c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Do I have to admit that I'm half Cuban and half American,or should I go even further, and explainthat Dad's parents were born in the Ukraine,part of Soviet Russia?Or am I just entirely American,all the fractions left behindby immigration from faraway nations?
— Margarita Engle, Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings: A Memoir
The Republic of Venice used to boast that, in the space of three months, it could know all the events of the Mediterranean. We see the astronauts, from the distance of a few feet, at the very moment they land on the moon. Unfortunately the news almost swamps us with its frequency and abundance. It doesn't give us time to reflect: we are so constantly amazed that gradually we lose our capacity for being surprised at anything, and we don't enjoy even beautiful things.
— Pope John Paul I, Illustrissimi: Letters from Pope John Paul I
It may sound exaggerated to say that the clash of civilizations and cultures as what we're witnessing in Europe between muslims and christians is necessary, but the alternative, an extremely arrogant and suppressive Europe, would eventually self-destroy itself, as it nearly did several times in the past centuries. The forced discipline on Europeans is violent for the present generation, unaware of its moral weaknesses and delusional supremacy, but necessary for future generations, that need to witness a more peaceful world, one where racism doesn't dictate their opportunities in life. And that, at present moment, is still a dream in most European countries, that despite their history, show such a level of aggression and segregation, that make one of darker skin wonder if slavery has not yet ended.
— Robin Sacredfire
Cultural products will spread faster and wider when everybody can see what everybody else is doing. It suggests that the future of many hit-making markets will be fully open, radically transparent, and very, very unequal.
— Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
Human culture arises directly from how we overcome the challenges of survival. Some call culture a balance between decadence and celebration. The need for shelter becomes architecture, the rituals of fine cuisine wrought by celebrity chefs. Perhaps the most enduring are the rituals of romance. At its highest expression the artistry of love is the subject of exquisite effort. It is when we are the most human.
— David Ai
Where is the culture of cleanliness?
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The culture the leader creates impacts the feedback a leader receives.
— Ron Edmondson
In real life there is no such person as the average man. There are only particular men, women and children, each with his or her inborn idiosyncrasies of mind and body, and all trying (or becoming compelled) to squeeze their biological diversities into the uniformity of some cultural mold.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
We have reached the end of one era, and now we don't know what is all around us. Because we're already in a new era, and it is very different from the old one. Science and the world of technology are both changing everything so quickly, even our bodies. So the original ancient culture was present here, but to no avail, at this point in history it has come to stop. It still has some effect, some kind of continuity, but it cannot analyse and reformulate things, it cannot impact things with absolute strength. The age to follow will be full of dangers. It will be full of difficulties. In all likelihood, it will not be a good future for mankind. It is even possible this new era will mean the end of mankind.
— László Krasznahorkai, Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens: Reportage
An encounter with other cultures can lead to openness only if you can suspend the assumption of superiority, not seeing new worlds to conquer, but new worlds to respect.
— Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Life
As you get the rhythm you discern how to win.
— Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
ideas generate action when they are believed regardless of whether they are true or not in our opinion
— Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World
When you conform to the monoculture's version of who you are and what the world is like, you lose your freedom along with your ability to be truly innovative in terms of your own life. Being able to draw on many different stories, not just the economic one, allows you to creatively and authentically meet the challenges that face you in your life. The monoculture, determinedly single-minded, insists that economic values and assumptions can be used to solve your problems, whether those problems are spiritual, political, intellectual, or relational.
— F.S. Michaels, Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything
Such competence is not necessarily acquired by means of the 'scholastic' labours in which some 'cinephiles' or 'jazz-freaks' indulge. Most often it results from the unintentional learning made possible by a disposition acquired through domestic or scholastic inculcation of legitimate culture. This transposable disposition, armed with a set of perceptual and evaluative schemes that are available for general application, inclines its owner towards other cultural experiences and enables him to perceive, classify and memorize them differently. . . . In identifying what is worthy of being seen and the right way to see it, they are aided by their whole social group and by the whole corporation of critics mandated by the group to produce legitimate classifications and the discourse necessarily accompanying any artistic enjoyment worthy of the name.
— Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
You will get closer to the truths only when you start thinking this way: My religion is not the best religion, my country is not the best country, my culture is not the best culture, and my life is not the best life! The more you move away from arrogance, pride and prejudice, the more you will get closer to the truth!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
That people you don’t know are worth knowing, that they have something to teach you. That learning about them – that encountering new ideas – doesn’t threaten you, it enriches you. (Celeste Ng)
— Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times
It is nine o'clock, and London has breakfasted. Some unconsidered tens of thousands have, it is true, already enjoyed with what appetite they might their pre-prandial meal; the upper fifty thousand, again, have not yet left their luxurious couches, and will not breakfast till ten, eleven o'clock, noon; nay, there shall be sundry listless, languid members of fast military clubs, dwellers among the tents of Jermyn Street, and the high-priced second floors of Little Ryder Street, St. James's, upon whom one, two, and three o'clock in the afternoon shall be but as dawn, and whose broiled bones and devilled kidneys shall scarcely be laid on the damask breakfast-cloth before Sol is red in the western horizon. I wish that, in this age so enamoured of statistical information, when we must needs know how many loads of manure go to every acre of turnip-field, and how many jail-birds are thrust into the black hole per mensem for fracturing their pannikins, or tearing their convict jackets, that some M'Culloch or Caird would tabulate for me the amount of provisions, solid and liquid, consumed at the breakfasts of London every morning. I want to know how many thousand eggs are daily chipped, how many of those embryo chickens are poached, and how many fried; how many tons of quartern loaves are cut up to make bread-and-butter, thick and thin; how many porkers have been sacrificed to provide the bacon rashers, fat and streaky ; what rivers have been drained, what fuel consumed, what mounds of salt employed, what volumes of smoke emitted, to catch and cure the finny haddocks and the Yarmouth bloaters, that grace our morning repast. Say, too, Crosse and Blackwell, what multitudinous demands are matutinally made on thee for pots of anchovy paste and preserved tongue, covered with that circular layer - abominable disc! - of oleaginous nastiness, apparently composed of rancid pomatum, but technically known as clarified butter, and yet not so nasty as that adipose horror that surrounds the truffle bedecked pate  de  foie gras. Say, Elizabeth Lazenby, how many hundred bottles of thy sauce (none of which are genuine unless signed by thee) are in request to give a relish to cold meat, game, and fish. Mysteries upon mysteries are there connected with nine o'clock breakfasts.
— George Augustus Sala, Twice Round the Clock, or the Hours of the Day and Night in London
Patriarchy has been the normal in almost all agricultural and industrial societies. ...If patriarchy in Afro-Asia resulted from some chance occurrence, why were the Aztecs and Incas patriarchal? It is far more likely that even though the precise definition of man and woman varies between cultures, there is some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood. We do not know what this reason is; there are plenty of theories, none of the convincing.
— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence.
— Kakuzo Okahura, The Book of Tea
I want to see a flowering of Arab and Jewish cultures in a country without racism or anti-Semitism, without rich or poor or spat-upon: everyone beneath the vine and fig tree living in peace and unafraid. A homeland for each and every one of us between the mountains and the sea. A multilingual, multireligious, many-colored and -peopled land where the orange tree blooms for all. I will not surrender this vision for any lesser compromise.
— Aurora Levins Morales, Getting Home Alive
The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies.
— Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations?
Some kind of philosophy undergirds every movie, commercial, lecture, or book. Everything we take into our minds is trying to teach us something about how we should think the world is. (Life Hacks, p.83)
— Jon Morrison, Life Hacks: Nine Ideas That Will Change How You Do Everything
I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.
— Joan Didion, South and West: From a Notebook
He is Your Customer, the Reason behind Your Customs.
— Vineet Raj Kapoor
When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun.
— Hans Johst
What is honored in a culture gets cultivated there.
— Plato, The Republic
The truth is, Jung has brought back one member of the old duality, unreason, with a new name; it is no synthesis at all, but only the latest maneuver in the war against rationality that has been conducted with rising hysteria by literary intellectuals and humanists against the laws of a culture they have reason to distrust and disobey. The Jungian theory proposes to every disaffected humanist his "personal myth," as a sanctuary against the modern world. Against the vulgar democracy of intelligence, Jungian theory proposes an aristocracy of feeling. From this proposal derives Jung's persistent influence on modern critical and aesthetic style.
— Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud
You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it's a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.
— George Gerbner
Go to the theater, to museums, and to concerts as often as possible; it gives you a healthy glow.
— Anne Berest, Audrey Diwan, Caroline de Maigret, Sophie Mas, How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are: Love, Style, and Bad Habits
The things that are most popular are usually rubbish, stand up for what’s important, not popular.
— Alan Moore
Every little thing makes a difference, whether you decide it yourself or whether it’s pure accident. So many people have had the whole course of their lives changed by something perfectly simple like, let’s say, crossing the street at one point instead of another.”“Yes, yes, yes, I know,” Stenham said with exaggerated weariness. “As far as I’m concerned that’s just as boring, and a lot more false, by the way. The point I’m trying to make is that he loves his world of Koranic law because it’s his, and at the same time he hates it because his intuition tells him it’s at the end of its rope. He can’t expect anything more from it. And our world, he hates that too, just on general principles, and yet it’s his only hope, the only way out—if there is one for him personally, which I doubt.
— Paul Bowles, The Spider's House
If you can't see past my name, you can't see me.
— DaShanne Stokes
Yes, you are Eskimo," he had said. "And never forget it. We live as no other people can, for we truly understand the earth.
— Jean Craighead George, Julie of the Wolves
Culture and holiness must be made compatible in the environment of the kingdom
— Sunday Adelaja
We could help the pulpit to understand that the miracle centered gospel is letting our values and culture down.
— Sunday Adelaja
A miracle focus culture is propagating wickedness.
— Sunday Adelaja
Miracle centered gospel brings about the culture of indolence and insolence upon the country.
— Sunday Adelaja
I love my culture, I'm very proud to be Kurd.
— Davan Yahya Khalil
You know all those bad girls who take off their selendang and put round their neck like fashion-show? One day, when the wind is very strong, the selendang will catch the wind. Then it will swing up and down and then round and round so fast, very fast, until it traps the spirit of the wind. Then it will grow long and thick and wrap itself round and round and round this girl’s neck. And then, when the girl cannot breathe, it will swallow her whole. Be careful, girl, be careful how you wear this.
— Jinat Rehana Begum
Really good films don't diminish anything, they don't close things off. On the contrary, they open up new insights, they make new thoughts thinkable. They crowd us, they deflate our slovenly lifestyle, our thoughtless way of chattering and pissing away our time and energy and passion. Believe me, films can teach us a huge amount. And they give us a true picture of the way life is."Mari laughed. "Of our slovenly lifestyle, you mean? You mean, maybe they teach us to piss our lives away with a little more intelligence, a little more elegance?
— Tove Jansson, Fair Play
Accepted social gender roles and expectations are so entrenched in our culture that most people cannot imagine any other way. As a result, individuals fitting neatly into these expectations rarely if ever question what gender really means. They have never had to, because the system has worked for them.
— Nicki Petrikowski, Critical Perspectives on Gender Identity
Many say that it is ethnocentric to claim that our religion is superior to others. Yet isn't that very statement ethnocentric? Most non-Western cultures have no problem saying that their culture and religion is best. The idea that it is wrong to do so is deeply rooted in Western traditions of self-criticism and individualism. To charge others with the "sin" of ethnocentrism is really a way of saying, "Our culture's approach to other cultures is superior to yours.
— Timothy J. Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism
Having the kingdom culture is establishing kingdom lifestyle on earth
— Sunday Adelaja
When a people has no translations and is unable to promote its culture, it does not exist.
— Bakhtyar Ali
I became a chameleon. My color didn't change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn't look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
Tea has nothing to do with being hungry," said Nimrod. "For Englishmen, it is like a canonical hour. And almost as much of an important ritual as the tea ceremony in Japan. Except for one thing. With tea, in Japan, recognition is given that every human encounter is a singular occasion which can, and will, never recur again exactly. Thus every aspect of tea must be savored for what it gives the participants. But in England, the significance occurs in the fact that teas is always the same, and will always recur again and again, exactly . For how is the endurance of a great civilization to be measured?
