c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
To talk of humans as 'transcendent' is not to ascribe to them spiritual properties. It is, rather, to recognize that as subjects we have the ability to transform our selves, our natures, our world—an ability denied to any other physical being. In the six million years since the human and chimpanzee lines first diverged on either side of Africa's Great Rift Valley, the behaviour and lifestyles of chimpanzees have barely changed. Human behaviour and lifestyles clearly have. Humans have learnt to learn from previous generations, to improve upon their work, and to establish a momentum to human life and culture that has taken us from cave art to quantum physics and the conquest of space. It is this capacity for constant innovation that distinguishes humans from all other animals. All animals have an evolutionary past. Only humans make history.
— Kenan Malik
A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of its picture of itself. High and popular art are not in competition here. Both may help citizens decide what they are and what they admire. In our age, however, high art has given up speaking to the body of its fellow citizens. It devotes itself to technical displays that can appeal only to other technicians.
— E. Christian Kopff, The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition
Amusement has always been the great moving force behind culture.
— Italo Calvino
How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children – some cultures oblige women to realize this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another – some cultures forbid them to realize this possibility. Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist.
— Yuval Noah Harari, קיצור תולדות האנושות
The study of man is the study of his extensions.
— Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture
In her fury she'd broken into Valencian, indicating the deepest possible roots in the land. I was impressed with how deeply she was from here, in a way I could never imagine being from anywhere, not even my home town.
— Elisabeth Eaves, Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents
It is characteristic of all extension systems to be treated as distinct and separate from the user and to take on an identity of their own. Religions, philosophies, literature, and art illustrate this. After a time, the extended system accretes to itself a past and a history as well as a body of knowledge and skills that can be learned. Such systems can be studied and appreciated as entities in themselves.
— Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture
The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert.
— Dean Koontz, Odd Apocalypse
If you're a true student of the truth, you may easily get frustrated when people try to make points based on mysticism and cultural beliefs.
— Assegid Habtewold
The formal definition of impact is a forcible contact between two things, and God has designed our lives for a collision course with the world.
— David Platt, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream
One cannot worship the false god of nationalism and the God of Christianity at the same time. .
— Martin Luther King Jr.
It seemed that our family had been on this land for thousands of years; that we had sprung from the earth, born of its flesh like a tree or a flower, deep-rooted, not by our feet, but by our hearts.
— Thea Halo, Not Even My Name: A True Story
If there is a religious agency in our lives, it has to appear in the manner of our times. Not from on high, but a revelation that hides itself in our culture, it will be ground-level, on the street, it'll be coming down the avenue in the traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else.
— E. L. Doctorow, The City of God
Scholars note that human reasoning is limited not only by imperfect information and innate intellectual capacities but also by the broader culture that subsequently shapes the very optics that individuals use to categorize the world.
— Michael Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda
From now on, how one arrives at a definition of the relationship of man's basic nature to his culturally conditioned control systems (extensions) is of crucial importance. For in our shrinking globe man can ill afford cultural illiteracy.
— Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture
Playing roles and acting are forms of lying. If a person acts like they really feel and it rocks the boat, they are ostracized. We promote pretense and lying as a cultural way of life. Living this way causes an inner split. It teaches us to hide and cover up our toxic shame. This sends us deeper into isolation and loneliness.
— John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You
Until she went with him to India the first time after they were married. Then it all made sense, and she realized that the hospitality he displayed to all guests was larger than he was - it was cultural, hereditary, something coded into his DNA.
— Thrity Umrigar, The Story Hour
Culture is not trivial. It is not a decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all human beings. Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature.
— Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
— Ernest Hemingway
Every age gets the lunatics it deserves.
— Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History
We are molding Jesus into our image. He's beginning to look a lot like us because, after all, that is who we are most comfortable with. The danger now is when we gather in our church buildings to sing, and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshiping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead, we may be worshiping ourselves.
