Quotes about culture
page 6

“I hesitate to talk about Czech food. […] The people are very sweet, wonderfully cultured, very friendly, but my God how they eat that food I do not know. It is surely the most disgusting cuisine in the world.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: Using words to paint pictures of "magical" Prague (2006)

God, People, World, Food

“The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters. Trump operates not by strategy, but by instinct. His great skill is to sniff his opponents' vulnerabilities: "low energy", "little", "crooked", "fake". In the same way, Trump has intuited the weak points in the American political system and in American political culture. Trump gambled that Americans resent each other's differences more than they cherish their shared democracy. So far, that gamble has paid off.”

David Frum (1960) American political commentator

Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (2018)

Fear, Law, Way, Democracy

“Naturally, when considering the whole issue of who will live in Europe, one could argue that this problem will be solved by successful integration. The reality, however, is that we’re not aware of any examples of successful integration… In countering arguments for successful integration, we must also point out that if people with diverging goals find themselves in the same system or country, it won’t lead to integration, but to chaos. It’s obvious that the culture of migrants contrasts dramatically with European culture. Opposing ideologies and values cannot be simultaneously upheld, as they are mutually exclusive. To give you the most obvious example, the European people think it desirable for men and women to be equal, while for the Muslim community this idea is unacceptable, as in their culture the relationship between men and women is seen in terms of a hierarchical order. These two concepts cannot be upheld at the same time. It’s only a question of time before one or the other prevails. Of course one could also argue that communities coming to us from different cultures can be re-educated. But we must see – and Bishop Tőkés also spoke about this – that now the Muslim communities coming to Europe see their own culture, their own faith, their own lifestyles and their own principles as stronger and more valuable than ours. So, whether we like it or not, in terms of respect for life, optimism, commitment, the subordination of individual interests and ideals, today Muslim communities are stronger than Christian communities. Why would anyone want to adopt a culture that appears to be weaker than their own strong culture? They won’t, and they never will! Therefore re-education and integration based on re-education cannot succeed.”

Viktor Orbán (1963) Hungarian politician, chairman of Fidesz

Life, Women, Men, People

“We all have that heritage, no matter what old land our fathers left. All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It's a breed — selected out by accident. And so we're overbrave and overfearful — we're kind and cruel as children. We're overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We're oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic — and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture. Can it be that our critics have not the key or the language of our culture? That's what we are, Cal — all of us. You aren't very different.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

East of Eden (1952)

Children, Color, Sense, Time

“For the first time, we saw everything they could bring to the battle. And it was… nothing. Not even a fizzle. All they can say is "thief, we have our rights, we want our rights, nothing must change, we want more money, thief, thief, thief". And shove some poor artists in front of them to deliver the message. Whereas we are talking about scarcity vs. abundance, monopolies, the nature of property, 500-year historical perspectives on culture and knowledge, incentive structures, economic theory, disruptive technologies, etc. The difference in intellectual levels between the sides is astounding.”

Rickard Falkvinge (1972) former head of the Swedish Pirate Party

P2P Consortium Interview http://www.p2pconsortium.com/index.php?showtopic=15274 (January 12, 2008)

Money, Nature, Knowledge, Change

“Crime is valuable feedback about what childhood in a society means, about its education, economics and culture—about whether this is a society that works or not.”

David Fleming (1940–2010) British activist

Lean Logic, (2016), p. 276, entry on Lean Law and Order http://www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/lean-logic-surviving-the-future/

Education, Childhood

“John Cage, composer, painter, and all-round thinker and cultural catalyst, said that if you introduce twenty percent of novelty into any artwork, watch out -- you are going to lose eighty percent of your audience at once. He said you would lose them for fifteen years. Cage was interested in fifteen-year cycles. But he was hopelessly optimistic. The general appreciation, for example, of Western painting has got stuck around Impressionism, and that was 130 years ago, not fifteen years ago.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

"105 Years of Illustrated Text" in the Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 5 No. 1.
105 Years of Illustrated Text

Painting

“The default designation of poetry has become written poetry. That's why we have to prefix the adjective "oral," because the unmodified noun no longer covers anything but written poetry. That's also why we resort to other unwieldy phrases to pigeonhole events and phenomena that our cultural proclivities have silently eliminated from consideration. Thus a "poetry reading" describes a performance (from a published text, of course) before a well-behaved, often academic audience. Thus "spoken-word poetry"—so redundant from a historical perspective—identifies voiced verbal art, verse that is lifted off the page and into the world of presence and experience.”

John Miles Foley (1947–2012) American literary scholar

How to Read an Oral Poem (2002), p. 30

World, Art, Reading

“It worries me because it alters perception. TV, and the culture it anchors, and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided.”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

Source: The Age of Missing Information (1992), p. 22

World

“…the jeaned and rucksacked young I see on Continental trains or thumbing rides on motorways are not in search of the exotic. They are seeking confirmation that their own kind exists everywhere and denies the racial and cultural variety that used to be one of the joys of the world. If they want the exotic at all it is in the form of what they know well in their own lands through regular, though usually illegal, importation….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

World, Search, Joy, Training

“Britishness…is a political synonym for Englishness which extends English culture over the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish.”

Gwynfor Evans (1912–2005) Welsh politician

Source: https://archive.is/20120730080319/www.bbc.co.uk/wales/southeast/halloffame/public_life/gwynfor_evans.shtml BBC Wales

https://www.diliname.eu/index.php/wales/item/47-the-end-of-britishness.html The end of Britishness: a synopsis by the Welsh Nationalism Foundation of an address by Evans to a Rally held in Port Talbot on Saturday, 4 October 1980.

