c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Jesus was trying to present value of a life of vulnerability in which one would have practical and needed experience of the same. It would be a life without baggage, so one would learn to accept others and their culture instead of always carrying along our own country's assumptions and calling them the Gospel.
— Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation
I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.
— Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones--bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.
— Fritz Leiber
a single generation enamoured of foreign ways is almost enough in history to risk the whole continuity of civilization and learning.
— Sister Nivedita, Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists
It's because there are too many people who want to stop us having fun. That's the reason.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The World According to Bertie
We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The World According to Bertie
It seemed perverse to some, but for all their apparent militarism the Gzilt had remained peaceful over many millenia; it was the avowedly peaceful Culture that had , within living memory, taken part in an all-out galactic war against another civilisation.
— Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata
Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The heathen could only be eliminated as a force if their culture was completely erased.
— Tariq Ali, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree
The dominating idea of English society was not cultivate virtue but to avoid scandal.
— Edward Short
She'd asked him what it was like to be in there, doing nothing but then being woken up to speak to somebody you couldn't see. He'd said that it was like being woken from a deep and satisfying sleep, to be asked questions while you kept your eyes closed. He was quite happy. Sight was over-rated anyway.
— Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata
Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. We've never quite made peace with that in the theater---set designer Robin Wagner
— Barbara Isenberg, Making It Big
True Christianity cuts across all other religions and creates its own culture.
— Dr. J. Otis Yoder
Death is universal. The rituals associated with it, however, vary substantially—and are greatly influenced by their religious and cultural context.
— Richard J. Borden, Ecology and Experience: Reflections from a Human Ecological Perspective
One of the truly bizarre things about our current cultural situation is that the leading figures of the scientific establishment seem genuinely amazed that the citizens do not accept finch-beak variation as proof of the claim that humans, like all animals and plants, are accidental products of a purposeless universe in which only material processes have operated from the beginning.
— Phillip E. Johnson, An Easy-to-Understand Guide for Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds
Google and Apple offer the image of a pseudo-commons to Internet users. That image recalls Nick Dyer-Whiteford's claim that, in light of the structural failures of neoliberal policies, capital could "turn to a 'Plan B', in which limited versions of commons, pollution trading schemes, community development and open-source and file-sharing practices are introduced as subordinate aspects of a capitalist economy, where voluntary cooperation subsidizes profit. One can think here of how Web 2.0 re-appropriates many of the innovations of radical digital activists, and converts them into a source of rent." Indeed, with the rise of the trademarked Digital Commons software platform and with the proliferation of university-based digital and media commons (which are typically limited to fee-paying and/or employed university community members), the very concept of the digital commons appears to be one of these reappropriations. But if, as part of what James Boyle describes as the "Second Closure Movement," this very rhetorical move signals the temporary defeats of the after-globalization and radical hacker movements that claimed the language of the commons, perhaps the advocacy for ownership of digital wares (or at least a form of unalienable, absolute possession, whether individual or communal) would provide a strategic ballast against the proprietary control of large swathes of information by apparently benevolent corporations and institutions. While still dangling in mid-air, the information commodity's consumption might thereby be placed more solidly on common ground.
— Sumanth Gopinath, The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form
I spent the beginning of my focus on activism by doing what most everyone else was doing; blaming other people and institutions. Don’t like the war? Let’s blame the president, congress, or lobbyists. Don’t like ecological disregard? Let’s blame this or that corrupt corporation or some regulatory body for poor performance. Don’t like being poor and socially immobile? Let’s blame government coercion and interference in this free market utopia everyone keeps talking about.The sobering truth of the matter is that the only thing to blame is the dynamic, causal unfolding of system expression itself on the cultural level. In other words, none of us create or do anything in isolation – it’s impossible. We are system-bound both physically and psychologically; a continuum. Therefore our view of causality with respect to societal change can only be truly productive if we seek and source the most relevant sociological influences we can and begin to alter those effects from the root causes.
— Peter Joseph
All ethics and morals are culturally relative. And Esme's reaction taught me that while cultural relativism is an easy concept to process intellectually, it is not, for many, an easy one to remember.
— Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees
Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster.
— Geert Hofstede
Government observers, keen on getting the Penan out of the valuable hardwood forests, have claimed that Penan health is poor and that they are malnourished. This is a ploy to get them settled so they can be controlled. Also, it is a source of embarrassment to the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia that in the 1980s, nomadic hunters are still roaming the jungles. This doesn't help the national image of a modern, developing country.
— Eric Hansen, Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo
Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit
— Jawaharlal Nehru
One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.
— Booker T. Washington
Nations rise and fall, flourish and decay, by what they believe in and by what their culture stands for.
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
Eyes glazed over as the great rice-wine parties in the highlands were recalled, parties that are no longer held since the arrival of the mission. Bario has become a good, clean, upstanding, sober, hard-working Christian community. What a loss for these fun-loving and generous people.
— Eric Hansen, Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo
Considering our backgrounds, I found it a strange irony that Ian and I should meet in central Borneo. Both of us were set in motion by the war in Southeast Asia. Ian enlisted. I left the country several weeks before an FBI agent arrived at my parents' front door.
— Eric Hansen, Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo
Man is often the prisoner of the culture he lives in. Question your culture to break the prison doors! Question it so that you can be able to see the incredible stupidities in your culture!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The general air of insecurity and affection made it too easy for him to imagine these once-a-year fabulous creatures as the cubicle dwellers most of them were in everyday life.
— Charlie Huston, Sleepless
We want to make certain that we view culture through the eyes of faith, that we don't view our faith through the eyes of culture.
— Stephen D. Livesday
Liberals tend to view traditions, policies, and morals of past generations as arbitrary designs put in place by less enlightened people. Because of this, liberals don't pay much attention to why traditions developed or wonder about possible ramifications of their social engineering.
— John Hawkins
The construction of a new body of knowledge always bears direct connection to the ideology in which it operates. Historical insights that diverge from the narrative laid down at the inception of the nation can be accepted only when consternation about their implications is abated. This can happen when the current collective identity begins to be taken for granted and ceases to be something anxiously and nostalgically clings to a mythical past, when identity becomes the basis for living and not its purpose - that is when historiographic change can take place.
— Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People
Pride is instilled. It's what we carry with us every day of our lives.
— Nancy Arroyo Ruffin, Letters to My Daughter: A Collection of Short Stories and Poems about Love, Pride, and Identity
Do not let your assumptions about a culture block your ability to perceive the individual, or you will fail.
— Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance
You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it's effectively implemented.
— Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?
Americans are interesting creatures. They criticize those who speak their language with a slight accent but have no issues with butchering most other languages, my name included.
— Santino Hassell, Afterimage
People carry around with them internalization's fixed-feature space learned early in life. Man is like other members of the animal kingdom , first, last and always a prisoner of his biological organism. No matter how hard he tries, it is impossible for him to the best himself of his own culture, where it has penetrated to the roots of his nervous system and determines how he perceives the world.
— Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension
Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
— Edward Abbey, Down the River
A culture finds the gods it needs.
— Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Norse Myths
Jay-Z and Kanye West are to authentic rap culture what diseased rates were to 14th century Europeans
— Dean Cavanagh
I am not going to believe in militant nationalism, which cultivates a culture of intolerance, Can't we think of a solution without violence.
— Tarif Naaz, Mayhem In Paradise
May the sunshine ever greet youand sorrows flow away,May the knowledge flow within youand darkness fade away.
— Munindra Misra, Chants of Hindu Gods and Godesses in English Rhyme
Americans tend to use "nation" as a synonym for "country." But political scientists and historians, as well as many Europeans, tend to use the term for a much more specific phenomenon: a group of people who feel they belong together, whether they have a country of their own or not.
— Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity
Ferbin's father had had the same robustly pragmatic view of religion as he’d had of everything else. In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious lives more bearable. People craved self-importance; they longed to be told they mattered as individuals, not just as part of a mass of people or some historical process. They needed the reassurance that while their life might be hard, bitter and thankless, some reward would be theirs after death. Happily for the governing class, a well-formed faith also kept people from seeking their recompense in the here and now, through riot, insurrection or revolution.
— Iain M. Banks, Matter
The nationalist regrets the change
—  an ill-founded belief in the merits of purity blinds him to the virtues of the foreign and the hybrid.
writers like Jack Kerouac (who called himself an "urban Thoreau") set forth to redefine and rediscover ways to live in America without slogging through what Kerouac called the endless system of "work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume...
— Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man
It's good netiquette to look for every opportunity to compliment others online. NetworkEtiquette.net
— David Chiles, The Principles Of Netiquette
There are many madnesses in every culture! All cultures need reason!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Ferbin’s father had had the same robustly pragmatic view of religion as he’d had of everything else. In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious lives more bearable. People craved self-importance; they longed to be told they mattered as individuals, not just as part of a mass of people or some historical process. They needed the reassurance that while their life might be hard, bitter and thankless, some reward would be theirs after death. Happily for the governing class, a well-formed faith also kept people from seeking their recompense in the here and now, through riot, insurrection or revolution.
— Iain M. Banks
in spite of the phenomenal growth of the Internet and mobile devices, I still believe television will continue to be an incredibly important medium for the Church. After all, over the last century, radio never killed movies, and TV never killed radio. Everything finds its level in the media universe.
— Phil Cooke
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.
— Clarence Darrow, The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow
The Hmong never had any interest in ruling over the Chinese or anyone else; they wanted merely to be left alone, which, as their later history was also to illustrate, may be the most difficult request any minority can make of a majority culture.
— Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
We are all born agnostics. Atheism and theism is sold to us.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, Divided & Conquered
Thanks to arranged marriages: There are countless women who have never been their husband's girlfriend.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A gold tooth is to some blacks, what braces are to all whites.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The drive behind life has lost none of its power; proof that, impelled by that drive, man can build as well as destroy; that in his nature is more of Vishnu the Creator than of Siva the Destroyer.
— George Amos Dorsey, Why We Behave like Human Beings
Building a naval power takes generations, not so much to develop the necessary technology as to pass along the accumulated experience that creates good admirals.
— George Friedman, The Next Decade: What the World Will Look Like
And that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world. For we moderns have nothing of our own. We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias, as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us. But the only value of an encyclopaedia lies in the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, in the binding or the wrapper. And so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: “Manual of internal culture for external barbarians.” The opposition of inner and outer makes the outer side still more barbarous, as it would naturally be, when the outward growth of a rude people merely developed its primitive inner needs. For what means has nature of repressing too great a luxuriance from without? Only one,—to be affected by it as little as possible, to set it aside and stamp it out at the first opportunity. And so we have the custom of no longer taking real things seriously, we get the feeble personality on which the real and the permanent make so little impression. Men become at last more careless and accommodating in external matters, and the [Pg 34] considerable cleft between substance and form is widened; until they have no longer any feeling for barbarism, if only their memories be kept continually titillated, and there flow a constant stream of new things to be known, that can be neatly packed up in the cupboards of their memory.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
The financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession.
— Sara Sheridan
As it stands there is a very strong argument that as the book trade becomes increasingly corporate it's our literary heritage that is at risk - a vital part of our culture.
— Sara Sheridan
From all accounts, it seems the faithful opposition is reduced to Gideon's 300. The day has arrived for Christians to engage the battle...From now on, true Christians will engage the battle of ideas in academy. The time for giving up ground is over. Now we must fight. We must engage the [B]iblical worldview vigorously in the world of great literature. The greatests wars ever fought in history are not those fought by sword or artillery. The greatest battles are engaged in the realm of ideas
— Kevin Swanson, Apostate
To understand our world, we must use a revolving globe and look at the earth from various vantage points. If we do so, we will see that the Atlantic is but a bridge linking the colorful, tropical Afro-Latin American world, whose strong ethnic and cultural bonds have been preserved to this day. For a Cuban who arrives in Angola, neither the climate, nor the landscape, nor the food are strange. For a Brazilian, even the language is the same.
— Ryszard Kapuściński, Another Day of Life
It is one of the benchmarks of a culture I always think – the page at which it operates. A good way to measure it is to order a taxi and see how irate local people get if it is late.
— Sara Sheridan, Truth Or Dare
I'm proud of the culture I come from - we're a small country and a close-knit community.
— Sara Sheridan
The thought came back to him, as it often did: To save the culture of your allies is a small thing. To cherish the culture of your enemy, to risk your life and the life of other men to save it, to give it all back to them as soon as the battle was won … it was unheard of, but that was exactly what Walker Hancock and the other Monuments Men intended to do.
— Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
Whiteness is not a culture. There is Irish culture and Italian culture and American culture - the latter, as Albert Murray pointed out, a mixture of the Yankee, the Indian, and the Negro (with a pinch of ethnic salt); there is youth culture and drug culture and queer culture; but there is no such thing as white culture. Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it. Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and the white skin would have no more social significance than big feet.
— Noel Ignatiev, Race Traitor
Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.
— Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures
deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
It is good to recall that three centuries ago, around the year 1660, two of the greatest monuments of modern history were erected, one in the West and one in the East; St. Paul's Cathedral in London and the Taj Mahal in Agra. Between them, the two symbolize, perhaps better than words can describe, the comparative level of architectural technology, the comparative level of craftsmanship and the comparative level of affluence and sophistication the two cultures had attained at that epoch of history. But about the same time there was also created—and this time only in the West—a third monument, a monument still greater in its eventual import for humanity. This was Newton's Principia, published in 1687. Newton's work had no counterpart in the India of the Mughals.
— Abdus Salam, Ideals & Realities 2/E
It takes a huge amount of culture to normalize "crazy", and of course that's its main focus
— Stefan Molyneux
It would be easier to get a computer to cry than to get Estonians to share their innermost feelings.
— Lembit Öpik, Xenophobe's Guide to the Estonians
The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
Modernity has abandoned the household gods, not because we have rejected the idolatry as all Christians must, but because we have rejected the very idea of the household. We no longer worship Vesta, but have only turned away from her because our homes no longer have any hearths. Now we worship Motor Oil. If our rejection of the old idols were Christian repentance, God would bless it, but what is actually happening is that we are sinking below the level of the ancient pagans. But when we turn to Christ in truth, we find that He has ordained every day of marriage as a proclamation of his covenant with the church. A man who embraces what is expected of him will find a good wife and a welcoming hearth. He who loves his wife loves himself.
— Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth
The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass.
— Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays
Pardon me, but my father says that it is a lie that Americans have everything. You have no sheep, no goats, no trees, no oil, no vines, no wine, not even chickens. He asks, 'What kind of life is that?' He says, 'No wonder you don't sing or dance or recite poetry very often.
— Robert Fulghum, What On Earth Have I Done?: Stories, Observations, and Affirmations
Cultures should not be like water that dissolves them evenly, but like colours that stand out distinctly.
— Vinita Kinra
Because history became his (Keenan's) genuine passion, he tended to see the world in terms of deep historical forces that, in his mind, formed a nation's character in ways almost beyond the consciousness of the men who momentarily governed it, as if these historical impulses were more a part of them than they knew.
— David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
The notion of dream interpretation far antedates the birth of psychoanalysis, and probably served an important function in most, if not all, historical societies. In having lost this function, modern man has also lost the best part of his nature, which he obliviously passes on to the next generation of dreamers.
— Neel Burton, Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception
We can't surrender to the culture. We've minimized the role of fathers, so we've created a generation of barbarians, children who become men without growing up. They stay in boyhood through their 20s and 30s, sometimes their whole lives. They think of themselves first, indulge in pornography, do what they feel like, leave their wives, and culture, and churches to raise their children.
— Randy Alcorn, Courageous
Often I felt that these men were play-acting: the unreality of their role was their security, even their own destinies were to them saga and folk-tale rather than a private matter; these were men under a spell, men who had been turned into birds or even more likely into some strange beast, and who bore their magic shapes with the same unflurried equanimity, magnanimity, and dignity that we children had marvelled at the beasts of fairy tale. Did they not suspect, moreover, with the wordless apprehension of animals, that if their magic shapes were to be stripped from them the fairy tale would be at an end and their security gone, too, while real life would begin with all it's problems, perhaps in some town where there was neither nature or mirage, no link with the folk-tale and the past, no ancient path to the far side of the mountains and down to the river gullies and out beyond the grass plains, no landmarks from the Sagas? - Only a restless search for sterile, deadening enjoyment.
— Halldór Laxness, The Atom Station
During the first millennium BCE, even the beer-loving Mesopotamians turned their backs on beer, which was dethroned as the most cultured and civilized of drinks, and the age of wine began.
— Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses
Honor the old but allow for innovation.
— Beau Sides, Lessons from China: A Westerner's Cultural Education
So in this Hemisphere when the moon goes down, I sit in one of those all-night-into-mornings cafes, watching short short skies below the skyscrapers and low-rises and sense the big turntables turning and the roadies setting up from stadium to stadium from L.A. to New York and all north and south and east and west and in between – and i know there must be a lot of kids who aren't sleeping but listening to their muse – iPad-ing and YouTubing...and the final shore ain't no shore at all but a long ether cable cyperspacing us together – cutting the continent in half.
— Joseph Maviglia, Critics Who Know Jack: Urban Myths, Media and Rock & Roll
Look, without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as People of Color, nothing about fanboy or fangirl culture would make sense. What I mean by that is: if it wasn't for race, X-Men doesn't sense. If it wasn't for the history of breeding human beings in the New World through chattel slavery, Dune doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the extermination of so many Indigenous First Nations, most of what we call science fiction’s contact stories doesn't make sense. Without us as the secret sauce, none of this works, and it is about time that we understood that we are the Force that holds the Star Wars universe together. We’re the Prime Directive that makes Star Trek possible, yeah. In the Green Lantern Corps, we are the oath. We are all of these things—erased, and yet without us—we are essential.
— Junot Díaz
They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
When people lack true culture or are devoid of innovative ideas, they speak about wine, various brands of alcoholic beverages, or the quality of soap.
— Dimitris Mita
The point is: what happens in heaven?''Unknowable wonderfulness?' 'Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn't represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.''If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances - and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse - then you don't have life after death; you just have death.
— Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward
More than any other product of human scientific culture scientific knowledge is the collective property of all mankind.
— Konrad Lorenz
Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again—making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. […] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics.
— Neal Stephenson
Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.
— Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression
Recently I've been dreamingof cursing old peoplewith little provocation,because their culturehas a long history of enslaving,raping, and segregating,and they have special lightswhich prevent us from dancing.
— Matthew Rohrer, A Green Light
Amish recognize each others' horse like we do our friends' car.
— Brenda Nixon
Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
— Allen Tate
Where the establishment emphasized humility, prudence, lineage, meritocracy celebrates ambition, achievement, brains&self-betterment
— Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
People who have made comparative studies of many different societies, know that when status is ascribed, rather than achieved, individual efforts towards excellence are not directed through any form of innovation; rather, the enhancement of status occurs only through the realisation of a previously well defined role position. It is only with social change, or when some form of continual dynamic disequilibium occurs in a society, that we begin to observe the development of achievement motivation in its modern form.
— Dor Bahadur Bista, Fatalism And Development: Nepal's Struggle For Modernization
The Swartzentruber Order is the most conservative on the Amish spectrum. Amish people have differences just like any culture.
— Brenda Nixon
Culture is more important than vision. Some leaders have great vision, but have created a toxic culture where that vision will never happen.
— Phil Cooke
To most Americans, a dog is a potential mate. To some Chinese, a dog is potential meat.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, Divided & Conquered
The ideal of a well-stocked mind aiming at excellence in all walks of life has been replaced by the dream of a well-stocked wine cellar, the cellar now being a specially made wine cooler strategically placed in one’s house, to be viewed by even the most unobservant visitor.
— Dimitris Mita
Culture defines who we are. For instance, the way we dress, behave in social manner, interact with others, meet or marry someone, etc., It greatly influences us in every way. It also tells us what is good or bad, and what is fun or boring. In short, without culture, we would not be able to identify and accept our differencens with other people.
— Alon Calinao Dy, Best Love Poems Collection
learn to experience and learn to respect ,i love my culture and i respect iti m proud to be Xhosa
— Saziso Lucas
Some Christians worried about a faith that was so embracing as to be meaningless, that exalted not the Almighty so much as the American way of life. When civil religion bleached the challenge from faith and left behind a watery patriotism, there was room for concern.
— Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House
Gifted teachers master the patience required for the unending business of transmitting civilization down the generations, transforming biological facts – children – into social artifacts called citizens. It is wearying work and it is a wonder teachers can summon the stamina for it.
— George F. Will, One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation
Isn't it time we asked ourselves, are we willing to accept any behavior codified within religious or cultural practice? Is there no line to be drawn? If honor killings are okay, then why not virgin sacrifices or cannibalism or sex with children outside the church? We have perversely taken our notion of tolerance to such extremes that we've become tolerant of intolerance.
— Bill Maher, When You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
— C.P. Snow
In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.
— Edward Tatum
The highways of American cities are an enduring testimony to our acceptance of ugliness
— J. Rufus Fears, Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life
Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo.
— Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Inhaling fumes directly from burning foliage, either in a confined space such as a cave or a tent, or scooping up and breathing in the vapors from psychoactive plant materials scattered on a bowl full of hot coals, must be an extremely ancient practice. Herodotus's account from the fifth-century BCE, describing the use of small tents by the Scythians (a northwestern Iranian tribe) for inhaling the smoke of cannabis, is probably the most famous account that confirms the antiquity of the use of cannabis as a ritual intoxicant.