— David Platt, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream
The full measure of a culture embraces both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel their lives. And no description of a people can be complete without reference to the character of their homeland, the ecological and geographical matrix in which they have determined to live out their destiny. Just as a landscape defines character, culture springs from a spirit of place.
— Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
One age misunderstands another
—  and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.
I did not see Pirahã teenagers moping, sleeping in late, refusing to accept responsibility for their own actions, or trying out what they considered to be radically new approaches to life. They in fact are highly productive and conformist members of their community in the Pirahã sense of productivity (good fishermen, contributing generally to the security, food needs, and other aspects of the physical survival of the community). One gets no sense of teenage angst, depression, or insecurity among the Pirahã youth. They do not seem to be searching for answers. They have them. And new questions rarely arise.
— Daniel L. Everett, Don't Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.
— C.S. Lewis
Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.
— John Updike
I had rather that the human race, having a certain quality in their lives, should continue for only a few centuries than that, losing freedom, friendship, dignity, and mercy, and learning to be quite content without them, they should continue for millions of millennia.
— C.S. Lewis
in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good, otherwise they can't do it.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.
— Edmund Burke, An  Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in Consequence of Some Late Discussions in Parliament, Relative to the Reflections on the French Revolution.
Like all cities, Beirut has many layers, and I had been familiar with one or two. What I was introduced to that day with Ali and Kamal was the Beirut of its people. You take different groups, put them on top of each other, simmer for a thousand years, keep adding more and more strange tribes, simmer for another few thousand years, salt and pepper with religion, and what you get is a delightful mess of a stew that still tastes delectable and exotic, no matter how many times you partake of it.
— Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati
Former civilians did not anticipate how disoriented they would feel as they lost access to their hobbies and interests while being drilled into a pattern of uniformity and sameness. It felt foreign to them to be told when to wake up, how to dress, what to eat (and when to eat it), the beat at which to march, and when to go to sleep. Privacy and individuality were the luxuries of civilians – not soldiers.
— Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II
When hip-hop was born she had no commercial home, and was an invention of beautiful creativity. Born from a beautiful struggle, today she is mostly a 'ratchet' bitch spitting nonsense from her pimp's mansion.
— T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
Culture always tells you to look to illusions for answers. ‘Look at me’, it says, ‘I’ve worked it all out’. Celebrities grow too powerful because people mistake their colour for content. They allow them to create a hole at the heart of our culture, in which they then flourish.
— Guy Mankowski, How I Left the National Grid: A post-punk novel
But unlike Jack, Bobby had not been groomed to be a candidate, and he was constitutionally incapable of the flattery and false praise with which politicians like Johnson got others to do their daily bidding.
— Jonathan Darman, Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America
In the non-material scenario, both temple or total quality gets raised, deploying communication as mortar, culture as reinforcement, and commitment as concrete.
— Priyavrat Thareja
Perhaps crossing the barriers of time has freed me.
— W.P. Kinsella, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy
If you really have an open mind, you would surely discover that every race has some good and bad people in it. Therefore, it would be very unwise to condemn an entire race just because you encountered some negative minded individuals from it.
One-year enlistment had proven problematic since the troops were scheduled to rotate out of the army just when they had begun to internalize the discipline of military service and became reliable soldiers.
— Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence
Captive Greece captured her rude conqueror
— Horace
How vigilant we must be to ensure that we don’t allow our impression of Jesus to be held captive by the prevailing mores of our secular culture! Rather, it is essential that we continue to return to the Gospels to ensure that the reverse occurs: to allow Jesus to hold our hearts and imaginations captive in response to the dominant thinking of our time. For exiles trying to live faithfully within the host empire of post-Christendom, the Gospel stories are our most dangerous memories. They continue to fire our imaginations and remind us that it’s possible to thrive on foreign soil while serving Yahweh, but it’s the kind of thriving that often rejects popular wisdom. These stories are the standard by which we judge all other stories, all other descriptors of life today. If, after reading these dangerous biblical stories, you can’t imagine Jesus the Messiah as a televangelist, strutting around on stage in a flashy suit, playing it up for the cameras, then you are forced to reject this image and seek another mode of being Christ today.
— Michael Frost, Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture
Reading is an important product of language that serves as a foundation of civilization. Without it, humans would essentially function on sound and instinct alone, much like beasts.
— Irvin weathersby Jr.
I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown of my feet by any.
— Mahatma Gandhi
The people had once created the city. The city now created the people, or, more exactly, the people of Venice now identified themselves more in terms of the city. The private had become public.
— Peter Ackroyd, Venice: Pure City
We want our children to know and believe the one good story. Every other story is a copy or shadow of this one. Some copies of it are quite good and shout the Truth. Others see only the faintest whisper of it, or, in its absence remind us of the Truth. We want our kids to know the one good story so well that when they see Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Frodo, Anne of Green Gables, Arielle, or Sleeping Beauty, they can recognize the strands of Truth and deception in them. Saturating our children in the one good story will enable them to discern Truth and error as it comes to them from the world.
— Elyse M. Fitzpatrick, Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus
I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown of my feet by any
— Mahatma Gandhi
There is no separation between the gospel and culture, between how we live in society and how we live in our private lives, between the lordship of Jesus inside the four walls of a church building and outside that building.
— Michael Brown
A modern culture built on the back of dying gods immerses me.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
We are called to go make disciples, but how do disciples live? How do we function in the world—in our marriages, families, schools and places of business? How do we live as salt and light in the society?
— Michael Brown
We the people have more power than we know, and we must learn to use it judiciously.
— Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do?
When strategy, culture, and brand harmonize, they amplify one another and resonate loud and clear.
— Kate   O'Neill, Lessons from Los Gatos: How Working at a Startup Called Netflix Made Me a Better Entrepreneur
To be likeable as a woman, it seems, you have to ensure that you’re also non-threatening and slightly useless.
— Hannah Brooks Olsen
Liberals and conservatives tend to view the economy in purely materialistic terms. They make growth, security, and prosperity ends in themselves. They exalt enlightened self-interest. They tell us that productive work is the fundamental source of human dignity.But for Christians, (Greg) Forster insists, the materialistic view is a lie. The modern economic man is prone to workaholism, Envy, greed, anxiety, and a host of other ills. The great task for Christians is to become, broadly speaking, innovative entrepreneurs: people who are not only more productive in their work then there would be leaving neighbors, but also more creative, generous, honest, and humane.
— Greg Forster, Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It
As a journalist, I can also now understand his (Patrick O'Brian's)idea that the Q&A is not particularly civilized — let alone a sports media press scrum. The formats don’t necessarily further understanding between two people. It is not always true conversation — a discussion that unearths nuggets of insight. It too often seems like interviewers are running through a pre-fab checklist, looking for a Tweetable quote, trolling for a gaffe, or ticking off pre-conceived points like those on a medical checklist at the doctor’s office. It can feel invasive, like a trip to the proctologist — in front of an audience.
— Knute Berger
The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m.
— Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
Every culture that’s ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality and that the other 5% would be delivered in the next 18 months, and from Egypt forward they’ve been running around believing they had a perfect grip on things and yet we look back at every society that preceded us with great smugness at how naive they all were. Well, it never occurs to us, then, that maybe we’re whistling in the dark too! That the universe is stranger than you CAN suppose, and that that openness that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing, because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor but in service to the living mystery: the fact that you’re not going to understand it; it is not going to yield to logic; or magic; or any other technique that’s been developed…
— Terence McKenna
When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.
— Stefan Molyneux
There are many themes found in the Book of Psalms that are generally not found in modern music. These include the fear of God, the righteousness and justice of God, the sovereignty of God, the judgement of God, the evil of sin, spiritual and physical warfare, the arch enemies of the Christian, the destruction of the wicked, the reality of hell, the blessedness of the church, the vicious attacks upon the church, the commandments of God, the dominion of David’s son, and so on. Without the backdrop of these truths, the themes of love, mercy, faith, and salvation become largely meaningless.