“A culture is like the upright strands that you begin with in basket-making, round which you wind the texture of the basket itself: no sticks, no basket; no culture, no community. It is the grammar, the story, humour and good faith that identifies a community and gives it existence. It is both the parent and child of social capital. And the social capital of a community is its social life – the links of cooperation and friendship between its members. It is the common culture and ceremony, the good faith and reciprocal obligations the civility and citizenship, the play, humour and conversation which make a living community, the cooperation that builds its institutions. It is the social ecosystem in which a culture lives.”

David Fleming (1940–2010) British activist

Lean Logic, (2016), p. xxi, introduction http://www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/lean-logic-surviving-the-future/

Life, Friendship, Faith, Communication

“The most influential specific postmodern approach has been Jacques Derrida's, known since the 60's as deconstruction. Postmodernism is philosophy means above all the writings of Derrida, and this earliest and most extreme outlook has found a resonance well beyond philosophy, in the popular culture and its mores.”

John Zerzan book Future Primitive and Other Essays

The Catastrophe of Postmodenity
Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994)

“Poetry is a blossom of very delicate growth, it requires the maturing influence of vernal suns and every encouragement of culture and attention to bring it to its natural perfection.”

Henry Kirke White (1785–1806) English poet

Melancholy Hours

Nature, Sun, Perfection

“A change of world view not only brings about profound cultural changes, but also is responsible for what historians call a "change of age." An age is a period of time in which the prevailing world view has remained relatively unchanged.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1990s, Re-Creating the Corporation (1999), p. 4.

Age, World, Change, Time

“[I]t pretends to examine how self-absorbed we are as a culture, only to be consumed by its own self-absorption. It's also badly constructed, humorless and emotionally sadistic.”

Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic

Review http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/01/18/cloverfield/ of Cloverfield (2008)

“The classical legacies of political thought, from Plato to Nietzsche, and the immediate tasks of running the world, at home and abroad, have been of most concern to the Right. Normative philosophical constructions have become a specialty of the Centre. Economic, social and cultural investigations – of past and present – dominate the output of the Left. Any attempt to come to grips with all three outlooks is thus obliged to traverse quite variegated ground.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Source: Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Foreword, p. xiii

World, Home, Past

“In the field of science fiction or fantasy, morality—when it enters a book at all—is almost always either thoughtlessly liberal (you can’t judge other cultures) or thoughtlessly illiberal (strong men must rule) or just plain thoughtless”

Joanna Russ (1937–2011) American author

killing people is bad
"Books" (review column), The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1968
Non-fiction

Men, People, Books, Strong

“They call us thieves and bandits. They say we steal. But it was not we who stole millions of Black people from the continent of Africa. We were robbed of our language, of our Gods, of our culture, of our human dignity, of our labor, and of our lives. They call us thieves, yet it is not.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

To My People (July 4, 1973)

God, People

“What picture of American society is likely to be imprinted on the consciousness of average Europeans? Given what they read or hear every day from intellectuals and politicians, they can hardly have any choice in the unpleasant particulars, especially if they happen to be French. The picture repeatedly sketched for them is as follows: American society is entirely ruled by money. No other value, whether familial, moral, religious, civic, cultural, professional, or ethical has any potency in itself. Everything in America is a commodity, regarded and used exclusively for its material value. A person is judged solely by the worth of his bank account. Every U. S. President has been in the pockets of the oil companies, the military-industrial complex, the agricultural lobby, or the financial manipulators of Wall Street. America is the "jungle" par excellence of out-of-control, "savage" capitalism, where the rich are always becoming richer and fewer, while the poor are becoming poorer and more numerous. Poverty is the dominant social reality in America. Hordes of famished indigents are everywhere, while luxurious chauffeured limousines with darkened windows glide through the urban wilderness.”

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

2000s, Europe's Anti-American Obsession (2003)

Money, Family, Reality, Reading

“The spirit of our National Socialist idea has to overpower the spirit of liberalism and false democracy if there is to be a third Reich at all! Deeply rooted in organic life, we have realized that the false belief in the equality of man is the deadly threat with which liberalism destroys people and nation, culture and morals. violating the deepest levels of our being! We have to reject with fanatical zeal the frequent lie that people are basically equal and equal in regard to their influence in the state and their share of power! People are unequal, they are unequal from birth, become more unequal in life and are therefore to be valued unequally in their positions in society and in the state!”

Gregor Strasser (1892–1934) German politician, rival of Adolf Hitler inside the Nazi Psrty

Source: " Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future https://books.google.com/books?id=fG_oAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA87", by Gregor Strasser - (1926 June 15)

Life, People, Lie, Democracy

“We can begin, like the Scholastic masters, with an objection: videtur quod non … ""It seems not to be true that…"" And this is the objection: a time like the present [i. e., a few years after the Second World War, in Germany] seems, of all times, not to be a time to speak of leisure. […]
That is no small objection. But there is also a good answer to it. […]
For, when we consider the foundations of Western European culture (is it, perhaps, too rash to assume that our re-building will in fact be carried out in a ""Western"" spirit? Indeed, this and no other is the very assumption that is at issue today), one of these foundations is leisure. We can read it in the first chapter of Aristotle's Metaphysics. And the very history of the meaning of the word bears a similar message. The Greek word for leisure (σχολή) is the origin of Latin scola, German Schule, English school. The names for the institutions of education and learning mean ""leisure.""”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), Leisure, the Basis of Culture, pp. 3–4

War, World, Education, School

“His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.”

