c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The power we discover inside ourselves as we survive a life-threatening experience can be utilized equally well outside of crisis, too. I am, in every moment, capable of mustering the strength to survive again—or of tapping that strength in other good, productive, healthy ways.
— Michele Rosenthal, Before the World Intruded
We're freaks, the two of us, Franny and I. I'm a twenty-five-year-old freak and she's a twenty-one-year-old freak, and both those bastards are responsible. I swear to you, I could murder them both without batting an eyelash. The great teachers. The great emancipators. My God. I can't even sit down to lunch with a man any more and hold up my end of a decent conversation. I either get so bored or so goddamn preachy that if the son of a bitch had any sense, he'd break his chair over my head
— J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
When you are an outcast, even a tossed stone can be cherished.
— Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
There are mighty few people who think what they think they think.
— Robert Henri, The Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students, Bearing on the Concept and Technique of Picture Making, the Study of Art
Recognize that there's something AMAZING about you. Everyone has something that comes very natural for them - natural gifts and talents. That gift/talent is that thing or things that comes easy for you, but hard for most. The greatness that is stored within was given to you, because it was meant to be used. Whether you've been running from it or haven't discovered it yet, it's there. It's your job to discover and master it. It wasn't given to you in vain, it's part of your purpose.
— Yvonne Pierre, The Day My Soul Cried:  A Memoir
The eye of your mind—your intelligence
—  the eye of your heart—your conscience
One makes discoveries about oneself but more often one makes up discoveries.
— Sara Levine, Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present
What did she do that made her happy? The question implied action, a conscious purpose. She did many things in a day, and many things made her happy, but that, Claire could tell, wasn’t the issue. Nor the only one, Claire realized. Because in order to consciously do something that made you happy, you’d have to know who you were. Trying to figure that out these days was like fishing on a lake on a moonless night—you had no idea what you would get.
— Erica Bauermeister, The School of Essential Ingredients
We always find something, eh Didi, to let us think we exist?
— Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
In the end, the sum of my vices is all me.
— Melina Marchetta, Quintana of Charyn
A real secret is something which only one person knows.
— Idries Shah, Reflections
I can't say I know at this moment what all these laws are. But on some level everybody knows that we are all getting exactly what we deserve.
— Thaddeus Golas, The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment
The enemy is within, and within stays within, and we can’t get out of within.
— Arthur Miller
The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?
— Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
As the leaf takes its time finding the ground so must I.
— Cory Basil, Skinny Dipping in Daylight
Was this new self awareness a gift or a curse?
— D. Morgenstern
The destination isn't in finding yourself. The destination is in the search.
— Thomas Warfield
While there are many that journey who seek, not all that travel will find, for they are bound by what they have been taught and not of what they know.”- The Tapestry of Spirit
— Erik Paul Rocklin
The basis of all reasoning is the mind's awareness of itself. What we think, the external objects we perceive, are all like actors that come on and off stage. But our consciousness, the stage itself, is always present to us.
— Trey Parker
I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each.
— Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles
To be or not to be that is the question.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
They speak very well of you".- "They speak very well of everybody."- "That so bad?"- "Yes. It means you can´t trust them.
— Iain M. Banks
They stared at each other, wanting each other, drawn to each other, but their silent shout of love went unheard in the roar of misunderstanding, and the clatter of culturally ingrained beliefs.
— Jean M. Auel, The Mammoth Hunters
Settling into a new country is like getting used to a new pair of shoes. At first they pinch a little, but you like the way they look, so you carry on. The longer you have them, the more comfortable they become. Until one day without realizing it you reach a glorious plateau. Wearing those shoes is like wearing no shoes at all. The more scuffed they get, the more you love them and the more you can't imagine life without them.
— Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams
It was always so hot, and everyone was so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and secrets.
— James McBride, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.
— Edward Albee
Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.
— Michael Crichton, The Lost World
If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably—after careful considerations of their relative merits—choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best.
— Herodotus, The Histories
She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
If you've spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you've probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this! This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence! It's supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware! And this is idiotic. It's the saddest kind of failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused. All those extraneous exclamation points are like little splatters of canned laughter: They represent the "form of funny," which is more easily understood (and more easily constructed) than authentic funniness. 
— Chuck Klosterman, Eating the Dinosaur
Our culture places a very high premium on self-expression, but is relatively disinterested in producing "selves" that are worth expressing.
— Matthew Kelly, Rediscover Catholicism
We live in a society and a culture and an economic model that tries to make everything look right. Look at computers. Why are they all putty-colored or off-fucking-white? You make something off-white or beige because you are afraid to use any other color – because you don’t want to offend anybody. But by definition, when you make something no one hates, no one loves it. So I am interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability. That’s what we really pay attention to anyway. We don’t talk about planes flying; we talk about them crashing.
— Tibor Kalman
I believe Western culture -- rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. -- is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.
— Mark Steyn
Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter that these people's dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I -- or does anyone else -- have to destroy them.At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?
— Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization
Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don't tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute appreciation. It's fairly sexy. Of course I don't know how these men behave at home, if they help with the cooking or are vain and boorish and mistreat their wives. I realized Mediterranean cultures have their issues. Fine, don't burst my bubble. I didn’t want to marry these guys, I just wanted to watch. (p. 247)
— Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
What a culture we live in, we are swimming in an ocean of information, and drowning in ignorance.
— Richard Paul Evans, A Step of Faith
Perfect sanity is a myth propagated by straitjacket salesmen.
— Rebecca McKinsey
no human culture is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to understand, to learn, to inhabit another world.
— Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.
— Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays
The world needs to see Christians burning, not with self-righteous fury at the sliding morals in our country, but with passion for God.
— Kevin DeYoung
Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture? 
— David Bohm
Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.
— Clifford Geertz
In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.
— David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?
One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway… We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking… The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.
— Richard Rohr
Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.
— Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
I had no songs in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway. Songs about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children, Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon, floods, union hall fires, darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers weren't for radiophiles. There was nothing easygoing about the folk songs I sang. They weren't friendly or ripe with mellowness. They didn't come gently to the shore. I guess you could say they weren't commercial.Not only that, my style was too erratic and hard to pigeonhole for the radio, and songs, to me, were more important that just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic. Greil Marcus, the music historian, would some thirty years later call it "the invisible republic."Whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. i just thought of popular culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk on it.I didn't know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was. Nobody bothered with that. If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs taught me that.
— Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1
If you really want to change a culture to empower women improve basic hygiene and health care and fight high rates of infant mortality the answer is to educate girls.
— Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time
...quality of life lies in knowledge, in culture. Values are what constitute true quality of life, the supreme quality of life, even above food, shelter and clothing.
— Fidel Castro, My Life: A Spoken Autobiography
If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most importent challenge of our times.
— Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without a culture anymore.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions
The sense of perspective that interaction with multiple cultures gives you I find to be extremely valuable, because it allows you to see the structure of a country with greater clarity, and gives you a sense of mental independence.
— Julian Assange
Are boys encouraged to express sadness, fear, or anxiety? In general, our society gives boys permission for one emotion: anger. If a boy is hurt or upset, he may be comforted briefly, but then he is told to stop crying and "be a man." This message usually implies he should hide his feelings. Boys and men are supposed to be solid unemotional rocks. Demonstrations of emotions are seen as "silly." Anger is seen as a sign of strength. Males are considered to be standing up for their rights if they react to a frustrating or undesirable event with anger. Outrage is often the only reaction to an injustice that is allowed from boys.
— Meg Kennedy Dugan, It's My Life Now: Starting Over After an Abusive Relationship or Domestic Violence
Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another
—  they were marvelously inconsistent.
It is culture that is the b
— Sharon  Lee
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
— Sinclair Lewis
Ugster vinyl pumps, Partridge Family records, plastic daisy jewelry, old postcards. . . . It's a magpie Christmas market.
— Francesca Lia Block, Dangerous Angels
We don’t live in a world that suffers from doubt, but one that suffers from certainty, false certainties that compensate for the well of worldly anxieties and worries.
— Les Back, The Art of Listening
One of the most effective ways of changing the way people think is to change the way they worship.
— Reformation Thought
When the waterholes were dry, people sought to drink at the mirage.
— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
Paranoia is just having the right information.
— William S. Burroughs
Whoever tells the best story shapes the culture.
— Erwin Raphael McManus
In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.
— Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
When we reject our origins, we become the product of whatever soil that we find ourselves planted; the colors of our leaves change as we consume borrowed nutrients with borrowed roots and, like a tree, we grow.
— Mike  Norton, Fighting For Redemption
It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.
— Clifford Geertz
The single most important human insight to be gained from this way of comparing societies is perhaps the realization that everything could have been different in our own society – that the way we live is only one among innumerable ways of life which humans have adopted. If we glance sideways and backwards, we will quickly discover that modern society, with its many possibilities and seducing offers, its dizzying complexity and its impressive technological advances, is a way of life which has not been tried out for long. Perhaps, psychologically speaking, we have just left the cave: in terms of the history of our species, we have but spent a moment in modern societies. (..) Anthropology may not provide the answer to the question of the meaning of life, but at least it can tell us that there are many ways in which to make a life meaningful.
— Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology
Culture has lead 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, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization
There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves
Once a culture becomes entirely advertising friendly, it seizes to be a culture at all.
— Mark Crispin Miller
Someone has said that culture is what remains with you after you have forgotten all you have read, and I believe there is much truth in that.
— Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man
[I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are.A story composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within that community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be -- knowledge based on experience. These stories become the conscience of the group. They belong to everyone.
— Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell
One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture.
— Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics
The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Indigenous foods die when no one learns to cook them.
— Jean Zimmerman, Made from Scratch: Reclaiming the Pleasures of the American Hearth
All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us – by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the bottom up, but now we were somehow being spoon-fed this commercial culture top down.
— Kalle Lasn
On a group of theories one can found a school
—  but on a group of values one can found a culture.
What was true of an ancient community of Christian believers struggling with a powerful and appealing philosophy is also true for Christians in a postmodern context. Arguments that deconstruct the regimes of truth at work in the late modern culture of global capitalism are indispensable. So also is a deeper understanding of the counterideological force of the biblical tradition. But such arguments are no guarantee that the biblical metanarrative will not be co-opted for ideological purposes of violent exclusion, nor do arguments prove the truth of the gospel. Only the nonideological, embracing, forgiving and shalom-filled life of a dynamic Christian community formed by the story of Jesus will prove the gospel to be true and render the idolatrous alternatives fundamentally implausible.
— Brian J. Walsh, Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire
The practice which obtains amongst the Americans of fixing the standard of their judgment in themselves alone, leads them to other habits of mind. As they perceive that they succeed in resolving without assistance all the little difficulties which their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of the understanding. Thus they fall to denying what they cannot comprehend; which leaves them but little faith for whatever is extraordinary, and an almost insurmountable distaste for whatever is supernatural.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Volume 2
The life of the law has not been logic
—  it has been experience.
Prejudice in this country is like chapters in a book. Chapter One: Hating the Africans and Indians. Chapter Two: Don't forget the Irish. Chapter Three: Polish jokes."..... "Hispanics? Latinos? Whatever you call us? Maybe we're Chapter Fifteen or Sixteen on the East Coast, but we're the preface in the West.
— Emilie Richards, Endless Chain
It was our belief that the love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome. . . . Children must early learn the beauty of generosity. They are taught to give what they prize most, that they may taste the happiness of giving. . . . The Indians in their simplicity literally give away all that they have—to relatives, to guests of other tribes or clans, but above all to the poor and the aged, from whom they can hope for no return.
— Charles Alexander Eastman
The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being YOU: they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.
— Wade Davis
The person who can learn by observation can create his own culture.
— Santosh Kalwar
..while I was happy enough to pray to any god, knowing that they were simply different faces created by men, of one indivisible truth.
— Lian Hearn, Brilliance of the Moon
A necessary part of our intelligence is on the line as the oral tradition becomes less and less important. There was a time throughout our land when it was common for stories to be told and retold, a most valuable exercise, for the story retold is the story reexamined over and over again at different levels of intellectual and emotional growth.
— Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place
When I joined the military it was illegal to be homosexual, then it became optional, and now it's legal. I'm getting out before the Democrats make it mandatory.
— Sgt. Harry Berres, USMC
I had brought from Paris the national prejudice against Italian music
—  but I had also received from nature that acute sensibility against which prejudices are powerless. I soon contracted the passion it inspires in all those born to understand it.
Street culture is a culture of containment. Most young people do not realize that it all too often leads to a “dead end”. “Street culture,” as I am using the term, is a counterforce to movement culture. Street culture in contemporary urban reality is synonymous with survival at all costs. This world view is mostly negative, because it demands constant adjustment to circumstances that are often far beyond young people’s control or understanding, such as economics, education, housing, employment, nutrition, law, and so forth.
— Haki R. Madhubuti
We are not quite conscious of the reason for our disdain when we refer to the illiterate past as wallowing in ignorance... What divides us from them is the column of print. Theirs was a total culture involving all the senses, while ours is a culture concentrated in the literate eye.
— Nick Joaquín, Culture and History
Death is inevitable. But the meaning people attach to death, its causes and aftermath, is culturally given. Without meaning, without culture making sense of things, life would be impossible.
— Richard B. Lee, The Dobe Ju/'Hoansi
[T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.
— Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism
It is said culture requires slaves. I say that no cultured society can be built with slaves. This terrible Twentieth Century has made all cultural theories from Plato down seem ridiculous. Little man, there has never been a human culture.
— Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
Over the years the Indian leadership, and the educated Indian, have deliberately projected and embellished an image about Indians that they know to be untrue, and have wilfully encouraged the well-meaning but credulous foreign observer to accept it. What is worse, they have fallen in love with this image, and can no longer accept that it is untrue.
— Pavan K. Varma, Being Indian: Inside the real India
In America religion is the road to knowledge, and the observance of the divine laws leads man to civil freedom.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
We live in a culture of reductionism. Or better, we are living in the aftermath of a culture of reductionism, and I believe we have reduced the complexity and diversity of the Scriptures to systematic theologies that insist on ideological conformity, even when such conformity flattens the diversity of the Scriptural witness. We have reduced our conception of gospel to four simple steps that short-circuit biblical narratives and notions of the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven in favor of a simplified means of entrance to heaven. Our preaching is often wed to our materialistic, consumerist cultural assumptions, and sermons are subsequently reduced to delivering messages that reinforce the worst of what American culture produces: self-centered end users who believe that God is a resource that helps an individual secure what amounts to an anemic and culturally bound understanding of the 'abundant life.
— Tim Keel, Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor, and Chaos
...O-suzu left whatever work she was doing at her sewing machine and dragged Takeo back to O-yoshi and her son.How dare you behave so selfishly! Now tell O-yoshi-san that you are sorry. Get down on the mats and make a proper bow!
— Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Culture was actually humanity’s attempt to extend the womb.
— Christopher Henry Dawson
No gaming outside of the venue without a sanctioned game master.
— Leah Rae Miller, The Summer I Became a Nerd
I even felt a vicarious guilt, like a German meeting Jewish people in Poland who had never heard of the Holocaust, or that there were Jews in America, and trying to explain it to them. Ashea, I wished I could say. Ashea.
— Neil Peart, The Masked Rider: Cycling in West Africa
Your culture is your limit; if you can’t go beyond it, you will remain as a frog of your little lake!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
Since everyone around you agrees ever since there were people on earth that land is value, or labor is value, or learning is value, or title, degree, necklaces, murex shells, the ownership of slaves. Everyone knows bees sting and ghosts haunt and giving your robes away humiliates your rivals. That the enemies are barbarians. That wise men swim through the rock of the earth; that houses breed filth, airstrips attract airplanes, tornadoes punish, ancestors watch, and you can buy a shorter stay in purgatory. The black rock is holy, or the scroll; or the pangolin is holy, the quetzal is holy, this tree, water, rock, stone, cow, cross, or mountain--and it's all true. The Red Sox. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows.
— Annie Dillard, The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New
My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.
— Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams
And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they're not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it's about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
Piracy is robbery with violence, often segueing into murder, rape and kidnapping. It is one of the most frightening crimes in the world. Using the same term to describe a twelve-year-old swapping music with friends, even thousands of songs, is evidence of a loss of perspective so astounding that it invites and deserves the derision it receives.
— Nick Harkaway, The Blind Giant
Tradition is a fragile thing in a culture built entirely on the memories of the elders.
— Alice Albinia, Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River
If you invest all your energy in economics, world commerce, parliamentarianism, military engagements, power and power politics, -if you take the quantum of intelligence, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming that you embody and expend it all in this one direction, there there won't be any left for the other direction. Culture and the state - let us be honest with ourselves - these are adversaries.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ/Ecce Homo/Twilight of the Idols/Other Writings
Why does it seem easier for us to accept reality when it is within the confinement of the animal kingdom yet so hard for us to face it in our?
— Aysha Taryam, The Opposite of Indifference: A Collection of Commentaries
For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.
— Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams
The forests were crippled, the wheat fields vanished; in place of the grass there reappeared stone and drifting sand. Men perished and moved on, the cities sank back into the sand, the dust settled over them. Thousands of years later Nordic dreamers dug up the petrified culture from the rubble and ashes. Today, the entire picture of the former paradise stands before our eyes as a spent dream which had once produced life, beauty and strength as long as a superior race ruled. It will live again and it will dream again. But as soon as races of a dreamless kind took over and attempted to realize the dream, reality vanished with the dream.
— Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century
At the dealership, I pulled out the sieve and toyed with it threateningly. When the salesman was ready for me, I held it up, told him I was not a tourist and demanded a large discount.
— Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams
I realised with a prickle of discomfort why he bothered me: it was not so much that I resented the hearty backslapping bonhomie of English upper-class gentlemen, for I could tolerate it well enough in Sidney on his own. It was the way Sidney fell so easily into this strutting group of young men, where I could not, and the fear that he might in some ways prefer their company to mine. Once again, I felt that peculiar stab of loneliness that only an exile truly knows: the sense that I did not belong, and never would again.
— S.J. Parris, Heresy
And so, when the chips are down, I must say, though not without a sense of repugnance, that if you wish to show your belief in democracy, you also have to do so when you are in the minority, convinced both intellectually and, not least, in your innermost self, that the majority, in the name of democracy, is crushing everything you stand for and that means something to you, indeed, all that gives you the strength to endure, well, that gives a kind of meaning to your life, something that transcends your own fortuitous lot, one might say. When the heralds of democracy roar, triumphantly bawling out their vulgar victories day after day so that it really makes you suffer, as in my own case, you still have to accept it; I will not let anything else be said about me, he thought.
— Dag Solstad, Shyness and Dignity
Never make the mistake of thinking you are alone — or inconsequential. Ignorance is voluntary and confusion is temporary. You see the world as-is, which is more than can be said for the vast populace.
— Rebecca McKinsey, Sydney West
It seems more than a little patronizing for Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when life in the Khumbu was so much simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who live in this rugged country seem to have no desire to be severed from the modern world or the untidy flow of human progress. The last thing Sherpas want is to be preserved as specimens in an anthropological museum.
— Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster
An important ethical function of identity politics, in this context, is to highlight that obstacles to the self-development of individuals, and to the formation and exercise of their agency, emerge in complex cultural and psychic forms, as well as through more familiar kinds of socio-economic inequality.
— Michael Kenny, Politics of Identity: Liberal Political Theory and the Dilemas of Difference
We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish "me, me, me" culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground...Little attempt is made to pass on our cultural inheritance, and our moral and religious traditions are neglected except in the shallow "family values" arguments.
— Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place
Utopias bore me. I'm interested in constructing messy, complicated societies that are full of flaws and then saying, ooh, this is interesting, let's see what happens if I poke it here. And concurrently with this and the previous point, I'm interested in making up cultures that are different
— Marie Brennan
As we search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture.
— Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place
When art as an expression starts to appear, without prompting, all over the suburbs and villages of this country, what we are saying is: we are confident enough to create our own living, our own entertainment, our own aesthetic. Such an aesthetic will not be donated to us from the corridors of a university; or from the Ministry of Culture, or by the French Cultural Centre. It will come from the individual creations of a thousand creative people
— Binyavanga Wainaina, Kwani? 01
It's too late to be studying Hebrew
—  it's more important to understand even the slang of today.
Then he asked my age and I asked his. That's the tradition in China. If we know each other's ages we can understand each other's past. We Chinese have been collective for so long, personal histories are not worth mentioning. Therefore as soon as Xiaolin and I knew how old the other was, we knew exactly what big shit had happened in our lives. The introduction of the One Child Policy shortly before out births, for instance and the fact that, in 1985, two pandas were sent to the USA as a national gift and we had to sing a tearful panda song at school. 1989 was the Tiananmen Square student demonstration. Anyway, Xiaolin was one year younger than me, so I assumed we were from the same generation.
— Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game and do it by watching first some high-school or small-town teams
— Jacques Barzun
The Labour party on the whole has not been a very effective opposition since the election, partly because it spent months and months electing its new leader. I think the Labour party should, for one thing, stress much more that for most people in the past 13 years, the period was not one of collapse into chaos but actually one where the situation improved, and particularly in areas such as schools, hospitals and a variety of other cultural achievements—so the idea that somehow or other it all needs to be taken down and ground into the dust is not valid. I think we need to defend what most people think basically needs defending and that is the provision of some form of welfare from the cradle to the grave.
— Eric Hobsbawm
When we say that the West has brought us nothing but evil, do we mean that beef is evil, that cabbages are evil that the guisado is evil?
— Nick Joaquín, Culture and History
I knew that Sundays in England aren't just ordinary dull Sundays, the same the world over, which demand that one simply tiptoe through without disturbing them or paying them the least attention, they are vaster and slower and more burdensome than anywhere else I know.
— Javier Marías
Charity is one of those remarkable words that helps to identify the fault lines of a culture.
— Janet Poppendieck, Sweet Charity?: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement
They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics. Szabo often wished that he could be as well adjusted as Melinda's family, but he would have had to be medicated to pursue her list of pleasures.
— Thomas McGuane
Enron was becoming a virtual cult of creativity, often placing swagger over substance. New ideas were celebrated for their newness, for their potential; tried and true businesses like the pipelines were almost derided.
— Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you've given enough, your place is near the centre.
— Robert Bringhurst, The Tree Of Meaning: Thirteen Talks
Being postmodern, however, is about being complicit rather than virtuous, it is about approaching categories like Good and Evil with a certain ironic skepticism.
— Veronica Hollinger, Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture
Enron would keep its unearned windfall, generated solely because David Duncan didn't know what he was doing.
— Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
...Fastow had found someone trusting and pliable.Fastow wanted a pupet, Bowen concluded, and he already controlled Ben Glisan's strings.p.338
— Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
A eureka moment. It suddenly struck Mintz as so obvious. The executives entrusted with reviewing all of the LJM transactions- Causey, Buy, the board- approached their duties casually, giving everything just the onceover. They seemed to figure that somebody else was doing the tough analysis. But no one was.p.389
— Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
In a market, preceptions could be as important as reality.p.403
— Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
Kaminski plunged ahead. "I am not going to sign off on anything related to the Raptors," he said. "And I don't care if I'm fired for it."Buy raised a hand. "Whoa, wait a minute, I don't think you'll be fired," he replied quickly. "Now that Skilling's gone, we have a different mantra in Enron."He looked Kaminski in the eye. "We're expected to be honest", he said.p.525
— Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
Excuse me, Ben," Bowen said. "Am I wrong, or aren't you the corporate treasurer?"Glisan bristled. "Yes.""What do you mean, you think you can get one?" Bowen shot back. "This is the current fucking maturities schedule! Go get it. You have to have a maturities schedule!"But they didn't. With all the focus on deals and earnings- with finance group's transformation into a profit center rather than a division to support the business- the workday, boring details had been sloughed off.p. 560
— Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
Cookbooks are almost a substitution for a lost sense of culture. People want some other life than the one they're living, so they buy a cookbook with pictures and imagine themselves as part of that life.
— Mark Miller
Literature, art, science, and religion degenerate when polemical struggle supplants the independent creation of ideas.
— Semen Frank
I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.
— Julia Glass
I went to watch the Buzkasgu game taking place on a series of fields - some fallow, some plowed and planted- just to the east of the empty Buddha niches. Buzkashi is a form of polo played with a dead goat instead of a ball.
— Rory Stewart
Culture primarily witnesses the absence of meaning, not it's presence.
— Thomas McFarland
I realise I have become something I never thought possible: patriotic and proud about being an adopted Italian. In more honest moments, I realise that I might never quite be able to leave the country. That longing to leave, and the inability to pull yourself away from the bel casino, the 'fine mess', has been written about for centuries. Using the usual prostitution metaphor, one of the country's most important patriots, Massimo D'Azeglio, wrote: 'I can't live outside Italy, which is strange because I continually get angry with Italian ineptitude, envies, ignorance and laziness. I'm like one of the people who falls in love with a prostitute.' That, in fact, is precisely the feeling of living here: it is infuriating and endlessly irritating, but in the end it is almost impossible to pull yourself away. It's not just that everything is troppo bello, 'too beautiful', or that food and conversation are so good. It's that life seems less exciting outside Italy, the emotions seem muted. Stendhal wrote that the feeling one gets from living in Italy is 'akin to that of being in love', and it's easy to understand what he meant. There's the same kind of enchantment and serenity, occasionally insecurity and sadness. And writing about the country's sharp pangs of jealousy and paranoia, Stendhal knew that they exist precisely because the country's 'joys are far more intense and more lasting'. You can't have one without the other.
— Tobias Jones, The Dark Heart of Italy
In an unfamiliar culture, it is wise to offer no innovations, no suggestions, or lessons. The epitome of sophistication is utter simplicity.
— Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter
The teaching conundrum had been solved. Teaching evolves where the costs are outweighed by the inclusive fitness benefits that result from the tutor's relatives being more likely to acquire the valuable information. Teaching is not favored when the pupil can easily acquire the information on their own or through copying others. Nor is it favored when imparting traits that are difficult to learn, as teachers generally do not possess the information to pass on to their relatives. These restrictions typically lead to few circumstances under which teaching would be efficacious. Models that allow for cumulative cultural knowledge gain, however, suggest that teaching evolved in humans despite, rather than because of, our strong imitative capabilities, and primarily because cumulative culture renders otherwise difficult-to-acquire valuable information available to teach. The analyses suggest that human teaching and cumulative culture evolved together, through mutual reinforcement.
— Kevin N. Laland, Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind
The fastest way to destroy a culture is to make it multicultural.
— Robert  Black
Celebrating Culture is celebrating existence.
— Mahrukh
Since the end of the postwar economic boom, certain strategies have been intensified to stimulate consumption, especially strategies aimed at American youth that project sexual activity as instant fulfillment and violence as the locus of machismo identity. This market activity has contributed greatly to the disorientation and confusion of American youth, and those with less education and fewer opportunities bear the brunt of this cultural chaos.
— Cornel West
A Bombshell commands attention for her business with a strong culture, consistent branding, and simple, no-to-low cost marketing.
— Amber Hurdle, The Bombshell Business Woman: How to Become a Bold, Brave, and Successful Female Entrepreneur
Find another solution. That’s how you move toward success.
— Amber Hurdle, The Bombshell Business Woman: How to Become a Bold, Brave, and Successful Female Entrepreneur
The more I learn the more I want to know
— Jennifer P. Linggi
The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most “savage” or “barbarous” of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.
— Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et histoire
Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are—and I say this with big pride—the progeny of slaves. If there’s any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we’ve traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
Religion, culture, education are all things that sound wonderful in theory. In practice, however, they are not so wonderful.
— Marty Rubin