— Kevin Swanson
Often we blame a region's religion when the oppression instead may be rooted in its culture. Yet, that acknowledged, it's also true that . . . it is often cited by the oppressors.
— Nicholas D. Kristof, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
The biblical counselor must always remember that the ROOT problem is deeper than skin; it is sin. The ultimate cure is not culture, but Christ.
— James MacDonald, Christ-Centered Biblical Counseling: Changing Lives with God's Changeless Truth
Netiquette Rules bring us together. Culture creates great experiences. Share. NetworkEtiquette.net
— David Chiles
in America we have people from all kinds of backgrounds, all in a cluster, together, and consequently law has become very important in this country. Lawyers and law are what hold us together. There is no ethos.
— Joseph Campbell
Irritability was an occupational disease. Intolerant and intolerable belong in the same category.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, The First Salute
A cult leader alone in his beliefs is just a crazy dude with a beard.
— Caitlin Doughty
It is a wise man who, when his spouse asks, "How does this look?" can answer honestly without upsetting her.
— Tsihugwa Kikuyu
While the United States is becoming the most culturally diverse nation in the world, less than 5.5% of Christian congregations are multiethnic.
— James MacDonald, Christ-Centered Biblical Counseling: Changing Lives with God's Changeless Truth
The conscience is a right mix of instinct, reason and culture. The conscience itself is not a truth but it has an ability to access the truth. But the very conscience is assembled only by the reason.
— Thiruman Archunan
Marriage is the best compromise between nature and culture.
— Thiruman Archunan
Spiritualism exits only for individuals. Reason is born when two men interact
—  addition of more and more members necessitates the spreading of the reason culminating as culture. Hence a culture is as dynamic as the reason. The nature of the reason is the nature of the spirit within for some and instinct for some others.
Culture is corporate character.
— Pearl Zhu, Digital Master
Culture is like water in the sea
—  it can either keep the business ship afloat or drag it down and sink it.
He wasn't sure he liked everything that was happening, but a lot of it was "cultural," apparently, and you couldn't object to that, so he didn't. "Cultural" sort of solved problems by explaining that they weren't really there.
— Terry Pratchett
Culture becomes visible when we travel between “ cultures ” and when we look back in time to other “ cultures ” than our own.
— Michael     Ryan
Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in.
— Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books
Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor.
— Ryan Lilly
A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death. Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death will be no small task, but we shouldn't forget how quickly other cultural prejudices--racism, sexism, homophobia--have begun to topple in the recent past. It is high time death had its own moment of truth.
— Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
Light always trumps darkness. It always has, and it always will. Therefore... if you believe that your world is darkening...if you believe that the culture of your nation is growing dimmer by the year...don't blame it on the dark! Darkness is only doing what darkness does."If darkness is winning the battles, my friend, it is because light is not doing it's job. You are light. So wake up. Wake up.
— Andy Andrews, The Noticer Returns: Sometimes You Find Perspective, and Sometimes Perspective Finds You
Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of face, (in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face). Of words, nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture.
— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
The theater has been called the pulse of the people.
— Abigail Adams
You don’t go on bended-knee to petition the official culture for your rights. You have to take them.
— Terence McKenna
They (evangelicals)could enrich their faith (with C.S. Lewis) without diluting it, and engage secular culture in ways other than through reasoned argument. Lewis allowed his readers to grasp and benefit from the importance of images and stories for the life of faith, without losing sight of the robustly reasonable nature of the Christian gospel”.
I have this theory, that this will be the only city that future archaeologists find, Las Vegas. The dry climate will preserve it all and teams of scientists in the year 5000 will carefully sweep and scrape away the sand to find pyramids and castles and replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the New York skyline and stripper poles and snapper cards and these future archaeologists will re-create our entire culture based solely on this one shallow and cynical little shithole. We can complain all we want that this city doesn’t represent us. We can say, Yes, but I hated Las Vegas. Or I only went there once. Well, I’m sure not all Romans reveled in the torture-fests at the Colosseum either, but there it is.
— Jess Walter
Simply put, here amid the kingdoms of this world we have no continuing city. That’s why we dare not become attached to the passing values of any human culture.
— Harold L. Senkbeil
There’s plenty of emphasis on success in our culture, but we have to help people focus on significance as well.
— Morton Shaevitz, Refire! Don't Retire: Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life
try to visualize all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves.
— Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts
When you travel, appreciate the culture of the people in the land.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
When I was young, I thought classical music was only the background noise for cartoons.
— Ben Carson, One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America's Future
With the evolution of Us came the evolution of Them.The original Them was anyone who wasn’t blood related — Them was pretty much everyone. Over time, as the number of people in Us got bigger, Them got smaller. Them now might mean anyone in any other country. This is a common Them in America, and a Them that only (light use of this word) consists of 95% of the world. Another common Them in America is anyone who isn’t Christian, which is a measly 68% of the world, or roughly 4.8 Billion Thems.In a relatively short amount of time, Us went from being a fraction of a percent of humanity and Them the rest, to some people experiencing an Us of more than two billion other people, far more than were ever alive at the onset of Us and Them.
— Sam Killermann
There are two kinds of cultures in this world: cultures where what you do matters and cultures where all that matters is who you are. You can be the former or you can suck.
— Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Privileged people can fall into the trap of universalizing experiences and laying them across other people’s experiences as an interpretive lens.
— Matt      Chandler
For every 100 women who earn a bachelors degree, 75 men do so. For every 100 American women who earn a Masters degree, 66 American men do so. For every 100 females, ages 20 to 24, who commit suicide, 624 males do so. For every 100 women, ages 18 to 21, in correctional facilities, 1430 men are so confined.
— Mitch Pearlstein, From Family Collapse to America's Decline: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation
Literalness, however, is not the substance from which human culture is made.
— Begoña Aretxaga
Strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as a “Christian” movie because movies, though often remarkable pieces of art full of symbolism, commentary and meaning, are not sentient beings. Even the animated ones are, strictly speaking, still things, inanimate objects lacking eternal souls, incapable of feeling emotions or making decisions.
— Jelani Greenidge
Good art requires the examination of faith issues from a variety of perspectives and voices. Yet for many audience members, the only way a film can be “Christian” is if there is a major altar-call type scene with a dramatic conversion. If the movie isn’t an overt endorsement not only of faith itself but Judeo-Christian morality and/or Protestant culture, then it’s not “Christian.
— Jelani Greenidge
The bottom line on the declaration, 'This is part of our culture,' is this: At its best, this is a choice made with little or no critical thinking about future results. At its worst, it is merely an excuse to do what one wants to do. It is selfish, leaderless, pack behavior with unconsidered consequences that ultimately destroy families, neighborhoods, cities, and before you know it, generations.
— Andy Andrews, The Noticer Returns: Sometimes You Find Perspective, and Sometimes Perspective Finds You
Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.
— Rebecca Goldstein
Who we are is not a question we can ask without seeking to understand the context in which we live. Biblical counselors seek to understand the influences that shape the responses of the human heart.
— James MacDonald, Christ-Centered Biblical Counseling: Changing Lives with God's Changeless Truth
The culture you live in today is the culture you have allowed. That is true of your family, and it is true of your country."Never forget that you will shape the culture in which you exist, or the culture you allow will determine how and - maybe someday - if you are allowed to exist.
— Andy Andrews, The Noticer Returns: Sometimes You Find Perspective, and Sometimes Perspective Finds You
War is the worst way of gathering knowledge about a foreign culture.
— Stanisław Lem
God bestows great gifts on human beings with perfect justice, but not All gifts we are given come from God. Some gifts come from society or culture, and it is here that problems develop.
— John Mark Reynolds, The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization
Since, in our societies, a gendered division of labor still predominates which confers a male twist on basic liberal categories (autonomy, public activity, competition) and relegates women to the private sector of family solidarity, liberalism itself, in its opposition to private and public, harbors male dominance. Furthermore, it is only modern Western capital culture for which autonomy and individual freedom stand higher than collective solidarity, connection, responsibility for dependent others, the duty to respect the customs of one's community. Liberalism itself thus privileges a certain culture: the modern Western one. As to freedom of choice, liberalism is also marked by a strong bias. It is intolerant when individuals of other cultures are not given freedom of choice-as is evident in issues such as clitoridechtomy, child brideship, infanticide, polygamy, and incest. However, it ignores the tremendous pressure which, for example, compels women in out liberal societies to undergo such procedures as plastic surgery, cosmetic implants, and Botox injections to remain competitive in the sex markets.
— Slavoj Žižek
Ultimately, culture, secular and otherwise, is a collection of survival strategies. The things that look like decoration—poetry, novels, music, dancing—if you strip away all the layers, are mechanisms for coping, surviving, understanding.
— Ben Fountain
Orwell wrote easily and well about small humane pursuits, such as bird watching, gardening and cooking, and did not despise popular pleasures like pubs and vulgar seaside resorts. In many ways, his investigations into ordinary life and activity prefigure what we now call 'cultural studies.
— Christopher Hitchens
... the invention of the mechanical clock in medieval Europe. This was one of the great inventions in this history of mankind -- not in a class with fire and the wheel, but comparable to movable type in its revolutionary implications for cultural values, technological change, social and political organization, and personality.
— David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World
And we convict almost every case, she thinks, because the law requires us to prosecute them for living their way of life.
— Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs
Fixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn around the life of a child or an adult in any consistent way, but if you can surround a person with a new culture, and different web of relationships, then they will absorb new habits of thought and behavior in ways you will never be able to measure or understand. And if you do surround that person with a new, enriching culture, then you had better keep surrounding them with it, because if they slip back into a different culture, and most of the gains will fade away.
— David Brooks
Once upon a time, when the evil spirit of darkness reigned over the Land of Azerbaijan, hiding the sun inside his underground caves,When the orphan sky peered at the Caucasus Mountains from the black dome of sorrow,When the rain shed its tears of ice upon the barren earth…
— Ella Leya, The Orphan Sky
Evil tempts every soul, but a weak soul tempts evil.
— Ella Leya, The Orphan Sky
while modernity is not Christianity, modernity is the product of a Christian civilization. Lately the defects of modernity have been made plain to us while its virtues have been taken for granted.
— John Mark Reynolds, The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization
(A middle-class child's) parents didn't just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits.
— David Brooks
Good God, is the man a heathen?’‘Worse, a capitalist with pretensions of culture.
— Melanie Jackson, Impression of Bones
As I learned more about choice, and looked over the extensive evidence in all of the cases I had testified in, I realized that what was happening in the FLDS was human trafficking-both for labor and for sex. In mainstream society, money and lust are the currency. In the FLDS, salvation and position are the currency, but the forced acts of labor and sex are the same-the very definition of slavery. And whether greed or God is the currency, it is not right to own another's free agency.
— Rebecca Musser, The Witness Wore Red: The 19th Wife Who Brought Polygamous Cult Leaders to Justice
The fundamentalist burns with anti-intellectual zeal, and in reaction sophists are often swollen up with intellectualism. The fundamentalist and the sophist justify their excesses by the sin of their opposite. Fundamentalism and sophistry give piety and philosophy bad reputations with society.
— John Mark Reynolds
My eyes still swelled with tears, but my heart was dancing the lazgi.
— Ella Leya, The Orphan Sky
It must never be forgotten that the general standard of learning and culture of a nation has a large part in determining its law and polity.
— Theodore Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law
Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it.
— Edith Wharton
Culture and collars had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing that college educations and mastery were the same things.
— Jack London, Martin Eden
Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination. Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meanings in symbolic terms, and the reordering of nature--the qualities of space and time--in new perceptual and material form. Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic. Technology is the instrumental ordering of human experience within a logic of efficient means, and the direction of nature to use its powers for material gain. But art and technology are not separate realms walled off from each other. Art employs techne, but for its own ends. Techne, too, is a form of art that bridges culture and social structure, and in the process reshapes both.
— Daniel Bell, The Winding Passage: Essays and Sociological Journeys, 1960-1980
Deception is the natural defence of the weak against the strong, and the South used it for many years against its conquerors; to-day it must be prepared to see its black proletariat turn that same two-edged weapon against itself. And how natural this is! The death of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner proved long since to the Negro the present hopelessness of physical defence. Political defence is becoming less and less available, and economic defence is still only partially effective. But there is a patent defence at hand,—the defence of deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying. It is the same defence which peasants of the Middle Age used and which left its stamp on their character for centuries. To-day the young Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive personal advantage in deception and lying. His real thoughts, his real aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he must not complain. Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage. With this sacrifice there is an economic opening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity. Without this there is riot, migration, or crime. Nor is this situation peculiar to the Southern United States, is it not rather the only method by which undeveloped races have gained the right to share modern culture? The price of culture is a Lie.
— W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
If only customs were logical. If only the rules were as simple as "Don't do anything that will hurt others." If that were the only rule, I’d have at least a fifty percent chance of getting it right. I would, for example, ask myself whether saying the Rosary silently on the train would hurt others. The answer would be no and so I would say it. As it is, the reasons as to why something is right and something is not seem arbitrary.
— Francisco X. Stork, Marcelo in the Real World
The young are often savvy in the cultural world but not so much the intellectual
—  the old the intellectual but not so much the cultural. But I tell you those who do the most damage during an era are very much aware of both.
How can we pick and choose which parts of the Bible to follow? One thing is God’s will and another is just cultural differences? What if it’s all cultural? What if homosexuality or saving yourself for marriage is as outdated as women staying silent in church or Leviticus forbidding tattoos?
— Trevor D. Richardson, Dystopia Boy: The Unauthorized Files
Social conditioning, accompanied by moral and mental constraints, now serve to render the mediocre mind nearly incapable of unbiased assessment.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
Anonymity beats fame. One cannot undo fame.
— Anonymous
God makes Himself felt in the heart of each person. He also respects the culture of all people...God is open to all people. He calls everyone. He moves everyone to seek Him and to discover Him through creation.
— Pope Francis, On Heaven and Earth: Pope Francis on Faith, Family, and the Church in the Twenty-First Century
The author called us to re-examine assumptions bequeathed to us from Greece and Rome. Just as a bridge built by the Roman Empire might have held up tolerably for centuries under foot traffic but crumble under the weight of a modern truck, the author cautions that classical thinking had limits exposed by contemporary events and certainly exposed by the modern world.
— Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture
Perhaps, she had dreamed, she would teach some future King, shaping his child mind for a new and better world.
— Margaret Landon, Anna and the King of Siam
We came to recognize that our initial thinking about the keys to educational reform was wrong. The key variables weren’t pedagogical. They weren’t financial. They weren’t curricular. They weren’t research. They weren’t any of the usual things we’ve always talked about as the engines of change. The variables were deeply emotional and cultural.
— David Edward Goldberg, A Whole New Engineer: The Coming Revolution in Engineering Education
Wherever you travel to, appreciate the culture and beauty of the place.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
These days people call entertainment capturing someone at their lowest moment and then posting it for the world to see.
— Cedar Cove
What is carved on rocks were away in time. What is told from mouth to mouth will live forever.
— Vietnamese saying
we deceive ourselves if we believe we can hold on to old models as "ideologies whimper off to a shallow grave in prolonged agony of people, institutions and cultures.
— Said E. Dawlabani
We . . . go out into the Waste Land of Experts, each knowing so much about so little that he can neither be contradicted nor is worth contradicting.
— G.M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age
The mother was conflicted between what she knows that what's possible.
— Brooke Hauser, The New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant Teens
Music is the one place in mass media where kids editorialize to kids.
— Don Williams
But cheating has always been the purview of fairies, and as we are about to enter their domain, we ought to act in accordance with local customs.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest. In a complex world, almost everything affects you – that closes the loop on pecuniary self-interest. Customers are always right, but people aren't.
— Clive Thompson
The farm work they hated was the only work they knew. Often, even the basic skills of plumbing or electricity or mechanical work were mysteries to them – as were the job discipline and the subtleties that children raised in the industrial world learn without thinking about them; starting work on time, working set hours, taking orders from strangers instead of their father, playing office politics.
— Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power
By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished?
— Rachel Carson
Civilization is in fact the longest story of all. Civilization can persist through a series of economies.
— Fernand Braudel
After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism
— Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest
In India we're fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, it's gone. Every person that's walking down the street is a walking bar code. You can tell where their clothes are from, how much they cost, which designer made which shoe, which shop you bought each item from. Everything is civilized and tagged and valued and numbered and put in it's place. Whereas in India, the wilderness still exists-the unindoctrinated wilderness of the mind, full of untold secrets and wild imaginings.
— Arundhati Roy
One problem with today's culture is that we defend too many rights and ignore too many wrongs.
— Ron Brackin
She came from the most worthless of classes - the rich, with a smattering of culture.
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
What makes a civilization real to its inhabitants, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at it centre, nor even the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, learned by its students and recollected in times of tribulation.
— Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest
Support what is good and spit out what is bad. Get off of your knees and reject the role of slave to the culture of violence.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Culture, religion, and education, are conspiracies to standardize worldviews.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups
The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions where the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from western clothes and hair styles to the European practice of colonizing foreign people. Unfortunately, they took up empire-building at precisely the moment when the cost of imperialism began to exceed the benefits.
— Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest
[C]ulture, for all its importance, is not some miasma that seeps into people through their skin. Culture relies on neural circuitry that accomplishes the feat we call learning. Those circuits do not make us indiscriminate mimics but have to work in surprisingly subtle ways to make the transmission of culture possible. That is why it is not an alternative to a focus on learning, culture and socialization, but rather an attempt to explain how they work.
The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.
— William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
Preserving cultural diversity is considered a supreme virtue today, but the members of the diverse subcultures don't always see it that way. People have wants and needs, and when cultures rub shoulders, people in one culture are bound to notice when their neighbors are satisfying those those desires better than they are. When they do notice, history tells us, they shamelessly borrow wherever works best.
For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present.
— Davis Bunn, Lion of Babylon
The overall result was drift punctuated by protest.
— Charles Emmerson, 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War
The long-term integrity of the empire would not be assured by warm words alone. Britain"s own position in the empire had changed. Once, the country been the engine room of empire, the productive heart of the beast. But with Britain becoming more like a boardroom, investing money, taking decisions, but essentially living off the labor of others, and off the earnings of the past? At some point in the future, might even this role wither away, and might Britain become little more than a repository of British tradition, a common idealized land into which Britons abroad – in Australia, Canada, New Zealand or South Africa – could retreat, a collective memory of Greenfields and swooping glens?
— Charles Emmerson, 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War
In a stress pressure-cooker like America, I believe we will see more and more shooting massacres. Violence is in our cultural DNA.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
America is the world's top war-master
—  the most sophisticated killer-culture in history.
The starting point to freedom is to begin questioning the cultural narrative you have been sold.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Before saying anything further about culture, I consider the world is hungry and does not care about culture, and people artificially want to turn these thoughts away from hunger and direct them towards culture.
— Antonin Artaud
Sometimes you just find a culture that breaks your heart,” she said finally.
— Lily King, Euphoria
The world of most men is given to them by their culture..
— Richard Wright, The Outsider
Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.
— Anthony Bourdain
Every old man that dies is a library that burns.
— Amadou Hampâté Bâ