Orson Scott Card book Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996)

Life, Time

“Perhaps I was too dumb, or just too interested in cricket or in girls, to ask myself any questions about religion. If I had not been, I might have, inevitably, asked myself questions that have troubled skeptics and unbelievers for as long as men and women have been skeptical or have lacked belief. "Is there really no God? And if there really is no supernatural dimension to the universe, why have so many people throughout history and in so many different cultures thought there was?"”

Jonathan Miller (1934–2019) British theatre director (born 1934)

Episode one: "Shadows of Doubt".
Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief (2004)

Women, Men, God, People

““Do you actually hope to convert the whole of mankind?”
“Belay that! Anyhow, if you mean, Do we hope to make everybody into copies of us? The answer is, No. Mind, I’m not in Parliament or Admiralty, but I follow debates and I read the philosophers. One trouble with the old machine culture was that, by its nature, it did force people to become more and more alike. Not only did this fail in the end—disastrously—but to the extent it succeeded, it was a worse disaster.” Lohannaso smote the rail with a mighty fist. “Damnation, Thomas! We need all the diversity, all the assorted ways of living and looking and thinking, we can get!””

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 11 (p. 119)

People, Hope, Way, Nature

“Racism is one of the biggest taboos in our culture, yet most discrimination against Asian-Americans goes largely unnoticed…its blown off by the rest of the media as a joke, as in "Look at them. They get all up in arms over nothing."”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, INVISIBILITY

“I have said this on many a previous occasion: that had the mix in Singapore been different, had it been 75% Indians, 15% Malays and the rest Chinese, it would not have worked. Because they believe in the politics of contention, of opposition. But because the culture was such that the populace sought a practical way out of their difficulties, therefore it has worked.”

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

[President's Address, Debate on President's Address, Parliament of Singapore, http://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/topic.jsp?currentTopicID=00062986-ZZ&currentPubID=00069476-ZZ&topicKey=00069476-ZZ.00062986-ZZ_1%2Bid005_19850301_S0005_T00051-president-address%2B, March 01 1985, January 16 2015]
1980s

Way

“I don't think it is wrong, racist, immoral or anything, for a country to say 'we will decide what the cultural identity and the cultural destiny of this country will be and nobody else.”

John Howard (1939) 25th Prime Minister of Australia

Quoted in "Howard reasserts right to decide cultural identity," The Age, 20 September 1988.

Thinking, Country

“It was Plato who determined once and for all the cultural meaning of imitation, but this meaning is truncated, torn from the essential dimension of acquisitive behavior, which is also the dimension of conflict. If the behavior of certain higher animals, particularly the apes, seems to foreshadow human behavior, it does so almost exclusively, perhaps, because the role of acquisitive mimesis is so important in their behavior, although it is not as central as it is for the human being. If one ape observes another reach for an object, it is immediately tempted to imitate the gesture. It also happens that the animal visibly resists the temptation, and if the imitative gesture amuses us by reminding us of human beings, the failure to complete it, that is to say the repression of what already can be nearly defined as a desire, amuses us even more. It makes the animal a sort of brother to us by showing it subject to the same fundamental rule as humanity—that of preventing conflict, which the convergence of two or several avid hands toward one and the same object cannot help but provoke.”

René Girard book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Source: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), p. 4.

Behavior, Failure, Help, Animals

“One area which shows how unknowingly predictable we are, is the way we decorate our houses. We all feel we make unique and distinct choices, yet we all conform to a cultural standard.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Way, Feeling, Housing

“No reputable theologian, or rational believer for that matter, adheres strictly to Biblical morality. As everyone knows, believers pick and choose their morality from a smorgasbord of divine commands, both good and bad, in scripture. And doing that shows that you have a sense of right and wrong that doesn’t come from the Bible or God. Ergo, it comes from evolution and culture.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" Where does morality come from? A demonstration with monkeys http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/where-does-morality-come-from-a-demonstration-with-monkeys/" August 7, 2012

God, Sense

“As a young man, I was more a white liberal than I ever tried to put on black. For all that, I ended up a “minority,” the beneficiary of affirmative action programs to redress black exclusion. And, harder to say, my brown advantage became a kind of embarrassment. For I never had an adversarial relationship to American culture. I was never at war with the tongue. Brown was no longer invisible by the time I got to college. In the white appraisal, brown skin became a coat of disadvantage, which was my advantage. Acknowledgment came at a price, then as now. (Three decades later, the price of being a published brown author is that one cannot be shelved near those one has loved. The price is segregation.) I remain at best ambivalent about those Hispanic anthologies where I end up; about those anthologies where I end up the Hispanic; about shelves at the bookstore where I look for myself and find myself. The fact that my books are published at all is the result of the slaphappy strategy of the northern black Civil Rights movement.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Love, War, Books, Time

“If Veblen failed to develop an evolutionary methodology, he also failed to develop a comprehensive evolutionary theory to explain in detail how institutions evolve in the cultural environment and what sorts of interaction occur between economic activity and institutional structures. Veblen was something of an intellectual butterfly, and he often lacked the patience to elaborate his ideas into a coherent system. But he teemed with fragmentary insights, and these can be pieced together to suggest the outlines of a Veblenian scheme of cultural evolution - what might be called a ‘pre-theory’ of cultural change.”

