Quotes about culture
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“This naive manner of conceptualizing capitalism by reference to a “pursuit of gain” must be relegated to the kindergarten of cultural history methodology and abandoned once and for all. A fully unconstrained compulsion to acquire goods cannot be understood as synonymous with capitalism, and even less as its “spirit.” On the contrary, capitalism can be identical with the taming of this irrational motivation, or at least with its rational tempering. Nonetheless, capitalism is distinguished by the striving for profit, indeed, profit is pursued in a rational, continuous manner in companies and firms, and then pursued again and again, as is profitability. There are no choices. If the entire economy is organized according to the rules of the open market, any company that fails to orient its activities toward the chance of attaining profit is condemned to bankruptcy.
Let us begin by defining terms in a manner more precise than often occurs. For us, a "capitalist" economic act involves first of all an expectation of profit based on the utilization of opportunities for exchange; that is of (formally) peaceful opportunities for acquisition. Formal and actual acquisition through violence follows its own special laws and hence should best be placed, as much as one may recommend doing so, in a different category. Wherever capitalist acquisition is rationally pursued, action is oriented to calculation in terms of capital. What does this mean?”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Prefatory Remarks to Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion (1920)

Peace, Law, History, Motivation

“Shamed, dishonored, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics - as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity - so it appears in all its hideous nakedness.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: The Junius Pamphlet (1915), Ch. 1, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (1970), trns: Mary-Alice Waters

Peace, Appearance

“And now, in the final irony, the fact that the US military power has solved the European problem, especially the "German problem", allows Europeans today, and Germans in particular, to believe that American military power, and the "strategic culture" that has created and sustained it, is outmoded and dangerous.”

Robert Kagan book Of Paradise and Power

Of Paradise and Power, p. 73

Problem

“We've moved away from being a culture of people who think about movies to one made up of people who believe that spouting a list of preferences is the same as registering an opinion.”

Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic

Unintelligent Agent, Salon.com, 1997-01-17, 2006-08-25, http://web.archive.org/web/20000930123506/http://www.salon.com/media/media970117.html, 2000-09-30 http://www.salon.com/media/media970117.html,

People, Thinking

“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything — high and low and, most especially, high — lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933. […] Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

Introduction
2010s, 2013, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics (2013)

Lie, History, Communication

“Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience.”

Alex Steffen (1968) American writer and futurist

Go bright green | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books. http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2035002,00.html

Reality

“Americans and Europeans alike sometimes forget how unique is the United States of America. No other nation has been created so swiftly and successfully. No other nation has been built upon an idea – the idea of liberty. No other nation has so successfully combined people of different races and nations within a single culture. Both the founding fathers of the United States and successive waves of immigrants to your country were determined to create a new identity. Whether in flight from persecution or from poverty, the huddled masses have, with few exceptions, welcomed American values, the American way of life and American opportunities. And America herself has bound them to her with powerful bonds of patriotism and pride. The European nations are not and can never be like this. They are the product of history and not of philosophy. You can construct a nation on an idea; but you cannot reconstruct a nation on the basis of one.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech at Hoover Institution Lunch (8 March 1991) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108264 This quote appears to be the basis for the following condensed version, seen on numerous internet sites : Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy. Post-Prime Ministerial

Life, People, Way, History

“All men and women have passions, natural desires and noble ambitions, and also a conscience; they have sex, hunger, fear, anger, and are subject to sickness, pain, suffering and death. Culture consists in bringing about the expression of these passions and desires in harmony.”

Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living

Source: The Importance of Living (1937), p. 20

Death, Women, Men, Hunger

“It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)

Men, Universe, Time, Success

“When all is said and done, science is about things and theology is about words. Things behave in the same way everywhere, but words do not. … Theology works in one culture alone. If you have not grown up in Polkinghorne's culture, where words such as "incarnation" and "trinity" have a profound meaning, you cannot share his vision.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Way, Science

“In Britain and indeed the entire West, today, we are part way through a process – artificially imposed by a dogmatic liberal ruling class - that is steadily destroying the very possibility of preserving our racial and cultural differences, and the unique nations to which they have given rise.”

Nick Griffin (1959) British politician

Nick Griffin, The BNP: Anti-asylum protest, racist sect or power-winning movement? http://web.archive.org/web/20030605150634/http://www.bnp.org.uk/articles/race_reality.htm

Way, Parting

“The second observation is that poetry is a universal human art. Despite post-modern theories of cultural relativism that assert there are no human universals, there exists a massive and compelling body of empirical data, collected and documented by anthropologists, linguists, and archeologists that demonstrates there is no human society, however isolated, that has not developed and employed poetry as a cultural practice. Most of this poetry, of course, has been oral poetry. Many of these cultures never developed writing. But the fact remains—and it is a demonstrable fact, not mere opinion—that every society has developed a special class of speech, shaped by apprehensible patterns of sound, namely, poetry”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

9-10
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Art, Universe

“There is not something fundamentally different about the American DNA that causes us to have a level of gun violence that is 20 times that of other first-world nations…. It happens here because we choose to allow it to happen. We have a celebratory culture of guns, and the loosest firearms laws in the world.”

Chris Murphy (1973) American politician

"Meet the Senator Who Filibustered for 15 Hours on Gun Control" http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/meet-the-senator-who-filibustered-for-15-hours-on-gun-control-20160620, RollingStone.com, 20 June 2016.

World, Law, Time

“The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.”

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Jewish-American political theorist

"Martin Heidegger at Eighty," in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (1978) by Michael Murray, p. 294.

Past, Dead

“Institutions should focus on educating against clashes of culture and the promotion of a culture of tolerance and peace.”

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

Source: The Role of Education in Global Security (2007), p.105

Education, Peace

“No matter how far our spiritual culture may continue to progress, no matter how much the natural sciences may grow, becoming ever more profound and more inclusive, no matter how much the human spirit may will to expand, that human spirit will never escape from the majesty and ethical sublimity of Christianity, as it shimmers and shines in the Gospels.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

A message to Eckermann on March 11, (1832), translated by Albert Schweizer in Goethe: Five Studies http://archive.is/tOo5z (1961), Beacon Press, p. 56

Nature, Science

“The very system of education which was deemed essential for forging bonds of unbroken alliance with the British power succeeded in unleashing revolutionary ideas and thoughts, which ultimately helped to throw off the yoke of alien rule in India. If we take a dispassionate view of what happened during the last one century, we must acknowledge that this has been an era in which good has been mixed with evil. The contact between the Indian mind and western thought and civilisation did not enslave the soul of India. In every domain of thought, in arts and architecture, in science, in history, philosophy and letters, in social services and in religious thought, great Indians gave their best, maintaining their stamp of originality as well as imbibing and assimilating fruits of western skill and knowledge. Though the number of Indians affected by such spread of knowledge was comparatively small, many of them assumed a much needed political leadership and became the instruments of agitation and mass movements, leading ultimately to the political liberation of their country. The cultural Renaissance preceded and created the silent Revolution.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Delhi University Convocation on 13th December 1952.

Education, Art, Soul, History

“The pope has been up against an intransigent church bureaucracy. Vatican officials have proved unwilling to cooperate with the commission; nor has it been furnished with enough resources. But above all, there has been cultural resistance within the church over abuse. The clerical caste is one shaped by obedience and a deep fear of sullying the reputation of the church. The relationship of bishop and priest is a paternal one; if the priest errs, the bishop may focus on forgiveness of the miscreant rather than punishment of an abuser, while his greatest focus is on avoiding publicity. But the church is now reaping what it sowed: like long-festering sores, the suppressed scandals are erupting everywhere.”

Catherine Pepinster (1959)

Pope Francis has utterly failed to tackle the church’s abuse scandal https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/26/pope-francis-catholic-church-abuse-scandal-failed (26 July 2018), The Guardian.

Fear, Forgiveness

“I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Secularism in its present Indian form is no more than an embodiment of anti-Hindu animus, and is supported by all those who want to destroy Hindu society and culture. Secularism is essentially a political concept which originated and took shape in nineteenth century Europe. …. It was in this atmosphere of revolt against Christianity and its closed culture that the concept of Secularism was evolved and employed in country after country in Europe. The secular power of the State was no longer to be the secular arm of the Church. It was to become secular on its own, that is, a power which secured equal rights to all its citizens without bothering about their beliefs. The Church was separated from the State which was no longer supposed to interfere with the religious life of the citizens, or to discriminate against any citizen on the basis of his on her religion or absence of it. Religion was now to be treated as a purely private matter in which the state was not supposed to pry, and which was not to be projected in public affairs.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Defence of Hindu Society (1983)

Life, Religion, Support, Country

“…a victim of bad medicine, bad air, bad food, farcical education, a despicable popular culture.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, 1985 (1978)

Education, Food

“Creation of absolutely the first rank — in philosophy, in music, in much of literature, in mathematics — continues to occur outside the American milieu. It is at once taken up and intelligently exploited, but the "motion of the spirit" has taken place elsewhere, amid the enervation of Europe, in the oppressive climate of Russia. There is, in a good deal of American intellectual, artistic production (recent paining may be a challenging exception) a characteristic near-greatness, a strength just below the best. Could it be that the United States is destined to be the "museum culture?"”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Pain, Music, Intelligence, Literature

“Your culture is different to ours. We're not ready for all this in Brazil because no father would ever take pride in having a gay son. Pride? Happiness? Celebrating if his son turns out gay? No way. Look, you have to have some sort of moral compass bearing in your life. They want to reach our children in order to turn the children into gay adults to satisfy their sexuality in the future. So these are the fundamentalist homosexual groups that are trying to take over society.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

Interview to Stephen Fry in October 2013. Jair Bolsonaro provoca polêmica em documentário do ator Stephen Fry sobre homofobia https://vejasp.abril.com.br/blog/pop/jair-bolsonaro-provoca-polemica-em-documentario-do-ator-stephen-fry-sobre-homofobia/. Veja SP (23 October 2013).

Life, Happiness, Children, Way

“Over time, it’s clear that this culture of enforcement actions being disconnected from the public safety needs of the community – and often to the detriment of community residents – has given rise to a disturbing and unconstitutional pattern or practice. Our investigation showed that Ferguson police officers routinely violate the Fourth Amendment in stopping people without reasonable suspicion, arresting them without probable cause, and using unreasonable force against them. According to the Police Department’s own records, its officers frequently infringe on residents’ First Amendment rights. They interfere with the right to record police activities. And they make enforcement decisions based on the way individuals express themselves.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

People, Way, Communication, Decision

“Sadly, it had become clear in recent years that the tribal culture, through which we sought to build small teams capable of enduring combat, had become distorted, misinterpreted and abused. And the evidence of that was brought home to me in a very personal, poignant and confronting way by Elizabeth Broderick.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Way, Home, Personality

“[The] Army understands that cultural change is a long term process that requires commitment, diligence and continual evaluation. We recognise that in many ways we are behind the curve when compared to other corporate and public institutions, but we are determined to enact change in a meaningful and enduring way. We are dedicated to drawing on, and implementing, best practice by engaging with leaders who have undertaken successful and innovative programs in this field including Deloitte, the National Rugby League and the Australian Federal Police. Through these relationships we will develop methodologies and approaches to ensure sustainable diversity.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Way, Understanding, Change, Success

“Only when the true ends of society have nothing to do with the sublime does “culture” become necessary as a veneer to cover over the void. Culture can at best appreciate the monuments of earlier faith; it cannot produce them.”

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

“Commerce and Culture,” p. 280.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Faith

“The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost?”

Jane Jacobs book Dark Age Ahead

Source: Dark Age Ahead (2004), Chapter One, The Hazard, p. 4

People, Age

“Suppose that, by some new discovery, or some improved mode of culture, only one per cent could be added to the annual results of English cultivation; this, of itself, would materially affect the comfortable subsistence of millions of human beings.”

Daniel Webster (1782–1852) Leading American senator and statesman. January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852. Served as the Secretary of Sta…

On the Agriculture of England (1840)

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

The Second Declaration of Havana (1962)

Hunger, War, People, Truth

“The Renaissance discovery of nature was an invention of nineteenth-century liberalism which played off the Renaissance delight in nature against the Middle Ages, in order to strike a blow at the romantic philosophy of history. For when Burckhardt says that the ‘discovery of the world and of man’was an achievement of the Renaissance, this thesis is, at the same time, an attack on romantic reaction and an attempt to ward off the propaganda designed to spread the romantic view of medieval culture. The doctrine of the spontaneous naturalism of the Renaissance comes from the same source as the theory that the fight against the spirit of authority and hierarchy, the ideal of freedom of thought and freedom of conscience, the emancipation of the individual and the principle of democracy, are achievements of the fifteenth century. In all this the light of the modern age is contrasted with the darkness of the Middle Ages.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Source: The Social History of Art', Volume II. Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, 1999, Chapter 1. The Concept of the Renaissance

Age, World, Democracy, History

“What are needed are the development of an ideological-cultural mechanism which permits both free inquiry and the uprooting of the weeds which multiply so easily in the fertile soil of state subsidies.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

“The real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own.”

Edward T. Hall book The Silent Language

The Silent Language (1959)

Understanding

“Another great writer who led me on It this stage was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. I had read all his novels but had never been able to understand why he had been honoured as a rishi. I myself was a novelist and had already written several humane stories. I thought that a novelist dealt with the dimensions of human character and mapped the heights it could scale and the depths to which it could sink. Why should we foist the title of a rishi on this poor fellow? That way rishis will be available a dime a dozen. My doubts about Bankim Chandra being a rishi were removed when I read the second volume of his Collected Works in Bengali. His insights into the innermost core of Hindu culture were a revelation. His Ramayaner Alochona made me see the monstrosities of modern Indology, more than ever before. I immediately translated this masterpiece into Hindi.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

How I became a Hindu (1982)

Way, Understanding, Reading

“Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 213

Art, History, Thinking, Training

“I enjoy French poetry as well as French prose, and I believe that this land must have some cultural connection with the European continent, and that she is best connected through her spiritual complement across the Straits of Dover.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

"Some Books: A New Year's Resolution for 1944" (1943), reprinted in Jeffrey M. Heath, (ed.) The Creator as Critic and Other Writings by E.M. Forster, Dundurn, 2008.

“One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for “patriarchal society,” to which nothing good is ever attributed. But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 37

Men, Books, Fashion

“I think Catholicism is actually so counter-cultural to capitalism that it’s great to get relief from that economic narrative. It’s great to go to a place where it’s all about the losers,” he says, laughing loudly. “Capitalism is all about winning and ‘be the best that you can be’. That’s a tiresome mantra. ‘I am legend’ is appropriate if you’re a superhero, but not if you’re a human.””

Tommy Tiernan (1969) Irish comedian

Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/tommy-tiernan-i-love-going-to-mass-it-s-all-about-the-losers-1.3268576

Thinking

“Suddenly I am like the poster boy of music, but I think the whole idea is to realise how deep is the base of Indian art and culture, how many fabulous young artistes there are, how many incredible great senior artistes are present today but not seen in limelight. We all have our turn at being the spokesperson for something or the other," the renowned musician.”

Zakir Hussain (musician) (1951) Indian tabla player, musical producer, film actor and composer

Quote, I am not torchbearer of Indian classical music: Zakir Hussain

Art, Music, Boy, Idea

“To such a one, already filled with intellectual substance, and possessing what we may call the practical gold-bullion of human culture, it was an obvious improvement that he should be taught to speak it out of him on occasion; that he should carry a spiritual banknote producible on demand for what of "gold-bullion" he had, not so negotiable otherwise, stored in the cellars of his mind. A man, with wisdom, insight and heroic worth already acquired for him, naturally demanded of the schoolmaster this one new faculty, the faculty of uttering in fit words what he had. A valuable superaddition of faculty:—and yet we are to remember it was scarcely a new faculty; it was but the tangible sign of what other faculties the man had in the silent state.”

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

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

Wisdom, Nature

“Instead of celebrating the richness of our diverse cultures, our distinguishing features became cruel dividing walls to keep us apart in ministering to the affairs of our common home.”

Vijay R. Singh (1931–2006) Fijian politician

Speaking Out (2006)

Home

“China's greatest work of literature, the 18th-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber, … is still virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. In its native land, The Story of the Stone, as the book is also known – Stone for short – enjoys a unique status, comparable to the plays of Shakespeare. Apart from its literary merits, Chinese readers recommend it as the best starting point for any understanding of Chinese psychology, culture and society.”

John Minford (1946) New Zealand sinologist

"China's Story of the Stone: the best book you've never heard of" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9434104/Chinas-Story-of-the-Stone-the-best-book-youve-never-heard-of.html, The Telegraph (28 July 2012)

Books, World, Dreams, Literature

“International trade in goods and services has expanded steadily over the past six decades thanks to declines in shipping and communication costs, globally negotiated reductions in government trade barriers, the widespread outsourcing of production activities, and a greater awareness of foreign cultures and products. New and better communications technologies, notably the Internet, have revolutionized the way people in all countries obtain and exchange information.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Paul R. Krugman, Maurice Obstfeld, and Marc J. Melitz, International Economics: Theory & Policy, 9th edition (2012)

People, Way, Communication, Past

“The concepts of purposive behavior and teleology have long been associated with a mysterious, self-perfecting or goal-seeking capacity or final cause, usually of superhuman or super-natural origin. To move forward to the study of events, scientific thinking had to reject these beliefs in purpose and these concepts of teleological operations for a strictly mechanistic and deterministic view of nature. This mechanistic conception became firmly established with the demonstration that the universe was based on the operation of anonymous particles moving at random, in a disorderly fashion, giving rise, by their multiplicity, to order and regularity of a statistical nature, as in classical physics and gas laws. The unchallenged success of these concepts and methods in physics and astronomy, and later in chemistry, gave biology and physiology their major orientation. This approach to problems of organisms was reinforced by the analytical preoccupation of the Western European culture and languages. The basic assumptions of our traditions and the persistent implications of the language we use almost compel us to approach everything we study as composed of separate, discrete parts or factors which we must try to isolate and identify as potential causes. Hence, we derive our preoccupation with the study of the relation of two variables. We are witnessing today a search for new approaches, for new and more comprehensive concepts and for methods capable of dealing with the large wholes of organisms and personalities.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

L.K. Frank (1948) "Foreword". In L. K. Frank, G. E. Hutchinson, W. K. Livingston, W. S. McCulloch, & N. Wiener, Teleological mechanisms. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sc., 1948, 50, 189-96; As cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) "General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications". p. 16-17

Law, Behavior, Search, Fashion

“One thing seems at any rate certain, that the spiritual motive will be in the future of India, as in her past, the real originative and dominating strain. By spirituality we do not mean a remote metaphysical mind or the tendency to dream rather than to act. That was not the great India of old in her splendid days of vigour, — whatever certain European critics or interpreters of her culture may say, — and it will not be the India of the future. Metaphysical thinking will always no doubt be a strong element in her mentality, and it is to be hoped that she will never lose her great, her sovereign powers in that direction…”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

The Renaissance in India (1918)

Dreams, Hope, Motivation, Thinking

“I can count on one of my hands, how many competent people are working in the [Hungarian] media today. But the situation is also woeful in the areas of theatre, film production and fine arts. The whole Hungarian culture is in a deep crisis, the putrescence reigning this country – in a cultural, economic, political, moral and mentalecological sense – consumes everything.”

Róbert Puzsér (1974) hungarian publicist

Egy kezemen meg tudom számolni, hány alkalmas ember dolgozik ma a médiában. De siralmas a helyzet a színház, a filmgyártás és a képzőművészet területén is. Az egész magyar kultúra mélységes válságban van, a rothadás, ami uralja az országot – kulturálisan, gazdaságilag, politikailag, etikailag és mentálökológiailag – mindent elemésztő.
Idegen test az RTL Klubon - Puzsér Róbert-interjú, hvg.hu, 2012. március 20.
Quotes from him, Interviews

People, Art, Sense, Country

“The interchanges I would have — of course, most of them were positive, and most people understand the movie, but there were plenty where the guys would want to put me in a headlock, or push me around a bit, or get into a little tussle with 'that tough guy from Back To The Future, because he’s not that tough after all'. Well, I’m not that tough after all, because I’m an actor; because it’s pretend! And I think that social media, the greater intimacy, maybe — I mean, part of it is false intimacy, but part of it’s real intimacy; you can go and see things about an actor, that’s kind of why I do the YouTube thing, to present, ‘this is me as a person’, that the audience, now, the pop cultural audience, is a more sophisticated audience and a more multi-faceted audience.”

Thomas F. Wilson (1959) actor, writer, musician, painter, voice-over artist, stand-up comedian, and podcaster

How Back To The Future's Thomas F Wilson Overcame His Biggest Bully: Himself http://themusic.com.au/interviews/all/2017/06/15/thomas-f-wilson-supanova-comic-con-mitch-knox/ (June 15, 2017)

People, Guy, Understanding, Thinking

“Had a long talk to the Chinese First Secretary at the embassy — a very charming man called Liao Dong — and said how much I admired Mao Tse tung or Zedong, the greatest man of the twentieth century. He said that I couldn't admire Mao more than he did. I asked him how Mao was viewed now. He said Mao was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong; the Cultural Revolution didn't work. He said he had been named after Mao — it was amusing.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Journal entry for 6 June 1996 in Free at Last!: Diaries, 1991-2001 (2003) p. 371
1990s

“Ultimately, the struggle of the fundamentalists is against two enemies, secularism and modernism. The war against secularism is conscious and explicit, and there is by now a whole literature denouncing secularism as an evil neo-pagan force in the modern world and attributing it variously to the Jews, the West, and the United States. The war against modernity is for the most part neither conscious nor explicit, and is directed against the whole process of change that has taken place in the Islamic world in the past century or more and has transformed the political, economic, social, and even cultural structures of Muslim countries. Islamic fundamentalism has given an aim and a form to the otherwise aimless and formless resentment and anger of the Muslim masses at the forces that have devalued their traditional values and loyalties and, in the final analysis, robbed them of their beliefs, their aspirations, their dignity, and to an increasing extent even their livelihood.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990)

War, World, Literature, Evil

Don DeLillo (1936) American novelist, playwright and essayist

'"Writing as a Deeper Form of Concentration": An Interview with Don DeLillo' by Maria Moss, Sources, Spring, 1999

“Survival—of the species of the culture of the faith—has a biological dimension. What would have befallen our Hominid ancestors had they implemented gender parity in their hunter-gatherer societies—sometimes the women hunt while the men forage and mind the kids, and vice versa?”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

" Emasculated West Primed For A Muscular, Muslim Takeover http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263677/emasculated-west-primed-muscular-muslim-takeover-ilana-mercer," FrontPage Magazine, July 29, 2016. 2010s, 2016

Women, Men, Faith

“We have our own laws, rules and culture. That is why we don’t need to entertain and care about what those on the outside say, what else if coming from Arab countries which are in chaos themselves”

Ibrahim Ali (1957) Member of the Dewan Rakyat (parliament)

ibid http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/perkasa-on-allah-arabs-ignorant-westerners-have-vested-interests-and-some-i#sthash.oKV6D9cL.dpuf

Law, Country

“You know, Republicans went to Washington to change the culture, to change the city. Instead, they became changed by Washington. Now, it doesn't do any good for us to look backwards or to fight amongst ourselves. We need to be looking forward.”

Bobby Jindal (1971) American politician; two-term Governor of Louisiana

"Gov Jindal: GOP Must Become the Conservative Party Again http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,451213,00.html", Fox News Channel, November 13, 2008

Change, Fight

“I think that there is this idea that what you should go after is fame. That is a hugely mistaken idea because fame means absolutely nothing. This whole culture of wanting to become famous is on a hiding to nothing, a sign of a society that’s lost its way and will only judge people as being valid if they’re famous, which of course is all bullshit. As Tom Stoppard said, the only thing that fame means is that more people know you than you know.”

Jeremy Irons (1948) English actor

Jeremy Irons: Why our TV isn't what it used to be
The Telegraph
2008-12-20
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/drama/3870293/Jeremy-Irons-Why-our-TV-isnt-what-it-used-to-be.html
2011-08-11

People, Way, Idea, Thinking

“The New York Times is busy sucking the teat of the major studios. They twist themselves into a pretzel when Kumar and Schmumar Go to White Castle Part III. They say, "Oh, the farts are such a statement about American culture! It's such great satire!" It's bullshit. Troma paved the road for farts! But we don't exist.”

Lloyd Kaufman (1945) American film director

Village Voice http://www.villagevoice.com/2014-01-15/film/troma-lloyd-kaufman-interview/ January 15, 2014 2014

Business, Time, Parting

“I have been strongly influenced by the Mahabharata, discourses of the Buddha, Sri Aurobindo and Plato. My masters have been Vyasa, Buddha and Sri Aurobindo, as elucidated by Ram Swarup. … Paganism was a term of contempt invented by Christianity for people in the countryside who lived close to and in harmony with Nature, and whose ways of worship were spontaneous as opposed to the contrived though-categories constructed by Christianity’s city-based manipulators of human minds. In due course, the term was extended to cover all spiritually spontaneous culture of the world – Greek, Roman, Iranian, Indian, Chinese, native American. It became a respectable term for those who revolted against Christianity in the modern West. But it has yet to recover its spiritual dimension which Christianity had eclipsed. For me, Hinduism preserves ancient Paganism in all its dimensions. In that sense, I am a Pagan. The term "Polytheism' comes from Biblical discourse, which has the term 'theism' as its starting point. I have no use for these terms. They create confusion. I dwell in a different universe of discourse which starts with 'know thyself' and ends with the discovery, 'thou art that'…
I met her [Mother Theresa] briefly in Calcutta in 1954 or 1955 when she was unknown. I had gone to see an American journalist who was a friend and had fallen ill, when she came to his house asking for money for her charity set-up. The friend went inside to get some cash, leaving his five or six year old daughter in the drawing room. Teresa told her, "He is not your real father. Your real father is in heaven." The girl said, "He is very ill." Theresa commented, "If he dies, your father does not die. For your real father who is in heaven never 'dies."”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

The girl was in tears. Interview, The Observer. Date : February 22, 1997. http://sathyavaadi.tripod.com/truthisgod/Articles/goel.htm https://egregores.blogspot.com/2009/10/buddha-sri-aurobindo-and-plato.html https://egregores.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/hindus-and-pagans-a-return-to-the-time-of-the-gods/

Money, People, World, Art

“The role of administration in the modern state is profoundly affected by the general political and cultural environment of the age.”

Leonard D. White (1891–1958) American historian

Source: Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, 1926, p. 7, as cited in: Moynihan (2009)

Age

“The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p.12

“Europe is no longer Europe, it is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense… I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion… I am disgusted by the anti-Semitism of many Italians, of many Europeans… Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history! They don't know who Churchill was! In Italy, they don't even know who Cavour was!… Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty… State-run television stations contribute to the resurgent anti-Semitism, crying only over Palestinian deaths while playing down Israeli deaths, glossing over them in unwilling tones… The increased presence of Muslims in Italy and in Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom… The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization… The struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions… The West reveals a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive… These charlatans care about the Palestinians as much as I care about the charlatans. That is not at all… When I was given the news, I laughed. The trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true… President Bush has said, 'We refuse to live in fear.'…Beautiful sentence, very beautiful. I loved it! But inexact, Mr. President, because the West does live in fear. People are afraid to speak against the Islamic world. Afraid to offend, and to be punished for offending, the sons of Allah. You can insult the Christians, the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Jews. You can slander the Catholics, you can spit on the Madonna and Jesus Christ. But, woe betide the citizen who pronounces a word against the Islamic religion.”

Oriana Fallaci (1929–2006) Italian writer

A Sermon for the West">From "A Sermon for the West" By Oriana Fallaci - Oct. 22, 2002 Address to an audience at the American Enterprise Institute

Love, Death, People, Truth

“The key insight of the approach is to consider that social action takes place in arenas, what may be called fields, domains, sectors, or organized social spaces… Fields contain collective actors who try to produce a system of domination in that space. To do so requires the production of a local culture that defines local social relations between actors.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The architecture of markets, 2001, p. 15

“I held it imperative to evolve an instrument of thought which would aid in cutting through all cultural opiates, past and present, so that a direct, immediate, and truly free vision could be achieved, and an idea be revealed with clarity. To acquire such an instrument, however… demanded full resolution of the past, and present through it. No shouting about individualism, no capering before an expanse of canvas, no manipulation of academic conceits or technical fetishes can truly liberate..”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

Letter to Gordon Smith, January 1, 1959, as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 194
1950s

Idea, Past

“Religion’s preferred punishment is almost always death, regardless of the crime. But the death penalty is a statistical failure just like all their proposed solutions to other problems always are. Here in the US, the states that still have the death penalty also have the highest murder rates; its a negative correlation. The problem there is one of society, the conditions imposed and the types of responses that are culturally coaxed. When murder happens, and that person is caught and tried, we should remove them as a threat, and whether they are imprisoned, institutionalized, or what have you should be determined by the particulars in each case.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, How is secular humanist governance better than theocracy? http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2013/09/07/how-is-secular-humanist-governance-better-than-theocracy/ (September 7, 2013)

Death, Religion, Penalty, Failure

“About 1500 it seemed as if Europe was about to cast off at one effort the slough of feudal barbarism, and to step at once into the fair inheritance of the wisdom and culture of the ancient world. The Church led the van, and smiled on free inquiry and the new learning. About the third decennium of the century the resistance of the obscurantists was organised, the Catholic reaction set in, and nascent humanism was submerged beneath the rising tide of theological passion and the fatal and fruitless controversies of Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic, to the rival cries of the Bible and the Church. The " sacrificio d'intelletto " of Loyola took the place of the free and rationalising spirit with which Erasmus had looked out upon the world of men.”

Mark Pattison (1813–1884) English author and Church of England priest

Source: Memoirs (1885), Chapter II, p. 100

Wisdom, Men, World, Smile

“There was a time when I should have felt terribly ashamed of not being up-to-date. I lived in a chronic apprehension lest I might, so to speak, miss the last bus, and so find myself stranded and benighted, in a desert of demodedness, while others, more nimble than myself, had already climbed on board, taken their tickets and set out toward those bright but, alas, ever receding goals of Modernity and Sophistication. Now, however, I have grown shameless, I have lost my fears. I can watch unmoved the departure of the last social-cultural bus—the innumerable last buses, which are starting at every instant in all the world’s capitals. I make no effort to board them, and when the noise of each departure has died down, “Thank goodness!” is what I say to myself in the solitude. I find nowadays that I simply don’t want to be up-to-date. I have lost all desire to see and do the things, the seeing and doing of which entitle a man to regard himself as superiorly knowing, sophisticated, unprovincial; I have lost all desire to frequent the places and people that a man simply must frequent, if he is not to be regarded as a poor creature hopelessly out of the swim. “Be up-to-date!” is the categorical imperative of those who scramble for the last bus. But it is an imperative whose cogency I refuse to admit. When it is a question of doing something which I regard as a duty I am as ready as anyone else to put up with discomfort. But being up-to-date and in the swim has ceased, so far as I am concerned, to be a duty. Why should I have my feelings outraged, why should I submit to being bored and disgusted for the sake of somebody else’s categorical imperative? Why? There is no reason. So I simply avoid most of the manifestations of that so-called “life” which my contemporaries seem to be so unaccountably anxious to “see”; I keep out of range of the “art” they think is so vitally necessary to “keep up with”; I flee from those “good times” in the “having” of which they are prepared to spend so lavishly of their energy and cash.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

“Silence is Golden,” p. 55
Do What You Will (1928)

Life, People, World, Fear

“Its culture: the fruit of its life, the product of its own efforts in thought and art. This culture is not international. It is the expression of the national genius, of the blood. The culture is international in its brilliance but national in origin. Someone made a fine comparison: bread and wheat may be internationally consumed, but they always bear the imprint of the soil from which they came.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

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

Life, Art, Effort

“As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Mapping the Nation (Mappings Series) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=39IHUaOV9fUC&pg=PA263 (13 November 2012), p. 263.

People

“The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

Herbert Reade Memorial Lecture (6 February 1990)

Idea, Change

“The left once dismissed the market as exploitative; it now honors the market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), pp. 10-11

Courage

“Faced with the election of a Catholic, our culture is at stake.”

Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American writer

Opposing the candidacy of ‪John F. Kennedy‬‎ for US President, as quoted in "The Religious Issue: Hot and Getting Hotter" in Newsweek (19 September 1960)

“Until we command the exact same salary as every male counterpart, I feel a political desire to stand by other women. If we don’t stand together, that equality will never be fully realized, and that bothers me. I see very little in our culture, actually, of women necessarily standing up for one another. I think there’s still an underlying fear if one woman has the light shone upon her, it takes away from your light, which of course is not the case at all. But I think when you’re young, you maybe fear that.”

Shirley Manson (1966) Scottish singer and artist

Garbage's Shirley Manson on getting the band back together and kissing major labels goodbye, Sam Adams, The A.V. Club, 23 May 2012, 12 February 2015 http://www.avclub.com/article/garbages-shirley-manson-on-getting-the-band-back-t-75506,

Women, Fear, Feeling, Thinking

“There must be other leaps in life - as momentous as the "mirror stage" - that Lacan didn't mention. Some are universal; others, culturally particular. To understand that your parents are human (and not an element of the natural world), that they're separate from you, that they were children once, that they were born and came into the world, is another leap. It's as if you hadn't seen who they were earlier - just as, before you were ten months old, you didn't know it was you in the mirror. This happens when you're sixteen or seventeen. Not long after - maybe a year - you find out your parents will die. It's not as if you haven't encountered death already. But, before now, your precocious mind can't accommodate your parents' death except as an academic nicety - to be dismissed gently as too literary and sentimental. After that day, your parents' dying suddenly becomes simple. It grows clear that you're alone and always have been, though certain convergences start to look miraculous - for instance, between your father, mother, and yourself. Though your parents don't die immediately - what you've had is a realisation, not a premonition - you'll carry around this knowledge for their remaining decades or years. You won't think, looking at them, "You're going to die". It'll be an unspoken fact of existence. Nothing about them will surprise you anymore.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Friend of My Youth (2017)

Life, Death, Children, World

“With the support of Universal knowledge and our heritage, we shall create a Bharat which will excel all its past glories, and will enable every citizen in its fold to steadily progress in the development of his manifold latent possibilities and to achieve through a sense of unity with the entire creation, a state even higher than that of a complete human being; to become Narayan from nar (man). This is the external divine form of our culture. This is our message to humanity at a cross roads. May God give us strength to succeed in this mission.”

Deendayal Upadhyaya (1916–1968) RSS thinker and co-founder of the political party Bharatiya Jana Sangh

Deendayal Upadhyaya , Integral Humanism, quoted in L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008)

God, Support, Knowledge, Sense

“The recoil from the absolute of mechanism was into an equally sterile absolute of the organic: the raw primitive. The organic processes, reduced to shadows by the machine, made a violent effort to retrieve their position. The machine, which acerbically denied the flesh, was offset by the flesh, which denied the rational, the intelligent, the orderly processes of behavior that have entered into all man’s cultural developments—even those developments that most closely derive from the organic. The spurious notion that mechanism had naught to learn from life was supplanted by the equally false notion that life had nothing to learn from mechanism.”

Lewis Mumford book Technics and Civilization

Source: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 6, sct. 9

Life, Behavior, Intelligence, Effort

“Counter to the avalanche of messages from our culture, I recognize celibacy not as negation but as a joyous turning inward. “Inebriate of air am I, / And debauchee of dew,” wrote Emily Dickinson, most promiscuous of celibates. “Opulence in asceticism,” Marianne Moore wrote, a phrase that celebrates the solitary life even as it provides a sound bite for saving the planet.”

Fenton Johnson (1953) American novelist

"Going it alone" (2015)

Life

“If Negroes are only “white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less,” then, conversely, white men are only Negroes with white skins, nothing more, nothing less. This means that all cultural differences, hereditary predispositions, and historical traditions are irrelevant and meaningless. It means, in other words, that history is meaningless. And how can one be an historian if it is his purpose to deny history? The white man has behind him centuries of Christian culture, and the discipline and selective breeding this faith requires. Although the white man may reject this faith and subject himself instead to the requirements of humanism, he is still a product of this Christian past. The Negro is a product of a radically different past, and his heredity is governed by radically different consideration.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Source: Writings, The Biblical Philosophy of History (1969), p. 88

Men, Faith, History, Past

“The main contemporary obstacle facing African Americans is neither white racism, as many liberals claim, nor black genetic deficiency, as Charles Murray and others imply. Rather it involves destructive and pathological cultural patterns of behavior: excessive reliance on government, conspiratorial paranoia about racism, a resistance to academic achievement as "acting white," a celebration of the criminal and outlaw as authentically black, and the normalization of illegitimacy and dependency.”

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

Source: Books, The End of Racism (1995), Ch. 1

Behavior, Dependency

“A Sense of oneness, a sense of indianess requires to be created among our youth to halt the mad rush towards an imported five star video culture. We believe that through dedication and perseverance we will realize national unity and create a new India of our dreams. In Delhi, I gave you a slogan: ”Unite and win, today we are achieving unity, tomorrow we will achieve victory", Vandematram.”

Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1924–2018) 10th Prime Minister of India

Indore, 6 - 8 January 1984
Quotes from ataljee.org

Youth, Dreams, Star, Sense

“We alone can be wracked with doubt, and we alone have been provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth-seeking methods. Wanting to keep better track of our food supplies, our territories, our families, our enemies, we discovered the benefits of talking it over with others, asking questions, passing on lore. We invented culture. Then we invented measuring, and arithmetic, and maps, and writing. These communicative and recording innovations come with a built-in ideal: truth. The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making maps is to find your way to your destination. … In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Postmodernism and truth (1998)

Truth, Family, Food, Way

“The cultured give happiness wherever they go. The uncultured whenever they go.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Happiness

“Cultural freedom is in special danger today because so much of our life has been politicized. … With governments which are popular and free, but which allow political sanction to pressures building up against certain types of cultural expression, … the pressure … moves to condemn on grounds which are social and political, and its desire is for uniformity, standardization, consolidation, and all the other features of Gleichschaltung, as it moves to protect from criticism and even from realistic depiction something over which people have become politically excited. In our American experience, these pressures have been largely social.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“The Importance of Cultural Freedom,” p. 20.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Life, People, Freedom

“My work will use everything that it can to communicate. It will use any trick; it'll do anything — absolutely anything — to communicate and to win the viewer over. Even the most unsophisticated people are not threatened by it; they aren't threatened that this is something they have no understanding of. They can look at it and they can participate with it. And also somebody who has been very highly educated in art and deals with more esoteric areas can also view it and find that the work is open as far as being something that wants to add more to our culture. The work wants to meet the needs of' the people. It tries to bring down all the barriers that block people From their culture. that shield and hide them. It tells them to embrace the moment instead of always feeling that they're being indulged by things that they do not participate in. It tells them to believe in something and to eject their will. The idea of St. John and baptism right now is that there are greater things to come. And it's about embracing guilt and shame and moving forward instead of letting this negative society always thwart us — always a more negative society, always more negative.”

Jeff Koons (1955) American artist

Partly cited in: Linda Weintraub, Arthur Coleman Danto, Thomas McEvilley. Art on the edge and over: searching for art's meaning in contemporary society, 1970s-1990s. Art Insights, Inc., 1996. p. 201; And cited in Kristine Stiles, ‎Peter Howard Selz (1996). Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings. p. 381
"From Full Phantom Five," 1988

People, Education, Art, Feeling

“A deeper understanding of cultural issues in organizations is necessary not only to decipher what goes on in them but, even more important, to identify what may be the priority issues for leaders and leadership. Organizational cultures are created by leaders, and one of the most decisive functions of leadership may well be the creation, the management, and--if and when that may become necessary--the destruction of culture. Culture and leadership, when one examines them closely, are two sides of the same coin, and neither can really be understood by itself. In fact, there is a possibility--underemphasized in leadership research--that the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture and that the unique talent of leaders is their ability to work with culture.”

Edgar H. Schein (1928) Psychologist

Source: Organizational Culture and Leadership, 1985, p. 2

Understanding, Decision

“The contemporary vegan movement is founded on loving-kindness and mindfulness of our effects on others. It is revolutionary because it transcends and renounces the violent core of the herding culture in which we live.”

Will Tuttle book The World Peace Diet

Source: The World Peace Diet (2005), Ch. 2

Love

“The operational sciences hoped to nourish business management, which however largely ignored them, and the latter continues to be undernourished by the business schools which are fairly broad but shallow everywhere. By over focus on short-range financial values, business management in the United States has lost a dozen major markets to the Japanese, added pollution in all its forms, and enriched itself out of all proportion to its value as just one factor of production.
Action science, developed by the social sciences over many years in relative isolation from the applied physical sciences, and which might otherwise have humanized them and made engineering more productive, was doomed to fail by being on one end of the two-culture problem wherein science and the humanities do not even speak the same language.
I could go on listing a few dozen paradigms: art, law, computer software design, medicine, politics, and architecture, each addressed to a certain context, level, or phase, each good in itself, but each limited to the fields of its origin and its purposes. The methodological problem is the same as if, in designing any large system, each subsystem designer were left to design each subsystem to the best requirements he knew. The overall requirement might not be met; overall harmony could not be achieved, and conflict could ensue to cause failure at the system level.
What is envisioned is a new synthesis, a unified, efficient, systems methodology (SM): a multiphase, multi-level, multi-paradigmatic creative problem-solving process for use by individuals, by small groups, by large multi-disciplinary teams, or by teams of teams. It satisfies human needs in seeking value truths by matching the properties of wanted systems, and their parts, to perform harmoniously with their full environments, over their entire life cycles”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi-xii, cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Life, Truth, School, Law

“With the main perpetrators of the 2000 coup around anything disastrous can happen. These people are the root of the coup culture and once they are put away this country can move forward.”

Maciu Navakasuasua Fijian political organizer

Source: "Interview, 11 January 2006", Fiji Sun http://www.sun.com.fj, 11 January 2006.

People, Country

“Why should conservatives care? We have every interest in seeing rock culture destroyed and crushed.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: "Die, Rock, Die!" by Jeffrey Tucker, The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, June 1997, UNZ.org, 2016-05-22 http://www.unz.org/Pub/RothbardRockwellReport-1997jun-00001,

“It is an honour to be invited to address this conference today. For some time the Australian Defence Organisation has formally observed International Women’s Day. That is altogether appropriate. However, as all of you are no doubt aware, such formalities are rendered much less meaningful unless they are underpinned by tangible progress for women. And that necessarily implies cultural change in environments which have not been as conducive as they must be to women realising their full potential.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Women, Change, Time

“Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.”

Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) English novelist

The Journals of Arnold Bennett, ed. Newman Flower (pub. Cassell, 1932)

Reading, Personality

“With a democratic society, the concept of multiculturalism is difficult to reconcile. Maybe in a very long term. But if you ask, where multicultural societies have so far worked, you can get very quickly to the conclusion that they only work there peacefully where there is a strong authoritarian state there. So, it was a mistake that we picked up at the beginning of the 60's guest workers from foreign cultures into the country.”

Helmut Schmidt (1918–2015) Chancellor of West Germany 1974-1982

Hamburger Abendblatt http://www.abendblatt.de/politik/deutschland/article290699/Wieviel-Anatolien-vertraegt-Europa.html, 24. November 2004

Strong, Country

“A strong economy and strong culture go hand in hand.”

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

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig Lecture (December 19, 2007)

Strong

“We do not and will not promote 'two Chinas', 'one China and one Taiwan' or 'Taiwan independence'. Taiwan and Mainland China share the common heritage. Both sides of the Taiwan Strait are part of the Chinese nation. Their people are descendants of the same ancestors. The people of mainland China and the people of Taiwan share a common bloodline, history and culture. And after five years of peaceful exchange, the two sides have created an unprecedented horizon for the Chinese nation, as well as set an example, not only for East Asia but also for the entire world, on how to settle disputes peacefully. With mutual non-recognition of sovereignty and mutual non-denial of jurisdiction as guiding principles, both sides should continue to expand and deepen their ties in areas such as commerce, culture, technology, environmental protection and human rights.”

Ma Ying-jeou (1950) Taiwanese politician, president of the Republic of China

Ma Ying-jeou (2013) cited in: " Gov't won't push 2 Chinas, independence: Ma http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/china-taiwan-relations/2013/04/30/377336/Govt-wont.htm" in The Taipei Times, 30 April 2013. Statement made during the 20th anniversary of Koo-Wang Talks at the Straits Exchange Foundation in Taipei, 28 April 2013. Strait issues

People, World, Peace, History

“I was very much influenced by the psychology of Freud and by early workers in the field of learning and memory—James, Thorndike, Pavlov, Skinner, and Ulric Neisser. Their thinking, and even their errors, provided a wonderfully rich cultural background for my later work.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

Error, Thinking, Learning, Memory

“India had never known a theocratic state till the advent of Islam in this country in the first quarter of the eighth century AD. Hindu Dharma has always been a pluralistic religion. Hindu culture and society too have been pluralistic throughout their hoary history. It was, therefore, impossible for the Hindus to erect an established church or to proclaim a state religion and call upon the State to impose it by force. The Hindu state extended its patronage to all religious sects equally, even when a king and his courtiers adhered to a particular sect in their private lives. Religious strife followed by bloodshed had never blackened the fair face of Hindu society. …The Hindu experience of a theocratic state was a very painful experience, spread as it was over several centuries. Even so, the Hindus did not learn any lessons in theocracy. The Hindu states which re-emerged under the Rajputs, the Marathas, the Sikhs, and the Jats were secular states….”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Defence of Hindu Society (1983)

Pain, Religion, History, Learning

“Keep in mind that the practice of dream interpretation is not generally useful for spiritual advancement. […] People codify things and events as positive or negative based on culture. Even within a culture there can be variations of codification. Thus, dream analysis by the average person often can lead to confusion due to personal speculation and mental gymnastics.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 25

People, Dreams, Personality

“…What I can't understand is why come here and try and change our country into the place that you've come from? And all I ask of people is come here, respect our country, respect our laws, our culture, our way of life. Be Australian, join us, enjoy this beautiful country and everything that it has to offer.”

Pauline Hanson (1954) Australian politician

Interview on Enough Rope (September 20, 2004) http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s1203646.htm

Life, People, Law, Beauty

“The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science, or outside of it, we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses. First, in the engineering sense: Science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But second, I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge – all information between human beings – can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma. It's a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance – and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair. The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930's, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it – the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.”

Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

Episode 11: "Knowledge or Certainty"
The Ascent of Man (1973)

World, Religion, History, Literature

“In Swami Dayananda's view, the term Arya was not coterminous with the term Hindu. The classical meaning of the word Arya is 'noble'. It is used as an honorific term of address, used in addressing the honoured ones in ancient Indian parlance. The term Hindu is reluctantly accepted as a descriptive term for the contemporary Hindu society and all its varied beliefs and practices, while the term Arya is normative and designates Hinduism as it ought to be…. Elsewhere in Hindu society, 'Arya' was and is considered a synonym for 'Hindu', except that it may be broader, viz. by unambiguously including Buddhism and Jainism. Thus, the Constitution of the 'independent, indivisible and sovereign monarchical Hindu kingdom' (Art.3:1) of Nepal take care to include the Buddhist minority by ordaining the king to uphold 'Aryan culture and Hindu religion' (Art.20: 1)…. The Arya Samaj's misgivings about the term Hindu already arose in tempore non suspecto, long before it became a dirty Word under Jawaharlal Nehru and a cause of legal disadvantage under the 1950 Constitution. Swami Dayananda Saraswati rightly objected that the term had been given by foreigners (who, moreover, gave all kinds of derogatory meanings to it) and considered that dependence on an exonym is a bit sub-standard for a highly literate and self-expressive civilization. This argument retains a certain validity: the self-identification of Hindus as 'Hindu' can never be more than a second-best option. On the other hand, it is the most practical choice in the short run, and most Hindus don't seem to pine for an alternative.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Who is a Hindu, (2001)

Religion, Art, Dependency

“But I'm pro-life because I believe life begins at conception, and I believe that we should do everything possible to protect that life because it is the centerpiece of what makes us unique as an American people. We value the life of one as if it's the life of all, and that's why we go out for the 12-year-old Boy Scout in North Carolina when he's lost; that's why we look for the 13 miners in Sago, West Virginia, when the mine explodes; that's why we go looking for the hikers in Mount Hood, because we value life, and it's what separates us from the Islamic jihadists who are out to kill us. They celebrate death. They have a culture of death. Ours is a culture of life.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

Republican Presidential Debate, South Carolina, 2007-05-15, quoted in [Republican Presidential Debate in South Carolina, 2007-05-15, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/us/politics/16repubs-text.html?pagewanted=11, 2011-03-01]
Republican Debates

Life, Death, People, Boy

“The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

Way, Knowledge, Thinking

“A man can trust his luck, but a society can’t; and cultural change, like random mutation, may make things chancier. So they have gone very slowly. At any one point in their history a hasty observer would say that all technological progress and diffusion had ceased. Yet it never has. Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 8 “Another Way into Orgoreyn” (p. 98)

History, Change

“Relations between India and China have been founded on solid understanding of the affinities of the cultures and the civilizations of the two countries, and the imperatives of peaceful co-existence and close co-operation between them in the post-cold war world. I believe that India-China friendship and co-operation could be a shining example of concord and harmonious relations between two ancient civilizations and the foundation for a just, stable and peaceful world order.”

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

Press Information Bureau in: Address By His Excellency Shri K.R. Narayanan, President Of The Republic Of India At Peking University http://pib.myiris.com/speech/article.php3?fl=010508171719, press Information Bureau, 30 May 2000

Friendship, War, World, Peace

Quotes about culture page 7

Quotes about culture
page 7