— P.B. Kerr, The Akhenaten Adventure
You must make a counter-culture decision to focus on becoming more like Jesus. Otherwise, other forces like peers, parents, coworkers, and culture will try to mold you into their image.
— Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?
I’ll tell you the difference between our countries. Americans think life is serious but not hopeless
—  the English that life is hopeless but not serious.
Whenever I hear people clucking about the decline of civilization, what's wrong with young people, how vulgar popular culture is, how confusing and frightening they find the internet, alarms go off. I know I'm around somebody whose hinges are rusting. Death will be bad enough, but for me, this early harbinger is more fearsome, because a part of one's spirit and openness and ability to learn and grow disappears.
— Jon Katz, A Dog Year: Twelve Months, Four Dogs, and Me
You know the only rule you need to know to get on in this country? ‘Never complain, never explain.
— Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds
I am a Jewish mother. My dying words will be, “Put a jumper on
— Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds
A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urras.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Some argue that in time there was a noticeable change in Ratzinger's position held during the Council. However, as he himself said, and others would say about him, "It is not Ratzinger who has somehow changed and suddenly become reactionary and conservative. It is the secular culture that has drifted beyond the pale.
— Gediminas T. Jankunas, The Dictatorship of Relativism: Pope Benedict XVI's Response
Cultures of permission valorized bad taste as liberation.
— Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens
A great deal of the global stimuli that we view comes to us without major effort. Daily a person scans and screens a wide barrage of solicited and unsolicited material. What information a society pays attention to creates the standards and principles governing citizens’ life. A nation’s discourse translates its economic, social, and cultural values to impressionable children.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The Five C's of Coaching: 1- Clarity 2- Communication3- Collaboration 4- Commitment 5- Culture
— Farshad Asl
It was not, then, race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its own kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.
— W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880
People want to feel good, be entertained, eat salty shit, and cum twice a week, and provided they do they'll stay quiet.
— Rick Remender, Tokyo Ghost, Vol. 2: Come Join Us
All under the pretense of military application.”He pouts. “No pretense about it. Remember, the Internet was a military application. And now look at how it’s changed our culture.
— Chuck Wendig, Invasive
Its regurgitation in newspapers of record and blogs of repute would be another reminder why the American society as a whole could never be call itself highbrow, why its easy availability of of stories on the private lives of others was turning adults, who would otherwise be enriching their minds with worthwhile knowledge, into juveniles who needed the satisfaction of knowing that others were more pathetic than them.
— Imbolo Mbue, Behold the Dreamers
This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook
Properly speaking, there are no barbarian standards. Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made. The varying degrees of culture are measured by the greater or less precision of the standards. Where there is little such precision, these standards rule existence only grosso modo; where there is much they penetrate in detail into the exercise of all the activities.
— Ortega y Gasset
Consistent and clear communication creates a dynamic and sustainable culture that is there when your not there.
— Farshad Asl
Biologically valid races are not real, but cultural racism is, and we must understand how this cultural reality affects our everyday interactions.
— Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea
Life on earth survives thanks to diversity, says Sekunda, because changing circumstances means today's winners can suddenly become tomorrow's losers. When the meteor hits, when the Green Revolution fails, when the bees unexpectedly die, the kind of anomalous diversity found in the Galapagos Islands—or in the technology of Japan—is exactly what will save us from the most dangerous failure of all: global success.
— Momus, Solution 214-238: The Book of Japans
For it is a fact that a man can be profoundly out of step with his times. A man may have been born in a city famous for its idiosyncratic culture and yet, the very habits, fashions, and ideas that exalt that city in the eyes of the world may make no sense to him at all. As he proceeds through life, he looks about in a state of confusion, understanding neither the inclinations nor the aspirations of his peers.
— Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
Every civilisation has had its irrational but reassuring myth. Previous civilisations have used their culture to sing about it and tell stories about it. Ours has used its mathematics to prove it.
— David Fleming, Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It
Either a building is part of a place or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.
— Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
These outlanders are peculiar, aren’t they?"Longbow smiled faintly. "They seem to think that we’re the peculiar ones. Their lives are very complicated, but we try our best to keep everything simple. I’m not sure exactly why, but that seems to offend them for some reason.
— David Eddings, The Treasured One
My family’s tradition of ‘matching-matching’ names is so obsessive, it’s against the order of nature. When my uncles Anil and Anant married, they took advantage of a heinous custom in Marathi weddings. After the pheras, a dish of uncooked rice is placed before the newlyweds, and whatever name the husband chooses to write in the rice becomes the new name of his wife.Because marriage in our culture is akin to buying a puppy at a pet shop and saying, ‘I am your new owner, and I shall call you Flu y.’So Anil Adarkar brought home Asha Adarkar (née Kiran), and Anant Adarkar brought home Anita Adarkar (née Geeta). And to complete this picture of divine perfection they named their children Aniket, and Ashwini and Ashleysha, respectively.
— Nikita Deshpande, It Must've Been Something He Wrote
Normality is an illusion, created by a conservative culture to control behaviour
— Merlyn Gabriel Miller, Sex, Death, Drugs & Madness
Englishmen did not speak to strangers on trains ...
— Ken Follett, The Man From St. Petersburg
I understood then why people were so often defeated by this world. Perhaps the web of support that they required just did not come into alignment when it had to. Or perhaps our culture lacked the channels by which to offer this support.
— Guy Mankowski, An Honest Deceit
Culture is a fibreglass condom suit - highly restrictive, uncomfortable and itchy as hell.
— Merlyn Gabriel Miller, Sex, Death, Drugs & Madness
Culture is a virus. It distorts your view of the world and destroys your capacity to think independently.
— Merlyn Gabriel Miller, Sex, Death, Drugs & Madness
It's not a crime to offend others; in fact, it's pretty much a natural consequence of having diverse cultures. We live in a world full of people with different backgrounds, interests, and values, and we must learn to accept that there will be clashes. As long as the differences do no harm, we should back off and accept them
— P.Z. Myers
Other sovereign democratic states have central governments more corrupted other than our own, but most can fall back on unifying elements we lack: common ethnicity, a shared religion, or near-universal consensus on many fundamental political issues. The United States needs its central government to function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it's one of the few things binding us together.
— Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America
Becoming 'color blind' isn't helpful. Who you are matters, how you are matters. Things like race and culture are a manifestation of flows of creation. Your identity doesn't just matter, without it your soul can't interact with the world. The key is we need to understand that all races, ethnic groups, cultures and like treasures are equal and we must remember to follow our soul rather than our identity. The identity is something the soul works through, not the other way around.
— Rebekah Elizabeth Gamble
One paid for one's knowledge with one's skin.
— Rudyard Kipling
Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.
— Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
you're deluding yourself that you have some deep spiritual connection, like you didn't just read it on Wikipedia. There's a difference between tradition and culture.
— Lauren Beukes, Moxyland
We build this country ourselves every day and we have to be, in the most positive sense, totally unreal.
— J.C. Villamere, Is Canada Even Real?: How a Nation Built on Hobos, Beavers, Weirdos, and Hip Hop Convinced the World to Beliebe
Culture is like the visible and invisible levels of an iceberg -”the solid state of “water.
— Pearl Zhu, Digital Valley: Five Pearls of Wisdom to Make Profound Influence
Organizational culture is just like the “Operation System” of the organization, you need reboot periodically to keep it running smoothly.
— Pearl Zhu, Digital Valley: Five Pearls of Wisdom to Make Profound Influence
Culture is collective mindsets, attitudes, and behaviors.
— Pearl Zhu, Digital Valley: Five Pearls of Wisdom to Make Profound Influence
Culture should be a business ‘app,’ everyone can apply it daily.
— Pearl Zhu, Digital Valley: Five Pearls of Wisdom to Make Profound Influence
Agile is more a “direction,” than an “end.” Transforming to Agile culture means the business knows the direction they want to go on.
— Pearl Zhu, Digital Agility: The Rocky Road from Doing Agile to Being Agile
Modern Boards set key tones in building fact-based business culture.
