Quotes about culture
page 9

“No steak "every now and then," no ribs, no burgers, none of that. … Culturally there needs to be a change, and why not start with myself?”

Montell Owens (1984) American football player, running back

"Vegan athletes solve the 'protein problem'" https://abc7.com/archive/9060743/, interview with ABC 7 (April 10, 2013).

Change

“There is a continental culture. There is a Canadian culture that is in some ways unique to Canada, but I don't think Canadian culture coincides neatly with borders.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

Report Newsmagazine January 7, 2002.
2002

Way, Thinking

“I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40 per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate. Of course, I will be called racist but, if I can invite whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country.”

Pauline Hanson (1954) Australian politician

Maiden Speech (1996)

Religion, Home, Country

“There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

"The Purse-Seine" (1937)

Life, Death

“If they (Muslim women) wish to cover their faces and isolate themselves from the rest of the community and so thoroughly reject our culture then I cannot imagine why they want to be here at all. Perhaps they should just push off back to their own countries.”

Norman Tebbit (1931) English politician

[Private Eye, No. 1170, October 2006].

Women, Imagination, Communication, Country

“Whereas an Otaku is a true connoisseur of the culture, showing the same reverence and respectful distance which any true expert shows to their chosen field of expertise, the Weeaboo is like a socially awkward adolescent, ineptly trying to gain the social acceptance of Japanese people — because their unfortunate mental disorder has caused them to believe they are, in fact, Japanese.”

Alexei Maxim Russell (1976) Canadian writer

from The Japanophile's Handbook.

People

“The word qur’an means “recitation.” It was not designed for private perusal, but like most scriptures, it was meant to be read aloud, and the sound was an essential part of the sense. Poetry was important in Arabia. The poet was the spokesman, social historian, and cultural authority of his tribe, and over the years the Arabs had learned how to listen to a recitation and had developed a highly sophisticated critical ear.”

Karen Armstrong (1944) author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain

Muhammad: A Prophet of Our Times
Muhammad: A Biography of The Prophet (2001)

Sense, Learning, Reading, Parting

“Photography has fulfilled my adventurous side: it is a real trade. I behaved like a thief in every country where I went, in China, in Africa, in America… all things considered, our trade is situated somewhere between pickpocket and tightrope walker… yes, we steal from people, we take something that belongs to them: their image, their culture.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, Photographing Is Nothing, Looking Is Everything! Interview with Philippe Boegner (1989), p. 114

People, Country

“Institutions consist of cognitive, normative and regulative structures and activities that provide stability and meaning to social behaviour. Institutions are transported by various carriers – cultures, structures, and routines – and they operate at multiple levels of jurisdiction.”

W. Richard Scott (1932) American sociologist

Source: Institutions and Organizations., 1995, p. 33

“Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.”

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

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 72

Dependency

“I’m so sorry to hear this, but this is what it is. It makes it feels like it’s sort of my fault on some level, but it also connect be to those events, those first encounters between the two cultures must have been raw, terrifying, brutal and final. conflicts in early American history, known as King Philip’s War, or Metacom’s War, Lawrence Wilkinson defended his town in the face of fierce violence from the Native Americans.”

Meryl Streep (1949) American actress

"Meryl Streep's British ancestor 'helped start war with Native Americans," 2012

War, Feeling, History

“To make you cry I’ll tell you about the twelve young impure men I saw executed at Dacca at the end of the Bangladesh war. They executed them on the field of Dacca stadium, with bayonet blows to the torso or abdomen, in the presence of twenty thousand faithful who applauded in the name of God from the bleachers. They thundered "Allah akbar, Allah akbar." Yes, I know: the ancient Romans, those ancient Romans of whom my culture is so proud, entertained themselves in the Coliseum by watching the deaths of Christians fed to the lions. I know, I know: in every country of Europe the Christians, those Christians whose contribution to the History of Thought I recognize despite my atheism, entertained themselves by watching the burning of heretics. But a lot of time has passed since then, we have become a little more civilized, and even the sons of Allah ought to have figured out by now that certain things are just not done. After the twelve impure young men they killed a little boy who had thrown himself at the executioners to save his brother who had been condemned to death. They smashed his head with their combat boots. And if you don’t believe it, well, reread my report or the reports of the French and German journalists who, horrified as I was, were there with me. Or better: look at the photographs that one of them took. Anyway this isn’t even what I want to underline. It’s that, at the conclusion of the slaughter, the twenty thousand faithful (many of whom were women) left the bleachers and went down on the field. Not as a disorganized mob, no. In an orderly manner, with solemnity. They slowly formed a line and, again in the name of God, walked over the cadavers. All the while thundering Allah–akbar, Allah–akbar. They destroyed them like the Twin Towers of New York. They reduced them to a bleeding carpet of smashed bones.”

Oriana Fallaci (1929–2006) Italian writer

Rage and the Pride">

Death, Women, Men, God

“Language is the net that holds thought trapped within a particular culture. But if one could only strike the ball with sufficient force, with perfect timing, it would perhaps break through the netting, continue on its course, never fall to earth, but go into orbit around the world.”

David Lodge (1935) writer

Part II, ch. 2, p. 141.
Small World (1984)

World, Time, Perfection

“The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money.”

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

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Love, Money, Problem, Thinking

“I think faith in each other is much harder than faith in God or faith in crystals. I very rarely have faith in God; I occasionally have little spasms of it, but they go away, if I think hard enough about it. I am incandescent with rage at the idea of horoscopes and of crystals and of the nonsense of 'New Age', or indeed even more pseudo-scientific things: self-help, and the whole culture of 'searching for answers', when for me, as someone brought up in the unashamed Western tradition of music and poetry and philosophy, all the answers are there in the work that has been done by humanity before us, in literature, in art, in science, in all the marvels that have created this moment now, instead of people looking away. The image to me... is gold does exist, and for 'gold' say 'truth', say 'the answer', say 'love', say 'justice', say anything: it does exist. But the only way in this world you can achieve gold is to be incredibly intelligent about geology, to learn what mankind has learnt, to learn where it might lie, and then break your fingers and blister your skin in digging for it, and then sweat and sweat in a forge, and smelt it. And you will have gold, but you will never have it by closing your eyes and wishing for it. No angel will lean out of the bar of heaven and drop down sheets of gold for you. And we live in a society in which people believe they will. But the real answer, that there is gold, and that all you have to do is try and understand the world enough to get down into the muck of it, and you will have it, you will have truth, you will have justice, you will have understanding, but not by wishing for it.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

From Radio 4's Bookclub http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00f8l3b 2000s

Love, God, People, Truth

“These differences can make it difficult for female musicians to enter male-dominated musical cultures.”

Holly Kruse

Holly Kruse (1999). Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, pg. 94. Malden, Massachusetts. ISBN 0631212639.

Music

“The road to freedom lies in beating back the state, so that individuals may regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire, and generally, associate at will. As a paleolibertarian, however, my idea of liberty is never propositional–it is not a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

" Cathy Reisenwitz Redux: Steigerwald, Oy Vey Gevalt! https://thelibertarianalliance.com/2015/01/14/ilana-mercer-cathy-reisenwitz-redux-steigerwald-oy-gevalt/," Libertarian Alliance, January 14, 2015 2010s, 2015

History, Idea, Reality, Freedom

“The US has always taken velvet revolution into consideration by promoting Western culture in the society and by causing strife between people and the government through propaganda, organizing certain individuals, psychological warfare and making intentional use of media, intellectual circles, university student's establishments and feminism movements in order to implement its interfering policies.”

Ahmad Khatami (1960) Iranian ayatollah

Cleric says US seeks velvet revolution http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=16910&sectionid=351020101, Press TV, 20 Jul 2007. Velvet Revolution

People, Universe

“I coined the term feminized protein for eggs and dairy products: plant protein produced through the abuse of the reproductive cycle of female animals. Feminized protein is taken from living female animals, whose reproductive capacity is manipulated for human needs. The unique situation of domesticated female animals required its own term: a sexual slavery with chickens in battery cages and dairy cows hooked up to milking machines. … The radical truth is that people can be perfectly happy as vegans, but the dominant culture can’t or won’t acknowledge this. … Being vegan is an exciting, wonderful culinary experience and we probably don’t even know what’s possible because it’s still so new. … The process of objectification/fragmentation/consumption can be interrupted by the process of attention/nowness/compassion.”

Carol J. Adams (1951) author, animal rights activist

“ Why Vegan-Feminist? http://caroljadams.com/why-vegan-feminist/”, in caroljadams.com (2015). Retrieved on 18 June 2016.

Happiness, People, Truth, Animals

“Intellectual culture consists, not chiefly, as many are apt to think, in accumulating information, though this is important, but in building up a force of thought which may be turned at will on any subjects on which we are called to pass judgment. This force is manifested in the concentration of the attention, in accurate, penetrating observation, in reducing complex subjects to their elements, in diving beneath the effect to the cause, in detecting the more subtle differences and resemblances of things, in reading the future in the present, and especially in rising from particular facts to general laws or universal truths. … Oone man talks continually about the particular actions of this or another neighbor; whilst another looks beyond the acts to the inward principle from which they spring, and gathers from them larger views of human nature.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

Truth, Law, Spring, Nature

“The great attraction of cultural anthropology in the past was precisely that it seemed to offer such a richness of independent natural experiments; but unfortunately it is now clear that there has been a great deal of historical continuity and exchange among those "independent" experiments, most of which have felt the strong effect of contact with societies organized as modern states. More important, there has never been a human society with unlimited resources, of three sexes, or the power to read other people's minds, or to be transported great distances at the speed of light. How then are we to know the effect on human social organization and history of the need to scrabble for a living, or of the existence of males and females, or of the power to make our tongues drop manna and so to make the worse appear the better reason? A solution to the epistemological impotence of social theory has been to create a literature of imagination and logic in which the consequences of radical alterations in the conditions of human existence are deduced. It is the literature of science fiction. … [S]cience fiction is the laboratory in which extraordinary social conditions, never possible in actuality, are used to illumine the social and historical norm. … Science fiction stories are the Gedanken experiments of social science.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

" The Last of the Nasties? http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1996/feb/29/the-last-of-the-nasties," The New York Review of Books, 29 February 1996; Review of The Lost World by Michael Crichton

People, Sex, Imagination, History

“Your body will never be more connected to your mind than when something is at stake. That's how you measure the value of a movement: by its consequences. Climb a tree, throw a rock, balance on the edge of a cliff-- you lose focus for a fraction of a second, you're screwed. It takes a very affluent and indulged culture to convince itself that standing around in weird poses is exercise.”

Erwan Le Corre (1971)

Christopher McDougall (2015). Natural Born Heroes: How A Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance, Vintage.

Exercises, Tree

“Soon, I'll be like all the others. The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban Communists will remain as proof on this planet that if they are worked at with fervor and dignity, they can produce the material and cultural goods that human beings need, and we need to fight without a truce to obtain them.”

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

Speech after Raul was re-elected as head of the Communist party http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fidel-castro-gives-speech-saying-hes-nearing-the-end-of-his-life/

Idea, Time, Fight

“Pub culture does not suit our country and hence we should try to control it. We should not sell our tourism on pub culture.”

Shripad Yasso Naik (1952) Indian politician

On pub culture in Goa, as quoted in " Pub culture needs to be controlled: Tourism minister http://www.livemint.com/Politics/RfmbkAe4cjK98SuqoAshSM/Pub-culture-needs-to-be-controlled-Tourism-minister.html", Live Mint (13 July 2014)

Country

“The counterpart of such devotion to the commands of Jesus Christ is a thoroughgoing opposition to the institutions of culture. To Tolstoy these seem to be founded on a complex foundation of errors, including the acceptance of the inevitability of evil in man's present life, the belief that life is governed by external laws so that men cannot attain blessedness by their own efforts, the fear of death, the identification of true life with personal existence, and, above all, the practice of and belief in violence. Even less than Tertullian does he think that human corruption is resident in human nature; the evil with which men contend is in their culture only.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: Christ and Culture (1951), p. 60

Life, Death, Men, Fear

“In unambiguous terms, fundamentalist Islam has announced again and again that it despises the values, culture, and traditions of America. The American Left does too. Consistent with the Arabic proverb that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the American Left has formed an alliance with fundamentalist Islam to transform this country into something far removed from its Judeo-Christian origins and ideals. The mistake the Left is making is that its so-called progressive goals have nothing in common with the medieval tenants of fundamentalist Islam. Militant Muslims have no respect for American progressives, any more than they respect the very existence of Israel. Fundamentalist Islam is using the American Left to advance its own agenda.”

Chuck Hustmyre (1963) American journalist

2000s, 2009, The Left's love affair with Islam (2009)

Country

“The relation of the authority of Jesus Christ to the authority of culture is such that every Christian must often feel himself claimed by the Lord to reject the word and its kingdoms with their pluralism and temporalism, their makeshift compromises of many interests, their hypnotic obsession by the love of life and the fear of death.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: Christ and Culture (1951), p. 68

Love, Life, Death, Fear

“I believe a constitution can permit the co-existence of several cultures and ethnic groups with a single state.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

As quoted in Prime Ministers (2000) by Rennay Craats

“The behavior and reactions of the oppressed, which lead the oppressor to practice cultural invasion, should evoke from the revolutionary a different theory of action. What distinguishes revolutionary leaders from the dominant elite is not only their objectives, but their procedures.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Source: Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970), Chapter 4, Cultural Invasion

Behavior

“Zen is a form of liberation - being liberated from Yin and Yang elements, and enabling you to remain calm and cool when you are troubled. Zen is not something definite and tangible, it is a refuge for mental solace. Zen is about concentration of mind. It is a profound culture, enabling people to gain spiritual tranqulity and be awakened. Even though not a word is spoken, it enables one to gain a thorough understanding of the truth of life. This is what we call the harmony between Yin and Yang. It is like a substance deep in your soul, generating a kind of wisdom and energy in your mind. It is also a kind of energy of self-confidence, helping you to achieve self-emancipation, self-regulation and self-perfection, leading you to the path of success. As such, Buddhism talks about ‘Faith, Commitment, and Action’. The theory, when applied in the human realm, is all about Zen. Concentration gives rise to wisdom. With concentration, the mind will be focused and it will not be drifting apart. Hence, the problem of schizophrenia will not arise. Zen culture is about the state of mind. It is a kind of positive energy! Positive energy is a kind of compassion, which enables people to understand each other when they encounter problems, to understand the country and society at large, and to understand their family and children, colleagues and friends. In this way, people will be able to live in peaceful co-existence and remain calm when they are faced with problems. When you see things in perspective using rationality and positive energy, you are able to change your viewpoint pertaining to a certain issue. This is the moment Zen arises in your mind! In fact, Zen is within you. This theory is very profound.”

Jun Hong Lu (1959) Australian Buddhist leader

10 October 2013
Special Interview by People' Daily, Europe Edition

Life, Wisdom, Children, People

“It was not the inexperienced art public that became American Scenists. It was the artists themselves, a highly sophisticated group, thoroughly familiar with the art work and the art traditions of the world, who had flocked to Paris to participate in the great cultural center, who were very conscious of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists revolutions, who fell for this propaganda [to strive for a pure national American art]. It is upon them that responsibility falls. Their support of this reactionary philistinism is an inexcusable betrayal... It is time for the artists to wake up and re-examine their aesthetic foundations; to rid themselves of the millstone that has made art in America an expensive picture postcard-factory... It is time that artists refused isolationist money, repudiated the art dealers, the favor of the museum directors. It is time artists forgot about success..”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Quote of 1942; in Barnett Newman', by Thomas B. Hess, museum of Modern art, New York 1971; as cited in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 124-125
1940 - 1950

Money, World, Art, Support

“Will the American Southwest become a giant Kosovo, a part of the nation separated from the rest by language, ethnicity, history and culture, to be reabsorbed in all but name by Mexico from whom we took these lands in the time of Jackson and Polk?”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, State of Emergency (2006)

History, Time, Parting

“Girls wanting a night out may be all right elsewhere but it is not part of Indian culture.”

Mahesh Sharma (1959) Indian politician

As quoted in " Girls Night Out Against Indian Culture: Union Culture Minister http://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/Girls-Night-Out-Against-Indian-Culture-Union-Culture-Minister/2015/09/19/article3035994.ece" The New Indian Express (19 September 2015)

Girl, Parting, Night

“The genius of culture is to create an ontological system so compelling that what is inside and outside of a person are viewed as of a piece, no seams and patches noticeable.”

Richard Shweder (1945) American anthropologist

"Cultural Psychology — What Is It?", Cultural Psychology (1990)

Personality

“Having a good and cultured family background was not enough to be successful in politics. One should live amidst farmers, till land, and tend cows and buffaloes.”

H. D. Deve Gowda (1933) Indian politician

On being compared with Hegde, a suave opponent Source: Gopal K. Kadekodi, et al., Development in Karnataka: Challenges of Governance, Equity, and Empowerment http://books.google.co.in/books?id=YpjqJz_RbncC&pg=PA99&dq=Devegowda&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Lpy6U9fAJ4ejkwXp54DwDA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Devegowda&f=false, Academic Foundation, 2008 P.98

Family, Success

“As educators of linguistically and culturally diverse students we face choices with respect to how we view language and human potential. Is language the means of interpreting our increasingly complex world and mobilizing intellect, imagination, and identity to create new knowledge and act on social realities or is it simply a set of sounds and symbols and the codes that bind them? Can our society benefit from all the intelligence, imagination, and multilingual talent it can get or should schools develop these attributes only among a privileged elite while focusing on English-only basic skills for those constructed as incapable of independent learning?”

Jim Cummins (professor) (1949) professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

Language and the Human Spirit (2003)

World, Education, School, Imagination

“It is part of our identity as Hindus and the Festival of Lights is today a celebration of the beauty of our culture, our Hindu values which, let me assure you, are second to none in the world.”

Mahendra Chaudhry (1942) Fijian politician

"Diwali is an integral part of Hindu culture" http://www.flp.org.fj/n021102.htm - speech at Diwali celebrations in Ba, 2 November 2002

World, Beauty, Light, Parting

“[Merton states that anomie represents] An acute disjunction between the cultural norms and goals and the socially structured capacities of members of the group to act in accord with them.”

Robert K. Merton book Social Theory and Social Structure

Source: Social Theory and Social Structure (1949), p. 162 (1957 edition) as cited in: John H. Scanzoni (1970) Opportunity and the family. p. 55

“Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization's makeup and success — along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like… I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.”

Louis Gerstner (1942) American businessman

Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? (2002)

People, Game, Time, Success

“Before the blank canvas, the unrealized work, completely in the artist’s head, must seem to him equal to the greatest. To say that which has never been said – is the reason for all artistic work. But only outside of the work should the artist worthily get down on his knees before the great artists of the past... Rembrandt in our days would be Rembrandt again, because the work of the master is his self. But in order to be Rembrandt in our days, he would have used new ways that would give a new culture.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona

Way, Past

“No, you cannot expect people to understand the higher reaches of philosophy. Culture should be taken out of the hands of the dollar chasers. We need a national subsidy for literature. It is disgraceful that artists are treated like peddlers and that art works have to be sold like soap.”

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) German philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist

Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (1968)

People, Art, Literature, Understanding

“The effects of Asian contacts on Europe, though considerably less, cannot be considered insignificant. The growth of capitalism in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in itself a profound and revolutionary change, is intimately connected with the expansion of European trade and business into Asia. The political development of the leading Western European nations during this period was also related to their exploitation of their Asian possessions and the wealth they derived from the trade with and government of their Eastern dependencies. Their material life, as reflected in clothing, food, beverages, etc., also bears permanent marks of their Eastern contacts. We have already dealt briefly with the penetration of cultural, artistic and philosophical influences, though their effects cannot still be estimated. Unlike the Rococo movement of the eighteenth century, the spiritual and cultural reactions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are deeper, and have not yet fully come to the surface. The influence of Chinese literature and of Indian philosophical thought, to mention only two trends which have become important in recent years, cannot be evaluated for many years to come. Yet it is true, as T. S. Eliot has stated, that most modern poets in Europe have in some measure been influenced by the literature of China. Equally the number of translations of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, which have been appearing every year, meant not for Orientalists and scholars but for the educated public, and the revival of interest in the religious experience of India, are sufficient to prove that a penetration of European thought by Oriental influences is now taking place which future historians may consider to be of some significance.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

Life, Education, Food, Literature

“The conclusions are self-evident, so I just state them. Electoral winners and losers obey the results of democratic competition and thus democracy is sustained merely as a consequence of political forces pursuing their interests. Whether this explanation is sufficient or some cultural patterns are necessary for democracy to endure is just hard to tell, as is whether democracy can survive even when it is not supported by economic self-interest.”

Adam Przeworski (1940) Polish-American academic

Chapter 5. "Why Do Political Parties Obey Results of Elections?" in Democracy and the Rule of Law (2003) edited by José María Maravall and Adam Przeworski

Democracy, Support

“If running a productive, Western-style economy were simply a matter of culture, it should be possible for African and Middle Eastern countries to import Western institutions and business methods, just as East Asian countries have done. But this is evidently not a straightforward task. Though it was justifiable at first to blame the evils of colonialism, two generations or more have now passed since most foreign powers withdrew from Africa and the Middle East, and the strength of this explanation has to some extent faded.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014)

Business, Evil, Country

“Celebrating our culture is very important to me. But one thing I cannot support is the senseless killing of animals in bullfights. From the moment the bull enters the ring, he’s destined to die. Outnumbered, frightened, even drugged or injured, his death will be slow and painful. … Tradition is no excuse for cruelty.”

Patricia de Leon (actress) (1976) Actress, model, television host

"Patricia De León: Bullfighting" https://www.peta.org/videos/patricia-de-len-bullfighting/, video for PETA (September 2010).

Death, Pain, Support, Animals

“Sociologists and anthropologists have long been concerned with how individuals are linked to one another and how these bonds of affiliation serve as both a lubricant for getting things done and a glue that provides order and meaning to social life. The attention to networks of association, which began in earnest in the 1970s, provided welcome texture and dynamism to portraits of social life. This work stood in stark contrast to the reigning approaches in the social sciences. In contrast to deterministic cultural (oversocialized) accounts, network analysis afforded room for human agency, and in contrast to individualist, atomized (undersocialized) approaches, networks emphasized structure and constraint (Granovetter, 1985). Network studies offered a middle ground, a third way, even if no one was quite sure whether networks were a metaphor, a method, or a theory (Barnes 1979). But the sociologists and anthropologists who initially studied networks did not pay sustained attention to economic activity, although some industrial sociologists (Roy, 1954; Dalton, 1959) had long stressed the role of informal networks as an antidote to formal organization practices and structures.”

Walter W. Powell (1948) American sociologist

Walter W. Powell and Laurel Smith-Doerr. "Networks and economic life." The handbook of economic sociology. (1994). p. 368-380; introduction.

Life, Way, Study, Science

“But his genetic and physical inference from cases of ethnic durability cannot account for the considerable variability, wide range and frequent absorptions and dissolutions of instances of ethnic affiliation, and the fact that many ethnies have undergone large-scale changes of culture and, in some cases, of demography. This is the case even in such a culturally long-lived example as the Greeks, where undoubted evidence of massive rupture of demographic continuity by the influx of Albanians and Slavs on the Greek mainland from the sixth to eighth centuries AD and of considerable, though not complete, culture change after the conversion to Orthodoxy, call into question the continuity and influence of a common ancient Greek biological and genetic inheritance on modern Greeks.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: Nationalism and Modernism (1998), p. 150.

Question, Change

“The defects of German philosophy are those of professionalism: a closed atmosphere, books instead of life, inability to communicate discoveries to the world at large, contempt for good style, inbreeding, lack of general culture, gruesome earnestness. The defects of the cultured philosophe are those of amateurism: too many interests, superficiality, the cultivation of good style as an end in itself, the sacrifice of truth to wit, lack of intellectual honesty, philosophizing but no philosophy, inconsistency. Nietzsche achieves a balance between these two types of mind and two styles of expression: he is profound but not obscure; he aims at good style but reconciles it with good thinking; he is serious but not earnest; he is a sensitive critic of the arts and of culture but not an aesthete; he is an aphorist and epigrammist, but his aphorisms and epigrams derive from a consistent philosophy; he is the wittiest of philosophers, but he rarely succumbs to the temptation to sacrifice truth to a witty phrase; he has many interests but never loses sight of his main interests. He achieves, especially in his later works, a conciseness and limpidity notoriously rare in German writing: no modern thinker of a like profundity has had at his command so flexible an instrument of expression.”

R. J. Hollingdale (1930–2001) British Author

1. The Child
Nietzsche (1965, 1999)

Life, Truth, Books, World

“Culture has led us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption.”

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

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)

Pleasure

“[On what she learned from working on The L Word] I think that I learned the most clearly was how connected we all are. And that (does air quotation marks) "gay issues" are also women's issues because homophobia is a form of misogyny…And I feel much more motivated to speak out when I see something that I don't like or that just smells wrong…I see how all women are connected. You know, and that we are all either repressed or we repress ourselves in certain ways, and that's truly codified within the culture. And that I'm not so far removed from that woman in the Congo who's terrified to go out into the woods to look for firewood.”

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

New York Times Talks Panel (20 April 2009) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeZgJ3EJrbE.

Women, Way, Feeling, Motivation

“Anyone who loves nature, as I do, cries out at the havoc being spread by humans, all over the globe. The pressures of city life can be appalling, as are the moral ambiguities that plague us, both at home and via yammering media. The temptation to seek uncomplicated certainty sends some rushing off to ashrams and crystal therapy, while many dive into the shelter of fundamentalism, and other folk yearn for better, “simpler” times. Certain popular writers urgently prescribe returning to ancient, nobler ways.
Ancient, nobler ways. It is a lovely image... and pretty much a lie. John Perlin, in his book A Forest Journey, tells how each prior culture, from tribal to pastoral to urban, wreaked calamities upon its own people and environment. I have been to Easter Island and seen the desert its native peoples wrought there. The greater harm we do today is due to our vast power and numbers, not something intrinsically vile about modern humankind.
Technology produces more food and comfort and lets fewer babies die. “Returning to older ways” would restore some balance all right, but entail a holocaust of untold proportion, followed by resumption of a kind of grinding misery never experienced by those who now wistfully toss off medieval fantasies and neolithic romances. A way of life that was nasty, brutish, and nearly always catastrophic for women.
That is not to say the pastoral image doesn’t offer hope. By extolling nature and a lifestyle closer to the Earth, some writers may be helping to create the very sort of wisdom they imagine to have existed in the past. Someday, truly idyllic pastoral cultures may be deliberately designed with the goal of providing placid and just happiness for all, while retaining enough technology to keep existence decent.
But to get there the path lies forward, not by diving into a dark, dank, miserable past. There is but one path to the gracious, ecologically sound, serene pastoralism sought by so many. That route passes, ironically, through successful consummation of this, our first and last chance, our scientific age.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Afterword (p. 563)
Glory Season (1993)

Love, Life, Wisdom, Women

“Nevertheless, music will not acknowledge a context greater than itself—social, cultural, or biographical—to which it is conveniently subservient. To paraphrase Goethe's grandiose warning to the scientist: do not look behind the notes, they themselves are the doctrine.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 3 : Explaining the Obvious

Music

“While National Socialism brought about a new version and formulation of European culture, Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself. It is not only anti-bourgeois, it is anti-cultural. It means, in the final consequence, the absolute destruction of all economic, social, state, cultural, and civilizing advances made by western civilization for the benefit of a rootless and nomadic international clique of conspirators, who have found their representation in Jewry.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Speech at the Nazi party Congress at Nuremberg (September 1935) http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb58.htm 1930s

War

“Some of the most productive times in the histories of nations have been when they were badly stressed — economically, politically, culturally or socially. It's possible to be stressed to a point that more creativity is stimulated than would otherwise be the case. I think it is true that necessity is the mother of invention.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Global Ideas from Pluto's Challenger (May 21, 2009)

History, Thinking, Time

“Our people have had the honor to be among those who founded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Despite the innumerable errors, both large and small, it is an undeniable fact that only as a part of the USSR have our people been able to survive Turkish invasion, live within secure borders, and progress economically and culturally. In spite of the current criticisms expressed from every quarter, it is a fact that the inhabitants of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic today enjoy a higher standard of living and more security than have Armenians at any other time in their three thousand year history. And all of this has taken place in the face of enormous challenges, including foreign invasion, economic isolation, civil war and an unimaginably costly World War.”

Monte Melkonian (1957–1993) National Hero of Armenia

“National Self-Determination or National Suicide?” p. 165. The article was originally written in Armenian, dated October 24, 1988, and posted form Poissy Prison, in France. It was first published in the first edition of The Right to Struggle, 1990.
The Right to Struggle (1993)

War, People, World, Error

“Ukraine has managed to preserve their language and culture, and national pride, which made it possible to assemble the force that could stand up to Russia. Belarusians, on the contrary, had been robbed, taking the national history and make sure that by 1917 the country did not exist, and all that it has today — thanks to Russia. People are deprived of their history and national identity, will not go to the square to fight for something that does not feel or understand.”

Uladzimir Nyaklyayew (1946) Belarusian politician and writer

Некляев в Вашингтоне http://naviny.by/rubrics/politic/2016/04/01/ic_articles_112_191337 // naviny.by (in Russian)

People, Feeling, History, Understanding

“Classical music has struggled to keep up. Unlike any other art form, it keeps on looking backwards all the time. It used to have a real museum culture. Then it went: "Oh my God, what are we going to do? Call for Nigel Kennedy. Quick!" Classical musicians have got to change or die,' she asserts strongly, 'but they just don't know how to. Audiences for classical music have dropped. The old blue rinse audience is dying out, and young people aren't coming in.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

On Classical Music

God, People, Art, Music

“Rather than calling attention to the house of mirrors, that passes for empirical truth (as postmodern acadimics did), and rather than fighting for better mirrors (as the ID warriors did), today's media activists are concentrating on shattering the impenetrable shiny surfaces of branded culture, picking up the pieces and using them as sharp weapons in a war of actions, not ideas.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

Source: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies 1999, Chapter Five: "The Patriarchy Gets Funky"

War, Truth, Idea, Fight

“By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.”

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

1960s, Counterblast (1969)

“Throughout the Near East lay rare tinder for anti-Western propaganda: a Moslem culture and history, bitter Arab nationalism galled by Jewish immigration under British protection and with massive American financial support, the remnants of a colonial status, and a sense of grievance that a vast natural resource was being extracted by foreigners under arrangements thought unfair to those living on the surface. This tinder could be, and was, lighted everywhere…”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Middle East

History, Support, Nature, Sense

“We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture.”

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

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 16

“Under its first two Indian editors [The Illustrated Weekly] became a vehicle of Indian culture devoting most of its pages to art, sculpture, classical dance and pretty pictures of flowers, birds, and dencing belles. It did not touch controversial subjects, was strictly apolitical and asexual (save occasional blurred reproductions of Khajuraho or Konarak). It earned a well-deserved reputation for dull respectability. I changed all that. What was a four-wheeled victoria taking well-draped ladies out to eat the Indian air I made a noisy rumbustious, jet-propelled vehicle of information, controversy and amusement. I tore up the unwritten norms of gentility, both visual and linguistic…. And slowly the circulation built up, till the Illustrated did become a weekly habit of the English-reading pseudo-elite of the country. It became the most widely read journal in Asia (barring Japan) because it reflected all the contending points of view on every conceivable subject: politics, economics, religion, and the arts.”

Khushwant Singh (1915–2014) Indian novelist and journalist

In Khushwant Singh's editor's page http://books.google.co.in/books?id=sNBOAAAAMAAJ, IBH Pub. Co., 1981, p. 4

Religion, Art, Flowers, Bird

“But here I stop—short of any deterministic speculation that attributes specific behaviors to the possession of specific altruist or opportunist genes. Our genetic makeup permits a wide range of behaviors—from Ebenezer Scrooge before to Ebenezer Scrooge after. I do not believe that the miser hoards through opportunist genes or that the philanthropist gives because nature endowed him with more than the normal complement of altruist genes. Upbringing, culture, class, status, and all the intangibles that we call “free will,” determine how we restrict our behaviors from the wide spectrum—extreme altruism to extreme selfishness—that our genes permit.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Ever Since Darwin

"So Cleverly Kind an Animal", p. 266
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

Behavior, Nature, Selfishness

“Over the years and against conventional wisdom, utopians sustained a vision of life beyond the market. … Georg Lukács set forth a theory of the “old and new culture” in which he argued that the socialist economy was not the goal; it was simply a precondition for humanity to advance to a new and humane culture. Most radicals do not understand that political power and economic reorganization is not the end-all, stated Lukács. The goal is not a new economic order, but freedom from an obsession with economics.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), p. 27

Life, Wisdom, Understanding, Freedom

“Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits. Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories. Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control.”

Robert Smithson (1938–1973) American artist

Cultural Confinement, 1972

Art, Imagination, Support

“The mandate entails a generous synthesis of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. The title requires the expert to be truly independent, keep an open mind, conduct his/her research objectively and without ideological prejudices, listen to all sides of an argument and seek the opinion of all stakeholders.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Alfred de Zayas Statement by on his personal website http://alfreddezayas.com. 2013

“It seemed strange to me that someone who painted big, scary abstractions should have been so commonsensical in her literary tastes, though later I would discover that twelve-tone composers read Keats just as experimental poets listened to Glenn Miller — few people are avant-garde outside their own domain.I suppose that as Midwesterners, the children of chemical engineers and homemakers, we experienced the arts as so foreign, even so preposterously unreasonable, that once we’d decided to embrace them we did so with lots of conviction and little discrimination. Surely it was no accident that T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the two great poetic synthesists of our day, the very men who had ransacked all of world culture and could refer in the same poem to the Buddha and to Sophocles or to Confucius and to Jefferson — it was no accident that they were both from the heartland. Public-library intellectuals, magpies of knowledge, like most autodidacts we were incapable of evaluating our sources. As a teen-ager, I tried to write verse like Milton’s; later, I wanted to write novels like Nabokov’s. In a novel I wrote in college, I imitated Evelyn Waugh. If someone had said to me, "But do you, the graceless son of a Cincinnati broker of chemical equipment, do you seriously imagine that you can just write a Renaissance Christian epic or something in the style of a Cambridge-educated Russian aristocrat or of the spokesman of the Bright Young Things of London circa 1925?"”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

if someone had spoken like this to me, I wouldn’t even have understood his point. My Women.The New Yorker https://archive.is/20121204150452/www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050613fa_fact 6 June 2005 Articles and Interviews

Men, Children, People, World

“Agriculture has been and remains a “catastrophe” at all levels, the one which underpins the entire material and spiritual culture of alienation now destroying us. Liberation is impossible without its dissolution”

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

Elements of Refusal (1988)

“Technical problems can be remediated. A dishonest corporate culture is much harder to fix.”

Bruce Schneier (1963) American computer scientist

Visa and Amex Drop CardSystems, Schneier, Bruce, 2005-08-15, Cryptogram newsletter, 2006-09-08 http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0508.html#16,

Problem

“In 1978 I was on a parliamentary delegation to Japan and returned via China during the Cultural Revolution, a choice also made by young Winston Churchill, then the Conservative MP for Stretford. I was debriefed by the Minister for Information who asked if there was anything at all I would like to ask. I said: "Yes. Everything you do, you do with extreme care and precision. When I ask questions that your government does not like, my driver calls for me five minutes later than arranged. When I ask if there are any blind or handicapped children in China, I get cabbage soup for dinner."Now I am in your country with a colleague, than whom I am older, have been in parliament longer, have held higher positions in our respective political parties: we are both staying at the Peking Palace Hotel and his suite is bigger than mine. Why?"The Minister, very embarrassed, finally said: "It is because Mr Churchill had a famous grandfather."It is the only time that I have been out-grandfathered.”

Clement Freud (1924–2009) English broadcaster, writer, politician and chef

Some questions of interpretation

Children, Question, Time, Country

“Never before has the boundary between geek culture and mainstream culture been so porous.”

Noam Cohen (1999) American journalist

Noam, Cohen, The New York Times, We're All Nerds Now, September 13, 2014, October 29, 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/sunday-review/were-all-nerds-now.html,

“So there is no single European people. There is no single all-embracing community of culture and tradition among, say, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Berlin and Belgrade. In fact, there are at least four communities: the Northern Protestant, the Latin Catholic, the Greek Orthodox, and the Muslim Ottoman. There is no single language - there are more than twenty. (…) There are no real European political parties (…). And most significantly of all: unlike the United States, Europe still does not have a common story.”

Geert Mak (1946) Dutch journalist and a non-fiction writer

Geert Mak, Europe as a cultural project http://www.eurocult.org/uploads/docs/712.pdf, 2005

People, Communication

“The most beautiful things in this country have the flavor of other places. Chinese food. Pizza came from the Italians, but it's an American experience. French fries. There's always some other cultures involved. You don't have to be a hyphenated American, but you can certainly be an American who doesn't forget where they came from.”

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

quoted in commentary on www.orlandosentinel.com (July 6, 2007)
2007, 2008

Food, Beauty, Country, Forgetting

“You open London Times and you find reviews of Western classical music concerts finding pride of place even if the concerts themselves have less than 200 people in a hall meant for 1,500. They do this because they want to highlight what they see as their socio-cultural legacy.”

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

Quote, I've never wanted to fit in Abbaji's shoes: Ustad Zakir Hussain

People, Music, Time

“A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization.”

Matthew Stover book Blade of Tyshalle

(I.3) Del Rey, p. 74
Blade of Tyshalle (2001)

Life, Happiness

“The ‘Romeo and Juliet’ story, we’re so past that. I have a very deep respect for art, but I also think we have a lot to learn from pop culture. And that is the future. Either you can ignore it and be stuck in the past, or you can learn from it.”

Danny Tidwell (1984) American dancer

In response to critics and ballet fans who say Tidwell "sold-out" by auditioning on So You Think You Can Dance La Rocco Claudia. "TV Viewers Discover Dance, and the Debate Is Joined" http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/arts/dance/21revo.html?ref=dance#, The New York Times, September 21, 2007

Art, Thinking, Learning, Past

“…the differences between U. S. and Japanese companies go beyond the cultural.”

Akio Morita (1921–1999) Japanese businessman

Source: Made in Japan (1986), p. 179.

“We are being protected from hysteria. Isn't that what they call it? Maniacs! The world's been in a habitual state of crisis for fifty years. Fifty? What am I saying? It's been in a habitual state of crisis since the beginning — but for half a century now, almost unbearable. And why, for the love of God? What is the fundamental irritant, the essence of the tension? Political philosophies? Economics? Population pressure? Disparity of culture and creed? Ask a dozen experts, get a dozen answers. Now Lucifer again. Is the species congenitally insane, Brother?”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 24
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Voluntas Tua

Love, God, World

“Many well-meaning Dutch people have told me in all earnestness that nothing in Islamic culture incites abuse of women, that this is just a terrible misunderstanding. Men all over the world beat their women, I am constantly informed. In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience or their community. I wanted my art exhibit to make it difficult for people to look away from this problem. I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that "Islam is peace and tolerance."”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Chapter 16: Politics

Women, Men, People, World

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

Source: Projective methods for the study of personality (1939), p. 402-403; As cited in: Edwin Inglee Megargee, Charles Donald Spielberger (1992) Personality assessment in America: a retrospective on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Society for Personality Assessment. p. 20-21

Life, World, Way, Feeling