Cynthia Eagle Russett (1937–2013) American historian

Source: Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response 1865/1912, 1976, p. 153; As cited in Geoffrey M. Hodgson, "Veblen and darwinism." International review of sociology 14.3 (2004). p. 357

Idea, Change, Patience

“For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

Wired 2.02: In the Kindom of Mao Bell http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.02/mao.bell.html?pg=2&topic=&topic_set=

““Useful! You want to talk about useful? Have you ever read anything about politics? Economics? You know what keeps a culture alive?”
“Yes,” said Ernest sullenly, while M. Gargotier cleaned up the mess. “People not bothering other people.””

George Alec Effinger (1947–2002) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Relatives (1973)., Chapter 8 (p. 135).

People, Reading

“The leaders of the United States have not only permitted that but assiduously promoted the diversity rather than the unity of the people they govern.
The leaders of other countries have, as we have seen, at times attempted to disavow their cultural heritage and shift the identity of their country from one civilization to another. In no case to date have they succeeded and they have instead created schizophrenic torn countries. The American multiculturalists similarly reject their country’s cultural heritage. Instead of attempting to identify the United States with another civilization, however, they wish to create a country of many civilizations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society. A multicivilizational United States will not be the United States; it will be the United Nations.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 12 : The West, Civilizations, and Civilization, § 1 : The Renewal Of The West?, p. 306

People, History, Time, Country

“The institution of caste illustrates the spirit of comprehensive synthesis characteristic of the Hindu mind with its faith in the collaboration of races and the co-operation of cultures. Paradoxical as it may seem, the system of caste is the outcome of tolerance and trust.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Faith

“The [George W. ] Bush administration and the conservatives must stop promoting American popular culture because it is producing a blowback of Muslim rage. With a few exceptions, the right should not bother to defend American movies, music, and television. From the point of view of traditional values, they are indefensible. Moreover, why should the right stand up for the left's debased values? Why should our people defend their America? Rather, American conservatives should join the Muslims and others in condemning the global moral degeneracy that is produced by liberal values.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Introduction, p. 26
Books, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left And its Responsibility for 9, 11 (2007)

People, Music, Rage

“One Western author who has become very popular among India’s history-writers is the American scholar Prof. Richard M. Eaton…. A selective reading of his work, focusing on his explanations but keeping most of his facts out of view, is made to serve the negationist position regarding temple destruction in the name of Islam. Yet, the numerically most important body of data presented by him concurs neatly with the classic (now dubbed “Hindutva”) account. In his oft-quoted paper “Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states”, he gives a list of “eighty” cases of Islamic temple destruction. "Only eighty", is how the secularist history-rewriters render it, but Eaton makes no claim that his list is exhaustive. Moreover, eighty isn't always eighty. Thus, in his list, we find mentioned as one instance: "1994: Benares, Ghurid army. Did the Ghurid army work one instance of temple destruction? Eaton provides his source, and there we read that in Benares, the Ghurid royal army "destroyed nearly one thousand temples, and raised mosques on their foundations. (Note that unlike Sita Ram Goel, Richard Eaton is not chided by the likes of Sanjay Subramaniam for using Elliott and Dowson's "colonialist translation.") This way, practically every one of the instances cited by Eaton must be read as actually ten, or a hundred, or as in this case even a thousand temples destroyed. Even Eaton's non-exhaustive list, presented as part of "the kind of responsible and constructive discussion that this controversial topic so badly needs", yields the same thousands of temple destructions ascribed to the Islamic rulers in most relevant pre-1989 histories of Islam and in pro-Hindu publications…. If the “eighty” (meaning thousands of) cases of Islamic iconoclasm are only a trifle, the “abounding” instances of Hindu iconoclasm, “thoroughly integrated” in Hindu political culture, can reasonably be expected to number tens of thousands. Yet, Eaton’s list, given without reference to primary sources, contains, even in a maximalist reading (i. e., counting “two” when one king takes away two idols from one enemy’s royal temple), only 18 individual cases…. In this list, cases of actual destruction amount to exactly two…”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple (2002)

Way, Quotes, History, Reading

“Culture is worth a little risk.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

As quoted in "The Poetic License to Kill" by Lance Morrow, in TIME magazine (1 February 1982) http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,955021,00.html

“Rather than pursuing our calling to present a vision of a world filled with God's power and love, the contemporary church merely presents the world as a two-dimensional facsimile of the consumer culture, albeit with a Jesus fish imprint.”

Skye Jethani

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

Love, God, World, Fish

“One always feels that a merely educated man holds his philosophical views as if they were so many pennies in his pocket. They are separate from his life. Whereas with a cultured man there is no gap or lacuna between his opinions and his life. Both are dominated by the same organic, inevitable fatality. They are what he is.”

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) British writer, lecturer and philosopher

Source: The Meaning of Culture (1929), p. 19

Life, Education, Feeling

“Culture produces relative consciousness of the changeable expression of reality. When this consciousness is attained, a revolt takes place: the beginning of the deliverance from that expression of reality. Destruction of its limitation follows. The culture of the intuitive faculties has conquered. A clearer perception of constant reality is possible. A new realism appears.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Source: 1940's, A New Realism', 1943-1945, p. 18

Reality, Appearance

“The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men, whether they are our sons or not; that we are all trained to force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

Speech at Queens College, City University of New York (March 12, 1975). "The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage", ch. 5, Our Blood (1976).

Women, Men, Training

“It might be crazy to expect a high government official to speak the truth. It might be crazy to believe that government policy will be something more than the handmaiden of the most powerful interests. It might be crazy to argue that we should preserve a tradition that has been part of our tradition for most of our history — free culture.
If this is crazy, then let there be more crazies. Soon.”

Lawrence Lessig book Free Culture

Free Culture (2004)

Truth, History, Parting

“You are no doubt aware that the Almighty, desiring to lead us to perfection and to improve our state of society, has revealed to us laws which are to regulate our actions. These laws, however, presuppose an advanced state of intellectual culture. We must first form a conception of the Existence of the Creator according to our capabilities; that is, we must have a knowledge of Metaphysics. But this discipline can only be approached after the study of Physics: for the science of Physics borders on Metaphysics, and must even precede it in the course of our studies, as is clear to all who are familiar with these questions.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Introduction

Law, Question, Knowledge, Study

“As human beings living in this monstrously ugly world, let us ask ourselves, can this society, based on competition, brutality and fear, come to an end? Not as an intellectual conception, not as a hope, but as an actual fact, so that the mind is made fresh, new and innocent and can bring about a different world altogether? It can only happen, I think, if each one of us recognises the central fact that we, as individuals, as human beings, in whatever part of the world we happen to live or whatever culture we happen to belong to, are totally responsible for the whole state of the world.
We are each one of us responsible for every war because of the aggressiveness of our own lives, because of our nationalism, our selfishness, our gods, our prejudices, our ideals, all of which divide us.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1960s, (1969)

God, War, World, Fear

“The freedom of improvising over a bass line disappeared from music only in the 19th century, and we're still paying for it. There's a culture among classical musicians of being passive, and it stems from following the notes, rather than one's own instincts.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

The Times, 15/12/1998
On Classical Music

Music, Freedom

“While [Montreal] it is a French-speaking city – largely – it has an enormous English-speaking minority and a large number of what are called ethnics: they who are largely immigrant communities, but who politically and culturally tend to identify with the English community.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

1990s, Speech to the Council for National Policy (1997)

Communication

“The fundamental values of a true community are elsewhere: in love, poetry, disinterested thought, the free use of the imagination, the pursuit of non-utilitarian activities, the production of non-profitmaking goods, the employment of non-consumable wealth - here are the sustaining values of a living culture.”

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

Faith for Living (1940)

Love, Imagination, Communication, Wealth

“The multicultural lobby has little respect for the history of Australia between 1788 and 1950. In the eyes of multicultural supporters, Australia was a desert between 1788 and 1950 because it was populated largely by people from the British Isles and because it seemed to have a cultural unity, a homogeneity which is the very antithesis of multiculturalism.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

Eye on Australia: Speeches and Essays of Geoffrey Blainey (1991)

People, History, Support

“Karl Marx was born at Trier on 5 May 1818, the child of Jewish parents with a long rabbinical tradition on both sides. His grandfathers were rabbis; his father, a well-to-do lawyer, changed his first name from Herschel to Heinrich and adopted Protestantism, which in Prussia was a necessary condition of professional and cultural emancipation.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 96
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume I, The Founders

Parent, Change

“According to a stagist conception of progressive history (which is usually blind to its implicit teleology), the work of figures like Foucault, Derrida and other cutting-edge French theorists is often intuitively affiliated with a form of profound and sophisticated critique that presumably far surpasses anything found in the socialist, Marxist or anarchist traditions. It is certainly true and merits emphasis that the Anglophone reception of French theory, as John McCumber has aptly pointed out, had important political implications as a pole of resistance to the false political neutrality, the safe technicalities of logic and language, or the direct ideological conformism operative in the McCarthy-supported traditions of Anglo-American philosophy. However, the theoretical practices of figures who turned their back on what Cornelius Castoriadis called the tradition of radical critique—meaning anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist resistance—surely contributed to the ideological drift away from transformative politics. According to the spy agency itself, post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, thereby creating an intellectual environment in which their imperial projects could be pursued unhindered by serious critical scrutiny from the intelligentsia.”

Gabriel Rockhill (1972) philosopher

"The CIA reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left" (2017)

History, Support, Falseness

“Our culture is biased against quiet and reserved people, but introverts are responsible for some of humanity's greatest achievements.”

Susan Cain (1968) self-help writer

"Introverts run the world -- quietly," CNN.com, March 18, 2012.

People

“Democracy is not enough. If the culture dies, the country dies.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

Source: 2000s, State of Emergency (2006)

Democracy, Country

“The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call the Philistines. Culture says: “Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?””

Matthew Arnold book Culture and Anarchy

Source: Culture and Anarchy (1869), Ch. I, Sweetness and Light

Life, People, Pleasure, Way

“I had different views in the '70s. As a human being, I've learned… I have more culture now. I was dumb as a rock when I wrote 'Okie from Muskogee'. That's being honest with you at the moment, and a lot of things that I said … I sing with a different intention now. My views on marijuana have totally changed. I think we were brainwashed and I think anybody that doesn't know that needs to get up and read and look around, get their own information. It's a cooperative government project to make us think marijuana should be outlawed.”

Merle Haggard (1937–2016) American country music song writer, singer and musician

As quoted in "Merle Haggard - Branded man", in No Depression magazine (31 October 2003) http://nodepression.com/article/merle-haggard-branded-man

Thinking, Learning, Change, Singing

“I have been outflanked by the culture. I am now seen as a drawling Oxonian, and a genetic elitist, who took over the family firm. People subconsciously think that I was born in 1922, wrote Lucky Jim when I was 7, and will live for at least a century. This feels odd to me, because my father was a "angry young man" and helped democratize the British novel. I'm not a toff. I'm a yob.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"Off the Page: Martin Amis" (2003)

People, Family, Feeling, Thinking

“If the miser reaches the point of sacrificing his health, his pleasures, and even his very honesty for the love of his money, shall we not succeed in learning to love so noble an aim as intellectual work sufficiently to make us sacrifice our laziness for a few hours every day? … Should not our young people therefore spend at least five hours a day at their work-table in order to assure for themselves, both now and in the future, the manifold joys of intellectual culture?”

Jules Payot (1859–1940) French educationist

Source: The Education of the Will (1920), p. 110

Love, Money, People, Health

“I've always been kind of obsessed with Frida Kahlo, so I was really into the idea of getting something that belonged to her. And then from Frida Kahlo I found out about Tina Modotti and then I started collecting her stuff and Edward Weston, and one person always leads to another person with me, because for me it started with Diego Rivera, then it went to Frida Kahlo, then it went to Tina, and Edward and… Also, if you're into Picasso, and you want to find out about him and that whole area of art and European culture, then you start reading about Man Ray and the surrealists and Andre Breton, and all of a sudden you're in that whole world and you start having interests in other people. It's like a disease.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Aperture Magazine 1999 http://allaboutmadonna.com/madonna-interviews-articles/aperture-magazine-summer-1999

People, World, Disease, Art

“History presents a series of cultural epochs. Each is a span of years within which knowledge presents a more or less unified structure which can be expressed in a classification, but each new epoch requires a new classification.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Other Chapters, p. 147 Cited in: Madeline M. Henderson (1966) Cooperation, convertibility, and compatibility among information systems: a literature review. p. 72.

History, Knowledge

“I've told a dark story. The truth is more mixed. A technology has given us a new freedom. Slowly, some begin to understand that this freedom need not mean anarchy. We can carry a free culture into the twenty-first century, without artists losing and without the potential of digital technology being destroyed. … Common sense must revolt. It must act to free culture. Soon, if this potential is ever to be realized.”

Lawrence Lessig book Free Culture

Free Culture (2004)

Truth, Understanding, Sense, Freedom

“Large number of tribes, Dalits and Backward Castes have a historical food culture of beef. The anti-beef agenda has been in the Brahmanical fold. It began with the South Indian Brahmins and then spread to the North and became part of the Gandhian movement. My question is, how can the state impose a certain food culture on people? The state has nothing to do with food. They can give certain food to people depending on the market, but cannot impose that you can or cannot eat certain food items. If beef eating is bad for Brahmins or Baniyas or certain upper castes, then the state is imposing that on the rest of the society. So the state is actually becoming a theocratic state.”

Kancha Ilaiah (1952) Indian scholar, activist and writer

Quoted in DNA India (04 March 2015) http://www.dnaindia.com/india/interview-maharashtra-s-beef-ban-is-not-merely-communal-it-is-theocratic-kancha-ilaiah-2066223.

People, Food, Question, Parting

“The Persian aggression against Iraq was a result of the arrogant, racialist and evil attitudes of the ruling clique in Iran. At the same time, it was a Zionist and imperialist conspiracy aimed at liquidating Iraq's revival and checking its development for decades. It tried to strip you of your shining mind and heart, in the same way as it tried to destroy the scientific, cultural and technical bases of your new revival. But you, with courage, patience and efficiency — thanks to the Revolution's achievements — have been able to meet a challenge which many peoples in the world may fail to meet, and which some countries in the Arab homeland have indeed failed to meet.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

President Saddam Hussein's Speech on National Day (1981)

People, World, Way, Courage

“I was searching for something a little more than a dashing metaphor, a good deal less than a cultural map: and for those purposes the two cultures is about right.”

C. P. Snow book The Two Cultures

Source: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), P. 10

“Indeed, a full understanding of Sraffa’s contributions can be difficult, since these must be viewed as a complex whole, as part of an extremely ambitious cultural project: ‘to shunt the car of economic science’ in a direction opposite to that –the subjective theory of value –chosen by Jevons, one of the leading early exponents of the marginalist approach. Thus, with his writings Sraffa contributes to exposing the weak points in the theories of the leading exponents of the marginalist approach, from Alfred Marshall and Arthur Cecil Pigou to Friedrich von Hayek, and of their present-day followers, and at the same time re-proposes the classical approach of Adam Smith and David Ricardo (and also, in certain respects, of Karl Marx). The work of reconstructing the classical approach is also coherent with elements of the Keynesian contribution. This connection is possibly the most important issue in the current debate concerning the road to be followed in going on with the work started by Sraffa.”

Alessandro Roncaglia (1947) Italian economist

Introduction
Piero Sraffa: His life, thought and cultural heritage (2000)

Cars, Understanding, Science, Time

“Western culture in our education system will make our youth forget our cultural heritage, and will be completely Westernised. A country which forgets its own culture also loses its vibrancy.”

Dinanath Batra (1930) Indian school teacher

On the effect of western culture on Indian educations, as quoted in " Dinanath Batra targets foreign universities in new book http://www.deccanchronicle.com/141028/nation-current-affairs/article/dinanath-batra-targets-foreign-universities-new-book" Deccan Chronicle (28 October 2014)

Youth, Education, Country, Forgetting

“The awful events of September 11, 2001 declared a war we were vaguely aware of, but hadn't really comprehended how near the threat was, and how terrible were the plans of our enemies.
It's a big thing, this war.
It's a fight between a just regard for human dignity and a malevolent force that defiles an honorable religion by disputing God's love for every soul on earth. It's a fight between right and wrong, good and evil.
And should our enemies acquire for their arsenal the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons they seek, this war will become a much bigger thing.
So it is, whether we wished it or not, that we have come to the test of our generation, to our rendezvous with destiny.
And much is expected of us.
We are engaged in a hard struggle against a cruel and determined adversary.
Our enemies have made clear the danger they pose to our security and to the very essence of our culture …liberty.
Only the most deluded of us could doubt the necessity of this war.
Like all wars, this one will have its ups and downs.
But we must fight. We must.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

2000s, 2004, Speech at the Republican National Convention (2004)

Love, God, War, Religion

“People get a sense that something is really wrong in government and in our culture. There is a corruption, not only in politics, but of spirit as well, when people are so quick to be violent with one another. I think everybody would like to be able to find a solution to make things better. We have the desire to reform inside of us, and we get frustrated because we don’t know how to change things, even if it comes to our own behavior. Sometimes you get frustrated because you don’t know how to stop that thing that you know is either hurtful to yourself or someone else.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Interview at Collider.com (6 February 2011) http://collider.com/jennifer-beals-interview-the-chicago-code/74802/.

People, Behavior, Thinking, Sense

“So much American science fiction is parochial -- not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way…”

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Poul Anderson: Fifty Years of Science Fiction (1997)

Way, Science, Future

“The imagination of these conquered peoples was dazzled by the introduction of Greek art, literature, philosophy, and public works. Though the successors of Alexander were unable to maintain the political control of the lands he conquered, and though successive waves of Roman, Arabian, and Tartar conquests swept over these lands in succeeding centuries, none of the later conquerors has been able wholly to eradicate the influence of Greek culture, nor to exterminate that element of population which was of Greek blood.”

Henry Morgenthau, Sr. (1856–1946) American diplomat

I was sent to Athens http://www.hri.org/docs/Morgenthau/

People, Art, Imagination, Literature

“It has been the White Race who has been the world builder, the maker of cities and commerce and continents. It is the White Man who is the sole builder of civilizations. It was he who build the Egyptian civilization, the great unsurpassed Roman civilization, the Greek civilization of beauty and culture, and who, after having been dealt a serious blow by a new Semitic religion, wallowed through the Dark Ages, finally extricated himself, and then build the great European civilization.”

Ben Klassen (1918–1993) American engineer, author and politician

Nature's Eternal Religion (1973), Ch. 2, Paragraph 2
Nature's Eternal Religion (1973)

Age, World, Religion, Beauty

“Equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture… have simply made us all members of one class.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/lkbak10.txt (1888), Ch. 14.

Wealth

“The dominant mood of contemporary American culture is the self-celebration of the peasantry.”

William A. Henry III (1950–1994) American critic

In Defense of Elitism

Mood

“The oft-heard comment that Leonardo [da Vinci]'s genius managed to transcend the culture of his time is amply justified. But his was not a science-fiction voyage into the future as much as a plunge into the past.”

Lucio Russo (1944) Italian historian and scientist

11.2, "The Renaissance", p. 336
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

Science, Time, Past, Future

“We are the citizens of this nation, and I feel it is our duty to discipline indecent behavior. It is out of this sense of duty that we feel the need to safeguard our culture.”

Pramod Muthalik (1963) Indian politician

As quoted in " Attack on women at a bar in India raises fears of 'Hindu Taliban' http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jan/29/world/fg-india-brawl29, Los Angeles Times (29 January 2009)

Behavior, Feeling, Sense

“In brief, the onus of protecting Hindus against Muslim and Christian proselytization falls on Hindu social and cultural organizations.”

K. S. Lal (1920–2002) Indian historian

Source: Return to Roots (2002), p. 105

“Whatever offices of life are performed by women of culture and refinement are thenceforth elevated; they cease to be mere servile toils, and become expressions of the ideas of superior beings.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) Abolitionist, author

Part 2, Ch. 4.
Household Papers and Stories (1864)

Life, Women, Idea

“I am now convinced that the Reformation of the church will come from the east. In the west there is no spiritual life. (I'm speaking of the Protestant church and not the Roman Catholic church.) We have civilisation and we try to keep up culture, but we have no spiritual life. The east has a spiritual life. They know that colour influences the spirit more than black lines. In Russia there is still the notion that art is nearer religion than thinking in lines and logic. All abstract rationalising needs to be filled out with sensual thinking and feelings. In Russia there is still a strong impression of colour.”

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor

Statement on his admiration of the Eastern Orthodox traditions (1982), as quoted in Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984 (1984) by James Bentley, p. 207

Life, Religion, Art, Feeling

“I have never understood why Catholics of culture take pains to deny or to explain away the fact that the Roman Church is not only a religion but also a secular system of government, and that the Church as representative of God upon earth may eo ipso claim — and always has claimed — absolute power in all things of this world.”

Houston Stewart Chamberlain book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century

The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts) (1899)

God, Pain, World, Religion

“Education in Chile has been modeled as a "consumer good" and this was accepted with much resignation by a broad layer of society for many years, they believed that education and health were to be treated like any other topic…. For this reason we cannot fail to recognize the intervention that the student movement made on the consciousness of thousands of Chileans who today are dissatisfied with the reality of today's education model, to whom a change of the outdated constitution makes sense, who understand the need to reform the taxation system, who no longer put up with the overexploitation of our natural resources, to benefit foreign capital, i. e. Chile awoke and once again came to believe in the possibility of building a different country. One which is more just, a country where education and health are guaranteed, a country where workers have dignified working conditions, where young people are not exploited nor ill-treated in their work-place, where women are integrated with rights and equal opportunities, a country where the environment is protected, where natural resources are exploited to improve the living condition of its people, a country were culture develops freely, where there is access to literature, a country where children don't suffer discrimination because they don't have any money, a country where a walk down your street doesn't mean constant fear of being assaulted, a country where the most disadvantaged youth don't have to resort to drugs or delinquency to give sense to their lives, a country where grandparents are not made to feel as burdens, a country where the development of knowledge becomes a task of society as a whole, where advances in science are placed at the service of the people. We are once again beginning to dream of this beautiful country …because we are not the same that we were a year ago, hope has resurfaced despite the elaborate effort of those who foster neoliberal ideology and who are trying to eternalize capitalism in a process of permanent auto-reproduction, excluding all possibility of a social revolution.”

Karol Cariola (1987) Chilean politician

Ser un joven comunista, por Karol Cariola, La Jota de Ingenieria, November 2011, 2013-10-03 http://www.jotainjenieria.cl/ser-un-joven-comunista-por-karol-cariola, Ser un joven comunista, por Karol Cariola, Oceansur.com, November 2011, 2013-10-03 http://www.oceansur.com/media/uploads/documents/files/prologo-karol.pdf, <br class="br">Original: La educación en Chile ha sido modelada como un “bien de consumo”, hecho que fue aceptado por un amplio sector de la sociedad, con mucha resignación durante años, ellos creyeron que la Educación y la Salud debían ser tratados como cualquier otro tema.... Por esto no podemos dejar de reconocer el gran acierto del movimiento estudiantil al intervenir en las conciencias de miles de chilenos que hoy , ya no se conforman con la realidad del actual modelo de educación, que le hace sentido el cambio de esta añeja constitución, que entendieron necesaria una reforma tributaria, que ya no aguantan la sobre explotación de nuestros recursos naturales en beneficio de capitales extranjeros, es decir, Chile despertó y volvió a creer en la posibilidad de construir un país distinto, un país más justo, un país donde la educación y la salud estén garantizadas, un país donde los trabajadores tengan condiciones laborales dignas, donde los jóvenes no sean explotados ni mal tratados en su fuente laboral, donde las mujeres sean integradas con igualdad de derechos y oportunidades, un país donde se proteja el medio ambiente, en que los recursos naturales sean explotados para mejorar las condiciones de su pueblo, un país donde la cultura se desarrolle libremente, un país en el que haya acceso a la literatura, un país donde los niños no sufran la discriminación desde que nacen por no tener dinero, un país donde caminar por las calles no sean un temor constante de ser asaltados, un país donde los jóvenes más desposeídos no tengan que recurrir a las drogas y la delincuencia para dar sentido a sus vidas, un país donde los abuelos no se sientan un estorbo, un país donde el desarrollo del conocimiento sea una tarea de la sociedad en su conjunto, un país donde el avance de la ciencia se ponga al servicio del pueblo, ese hermoso país es el que hoy estamos volviendo a soñar, porque con emoción lo vuelvo a mencionar, Chile está cambiando, hoy no somos los mismos que hace un año atrás, las esperanzas han resurgido a pesar del esmero de aquellos que propician la ideología neoliberal y que pretenden eternizar el capitalismo en un proceso de auto reproducción permanente, excluyendo toda posibilidad de una revolución social.

Women, Money, Children, People

“Even when Muslims do something intolerable, Europeans have to tolerate it in atonement of past colonial and imperialist misdeeds. Victimhood is an inexhaustible capital that Muslims in Europe could dig into for generations. The fact that the killers of Charlie Hebdo staff had never even visited Algeria did not deprive them of their ancestral capital of victimhood because of French colonial presence there decades before the two killers were born in Paris. Even acts that are clearly not worthy of respect, such as female genital mutilation, must be respected in the name of “cultural otherness.””

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

What happens to Western values if no one stands up against Islam? http://nypost.com/2015/01/11/what-happens-to-western-values-if-no-one-stands-up-against-islam/, New York Post (January 11, 2015). <br class="br">New York Post

Past

“If the chiefs as leaders are going to earn and maintain the respect of the people of Fiji and preserve the uniqueness of the traditional and cultural structures they need to also recognise that the differences that exist between us all cannot and should not be ignored.”

Koila Nailatikau (1953) Fijian politician

Source: Senate speech, 24 August, 2005 (excerpts)

People

“To change our laws and culture, the green movement must attract and include the majority of all people, not just the majority of affluent people.”

Van Jones book The Green Collar Economy

The Green Collar Economy (2008)

People, Law, Change

“From a succession of historians we learn of a particularly gruesome component of Carthaginian daily life: the routine and ritualized sacrificing of not just animals—animal sacrifice was a common religious activity of all Mediterranean cultures—but of infants and children. …Greek and Roman historians were unanimous in their abhorrence of the Carthaginian practice…”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

What the Bones Tell Us (1997)

Life, Children, Learning, Success

“The government of the US has no moral authority to elect itself as the judge over human rights in Cuba, where there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959, and where despite the economic blockade, there are levels of health, education and culture that are internationally recognised.”

Harold Pinter (1930–2008) playwright from England

Harold Pinter, et al. "Letters: Human Rights and Cuba" http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1445897,00.html, The Guardian (26 Mar. 2005). Pinter was a signatory.

Health, Education