— Pearl Zhu, Digitizing Boardroom: The Multifaceted Aspects of Digital Ready Boards
Our focus should not be on emerging technologies, but on emerging cultural practices.
— Henry Jenkins
Isn't it interesting how nationalistic attitudes foster the notion that being gay is 'un-(fill in your nationality/ religion/ culture here)'?
— Christina Engela, All That Remains
Being digital-ready is an overarching approach via building a set of “digital -flavored” cultures and taking a series of stepwise practices.
— Pearl Zhu, Digitizing Boardroom: The Multifaceted Aspects of Digital Ready Boards
Apparently, when conditions were right, peoples of all world regions were quite capable of transforming wild plants into domesticated crops—a good point to keep in mind when next you hear someone claim that some cultures (usually their own) are more inventive or creative than others.
— James Peoples, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Jasmine shook her head. She had forgotten about the tales of the Jinn that her father warned her about. Now, being here the memories were returning like a slow and purposeful spider. With its long, black legs the nightmares would creep into her mind each time she closed her eyes. Then, she would see through the creature’s murky eyes. She would see the carcass of a deer as it lay in the glistening white. She would watch the hyena tearing at its sweated flesh, blood seeping into the snow forming warm pools of death around her feet. And in that moment, the deer shifted. It shifted into the shape of a young boy.
— Shereen Malherbe, Jasmine Falling
It's not a crime to offend others; in fact, it's pretty much a natural consequence of having diverse cultures. We live in a world full of people with different backgrounds, interests, and values, and we must learn to accept that there will be clashes. As long as the differences do no harm, we should back off and accept them.
— PZ Myers
American culture, perhaps more than any other, prizes individualism. Our narratives of art, politics, and business idolize the person who triumphs against the odds, with only himself or herself to answer to. The lone wolf. The stranger in town. The maverick. The plucky kid. The Final Girl. You've only got yourself, in the end. It's all up to you.
— Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
The fact is, man has never stayed by a single ideal. The mass enthusiasm when you were young gave way to cool, rationalistic classicism. Today that’s being drowned in turn by a kind of neoromanticism. God knows where that will lead. I probably won’t approve. Regardless, new generations grow up. We’ve no right to freeze them into our own mold. The universe is too wide.
— Poul Anderson, Tau Zero
Hit me with spit on the wounds.
— Gwen Calvo
Deep down, people who deliberately distribute other people’s music and stuff feel contempt for professionals. And it’s not just culture — these days lots of people are contemptuous of everything. Without realizing it, they’re searching for things to despise.
— Fuminori Nakamura, Evil and the Mask
You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how 'creative', 'idealistic', and 'loving' it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. I fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the 'herd of the independent minds'. Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for 'love' was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence.
— Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
Danes express their strongest feelings in conjunction with food. That became clear to me the first time I was out visiting friends with Moritz. When I took a third helping of cookies, he looked straight at me."Keep on taking until you're ashamed of yourself," he said.I wasn't confident about my Danish, but I understood what he meant. I helped myself three more times. Without taking my eyes off him. The room disappeared, the people we were visiting disappeared, I didn't taste the cookies. Only Moritz existed."I'm still not ashamed," I said.I helped myself three more times. Then he grabbed the platter and put it out of my reach. I had won. The first of a long series of small, important victories over him and Danish manners.
— Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow
The fact of English supremacy is something most native speakers of English unknowingly suppress, all the while enjoying the privileges that come with it. Many non-English-speaking populations, however, cannot afford to suppress that fact but are forced to face it in one way or another, though their writers generally turn their backs on the linguistic asymmetry lest they end up too discouraged to write, overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all.
— Juliet Winters Carpenter, The Fall of Language in the Age of English
The task is to become church for them, among them and with them, and under Spirit of God to lead them to become church in their own culture.
— Tim Chester, Everyday Church: Gospel Communities on Mission
The Beats inaugurated the long march through the moral territory of American culture. Who knows how many lives were blighted along the way as a result of their proselytizing on behalf of drugs and promiscuous sex?
— Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
On the other hand, activist Christians who talk much about justice promote a notion of justice that envisions a society in which faith in God is rendered quite unnecessary, since everybody already believes in peace and justice even when everybody does not believe in God.
— Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony
Those that control the definitions, steer the culture as they please.
— R.A.Delmonico
Contrary to popular belief, some animals would not have each chosen to be a human being, if they were given the choice between being what they are and being human.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We -- the industrialized, technologized world -- have never been richer. And yet to an extraordinary extent we in the West continue to inhabit a moral and cultural universe shaped by the hedonistic imperatives and radical ideals of the Sixties. Culturally, morally the world we inhabit is increasingly a trash world: addicted to sensation, besieged everywhere by the cacophonous, mind-numbing din of rock music, saturated with pornography, in thrall to the lowest common denominator wherever questions of taste, manners or intellectual delicacy are concerned. Marwick was right: 'The cultural revolution, in short, had continuous, uninterrupted, and lasting consequences'.
— Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
Most of my important lessons about life have come from recognizing how others from a different culture view things.
— Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling
Certain portions of the earth, escaping utter destruction, become the seedbeds for replenishing the human race, and so it happens that on a world that is not young there are young populations having no culture, whose traditions were swept away in a debacle; they wander over the earth and gradually put aside the roughness of a nomadic existence and by natural inclunation submit to communities and associations; their mode of living is at first simple, knowking no guile and strange to cunning, called in its early stage the Golden Age. [16] The more these populations progress in civilization and employment of the arts, the more easily does the spirit of rivalry creep in, at first commendable but imperceptibly changing to envy; this, then, is responsible for all the tribulations that the race suffers in subsequent ages. So much for the vicissitudes that civilizations experience, of perishing and arising again, as the world goes on unchanged.[Chapter X - 15,16]
— Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio
It will no doubt be agreed that there are multitudes of these defiant, aggressive types in our culture. But they do not frequent psychoanalysts' offices because our competitive culture (in which, to a considerable extent, the individual who can aggressively exploit others without conscious guilt feeling is 'succesful') supports and 'cushions' them to a greater extent than the opposite types. It is generally the culturally 'weak' individuals who get to the psychoanalyst; for in cultural terms they have the 'neurosis' and the succesfully agressive person does not.
— Rollo May
At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory; this hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out again, must return to the wild: - Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings - in this requirement they are all alike. It was the noble races which left the concept of 'barbarian' in their traces wherever they went; even their highest culture betrays the fact that they were conscious of this and indeed proud of it.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo
The cultural past is rigidly deterministic to the extent that the individual is unaware of it. An analogy, of course, is found in any psychoanalytic treatment: the patient is rigidly determined by past experiences and previously developed patterns to the extent that he is unaware of these experiences and patterns.
— Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety
We human beings constitute and reconstitute ourselves through cultural traditions, which we experience as our own development in a historical time that spans the generations. To investigate the life-world as horizon and ground of all experience therefore requires investigating none other than generativity - the processes of becoming, of making and remaking, that occur over the generations and within which any individual genesis is always already situated. ... Individual subjectivity is intersubjectively and culturally embodied, embedded, and emergent.
— Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind
A man becomes God. This is the culture of life power of a human being. This is such a culture of unimaginable life power.The term God is the self -prejudiced word. This is used to explain the thing. But whatever happens is encircling a man.
— Sri Jibankrishna or Diamond
It is important to note that the acquisition of wealth, as the accepted standard of succes, does not refer to increasing material goods for sustenance purposes, or even for the purpose of increasing enjoyment. It refers rather to wealth as a sign of individual power, a proof of achievement and self-worth.Modern economic individualism, though based on belief in the free individual, has resulted in the phenomenon that increasingly large numbers of people have to work on the property (capital) of a few powerful owners. It is not surprising that such a situation should lead to widespread insecurity, for not only is the individual faced with a criterion of succes over which he has only partial control but also his opportunities for a job are in considerable measure out of his control.
— Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety
The lack of historical memory is a serious shortcoming in our society. A mentality that can only say, “Then was then, now is now”, is ultimately immature. Knowing and judging past events is the only way to build a meaningful future. Memory is necessary for growth.
— Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia: Apostolic Exhortation on the Family
If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing. When panic on one side is creating alarm on another, it is easy to forget there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism, exactly the same grounds, in fact. That is because we are human. We still have every potential for good as we ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect in one another. We are still creatures of singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be even despite our errors and degradations for as long as we abide on this earth. To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.
— Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays
I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one.
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
It is myopic to base sweeping change on the narrow experience of a few years.
— Antonin Scalia, Scalia Dissents: Writings of the Supreme Court's Wittiest, Most Outspoken Justice
We need to move from the existing culture of compliance in cybersecurity to developing a culture of excellence in mitigating Cyber threats.
— Arzak Khan
The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.
— Enoch Powell
No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.
— Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals
There is an unseen river of communication that forever flows -- dark and powerful.
— Sharon M. Draper, Stella by Starlight
I tried to think of a singularly American superstition. I'd learned a few from the Uncles—something about not letting one's shoes touch the kitchen table—but those were all imported from the Old World. Perhaps a country of immigrants had never gotten around to commingling the less desirable pieces of their cultures. Either that, or life there wasn't difficult enough to warrant an adult's belief in magic.
— Sara Nović, Girl at War
Although Martin Luther's theological message was couched as an exhortation to all Christian people, his frame of reference, the human experiences on which he drew and his emotional sympathies, or almost entirely German.
— Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation
It sounded so weird when people called shoyu "soy sauce." It made it sound like Tabasco or something instead of the clean and perfect thing that it was.
— Cynthia Kadohata
Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.
— Enoch Powell
Reading Encyclopaedia Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system.
— A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
Village life gently swirled around them, with the perpetual ebb and flow of people, scurrying in every direction. The village was a living, organic entity, with blood flowing through its veins, and with a definite pulse and heartbeat. It had its own distinct personality and its own dark caustic humour, and was constantly processing and regurgitating information through its winding, meandering streets.
— Leonardo Donofrio, Old Country
His plain, undecorated, and utilitarian work reeked week of provincialism.
— Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation
God does not save us to make us forget our heritage, but to complete it.
— Beth Moore, To Live Is Christ
The scene is France. The theater is the world.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
Don't you sense the enormity of your mistake – you invade a country without understanding its music. – Norman Mailer
— Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World
A modern revolutionary group, explained Abbie Hoffman, headed for the television station, not the factory.
— Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World
Malignant phenomena do not come out of a golden age.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
Asked what would be his idea of Heaven, one statesman in 1897 said it would be to "receive a flow of telegrams alternating news of a British victory by sea and a British victory by land.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
John Brown, raised by disciplinarians, became one himself.
— Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War
The tribal pull of patriotism could have no better testimony.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
The habit of mobility had become ingrained.
— Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II
When he came home with the traditional gift of underwear bought with his first paycheck, she barely looked at it, and coldly shot at him, “What about what you were going to be?
— Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom
Jack and Bobby Kennedy were too young, too attached to real family to transfer affection and loyalty to those that of their blood or region or upbringing.
— David Pietrusza, 1960--LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies
Litterature provides us with the opportunity to escape into fictional worlds that are ultimately rooted in human universals shaped by common biological forces.
— Gad Saad, The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature
All this visible greatness was really one with Nineveh and Tyre.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
General literature without the humbug," was the New Yorker's original mission.
— Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion
The Bible and newspapers, to both Lincoln and Greeley, they represented equally compelling gospel.
— Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion
Why is it that all the Christians I see on TV shows and movies are nothing like the Christians I know in actual life? The people I know have a sense of humor, aren't shallow, don't feel like they know all the answers, struggle, get scared, have hope, make sense, make peace, and hang on tight to their values because they're worth hanging on to. Have Hollywood writers just never actually set foot in a church???
— Angela Wilhite
The same magazines which not long before advertised products which would quickly allow women to return to their war work now extolled elaborate recipes which women could attempt if they stayed home and vacated jobs for men.
— Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II
We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.
— Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.
— Junot Díaz
There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
What did you do for them, Bone? Teach them to read and write? Help them rebuild, give them Christ, help restore a culture? Did you remember to warn them that it could never be Eden?
— Walter M. Miller Jr, A Canticle for Leibowitz
A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages