-441a15d0a89f&Type=Speech (May 31 2012)

Literature , Fashion , Learning , Science

“There is a right and legitimate Pan-Islamism to which every sincere and believing Mahomedan belongs--that is, the theory of the spiritual brotherhood and unity of the children of the Prophet. It is a deep, perennial element in that Perso-Arabian culture, that great family of civilisation to which we gave the name Islamic in the first chapter. It connotes charity and goodwill towards fellow-believers everywhere…It means an abiding interest in the literature of Islam, in her beautiful arts, in her lovely architecture, in her entrancing poetry. It also means a true reformation -- a return to the early and pure simplicity of the faith, to its preaching by persuasion and argument, to the manifestation of a spiritual power in individual lives, to beneficent activity for mankind. This natural and worthy spiritual movement makes not only the Master and His teaching but also His children of all climes an object of affection to the Turk or the Afghan, to the Indian or the Egyptian. A famine or a desolating fire in the Moslem quarters of Kashgar or Sarajevo would immediately draw the sympathy and material assistance of the Mahomedan of Delhi or Cairo. The real spiritual and cultural unity of Islam must ever grow, for to the follower of the Prophet it is the foundation of the life of the soul.”

Aga Khan III (1877–1957) 48th Imam of the Nizari Ismaili community

p. 156; a variant of this begins "This is a right and legitimate Pan-Islamism…", but is otherwise identical.
/ India in Transition (1918)

Family , Soul , Beauty , Children

“As we shall see in this book's chapters, traditional societies are far more diverse in many of their cultural practices than are modern industrial societies. […] Yet psychologists base most of their generalizations about human nature on studies of our own narrow and atypical slice of human diversity. […] That is, as social scientists Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan express it, most of our understanding of human psychology is based on subjects who may be described by the acronym WEIRD: from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. […] Hence if we wish to generalize about human nature, we need to broaden greatly our study sample from the usual WEIRD subjects […] to the whole range of traditional societies.”

Jared Diamond book The World Until Yesterday

Prologue, section "Why study traditional societies?"
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012)

Books , Education , Understanding , Nature

“We were a tiny redoubt of culture holding our own against the neighboring Huns of organized sports. I pretended to join the group disdain, but I knew in my heart it was already too late. After the two innings I had watched before leaving the house, baseball had reclaimed me. …Forty years is a long time to hold your breath, but I was back.”

Andrea Lewis (writer) Microsoft employee

" Forty Years http://www.slowtrains.com/vol7issue3/lewisvol7issue3.html" Slow Trains Vol.7, Issue 3 (2008)
2000-09

Sport , Time , Heart , Housing

“The battles of this century … are less likely to be the product of extreme political ideology—like those of the 20th century—but they could easily be fought around the questions of cultural or religious difference.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

As attributed without citation in Awake! magazine (anonymous), January 2015 http://www.jw.org/en/publications/magazines/g201501/watching-the-world-religion/
2010s

Question

“What I have discovered in 20 years of studying the universe, from here to there to everywhere, is that the universe is complicated, and when things happen, it is almost never like ‘A happened and therefore B’. No, A happened and therefore B, C, D and E, but then there is this thing F, and that had a 10% effect, and that prompted G to go back and tip over A, and it is always like this – everything is interconnected. And so a lot of these far-right fundamentalist religion people, and a lot of these people who are anti-global warming, anti-evolution, anti-science, what they do is they take advantage of the fact that things are complicated, and their lives are based on things being simple – if we do this, then this will happen – if we invade Iraq, we will be treated as liberators, if we pray, then good things will happen, and this stuff is wrong. But we have a culture where people are brought up to believe in simplicity, and if A then B. And so when you point out that scientists say the earth is warming, but we had a really devastating winter this year, then these people will say “oh, obviously global warming is wrong.””

Philip Plait (1964) astronomer, skeptic

No, global warming can cause worse winters locally. It’s complicated. But people don’t want to hear “it’s complicated”, and boy, the conspiracy theorists and anti-scientists take full advantage of that.
Skepticality http://www.skepticality.com/index.php ep. 52 http://www.skepticality.com/notes/sn_Ep52.php (15 May 2007) 23:11 - 24:46
Interviews

People , Religion , Boy , Study