— John Rush, Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience
The effect of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the user's experience and behavior depends in part on his or her personality and genetic predisposition, which can vary to a great extent from person to person. As symptoms of psychiatric disorders can sometimes be elicited after one-off use, people with a genetic tendency to depression or psychosis should be discouraged from using psychoactive mushrooms.
— John Rush, Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience
Students of the psychedelic realm know that one's expectations are a powerful determinant of the direction, content, and outcome of the experience. So, we should say at the outset that the experiences recounted here were preceded by careful preparation, where the trip was presented as a learning experience and a process of self-discovery. They all took place in safe, supportive environments. They generally did not fit the stereotypical model of teenagers dropping acid at a rock concert, looking for awesome visuals and good vibes.
— Rick Doblin, Manifesting Minds: A Review of Psychedelics in Science, Medicine, Sex, and Spirituality
Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged, as astrophysicists would say, on a decaying orbit.
— Raymond Loewy
by confusing life with play-acting and play-acting with life, one may perhaps construct a tolerable moral world from shattered fragments of the past
— William Hardy McNeill, Europe's Steppe Frontier, 1500-1800 a Study of the Eastward Movement in Europe
Institutions are lengthening shadows of strong individuals.
— George F. Will, One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation
Christian pop culture can be worthwhile if done well, but bad Christian pop culture isn't redeemed merely by the fact that it's Christian.
— Kevin Roose, The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University
Obscenity is a function of culture - a function in the mathematical sense, I mean, its value changing with that of the variables on which it depends.
— A.P., Sabine
The growth patterns of mushrooms are difficult to view since they come and go so quickly, appearing and disappearing overnight as if by magic. Their apparent lack of seed is another feature that was likely observed by early peoples who encountered them, perhaps providing further mystery as to the origin of the strange organisms.
— John Rush, Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience
Several centuries ago it was believed that the fly agaric, combined with the bufotenin–containing mucus of toads, was an ingredient of witches' brews, which made flying on their broomsticks possible. Even Santa Claus and Father Christmas are connected to Fly Agaric and their reindeer, which, by the way, like their portion of fly agarics and 'living' water.
— John Rush, Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience
Due to their soft bodies and ephemeral nature, it is unlikely that biological evidence of mushrooms will even be discovered in the archaeological record. This fact poses certain difficulties in determining the antiquity of modern cultural uses of psychoactive mushrooms, like those in Mexico and Siberia, and makes it even more difficult to determine whether psychoactive mushrooms were recognized and used by historical culture groups that are now extinct.
— John Rush, Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience
The relationships among natural and drug-induced alterations of consciousness must be understood from an evolutionary perspective. This reveals altered consciousness to be related to endogenous mechanism, which are triggered by both ancient evolutionary adaptations and more recently acquired propensities to use exogenous sources of substances to alter consciousness.
— John Rush, Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience
The decisions we make lead us to complex behavioral sets, and what we decide to do can be consciously and unconsciously motivated. The human being, however, is a small-group decision-making animal, a small pack animal, with a will to life, who engages in sex and the food quest to propagate and maintain that life, and who needs acceptance and recognition from group members.
— John Rush, Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience
There are numerous historical reports as well as visual images that link mushroom consumption to the ritual of sacrifice. These include bloodletting, penis perforation, and even the improbable act of self-decapitation.
— John Rush, Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience
Methods of detoxifying and processing plants for human use are known throughout the world, and include a variety of techniques, including dehydration, application of heat, leaching, and fermentation, among others (Johns and Kubo 1988). While it is difficult to trace the origins of these methods, or to answer the questions of how certain groups learned to detoxify and process useful plants in their environment, to make a blanket claim that certain cultures were incapable of discovering plant properties, and the methods necessary for rendering them same and useful, seems naive at best.
— John Rush, Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience
Author complains about "the further submergence of irrecoverable history into a perpetually churned present.
— George F. Will, One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation
Cannabis is renowned as a powerful hallucinogen in large doses, and certainly capable of inducing profound ecstatic ecstatic states. Anyone who who doubts this has clearly not experienced its effects.
— John Rush, Entheogens and the Development of Culture: The Anthropology and Neurobiology of Ecstatic Experience
The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.
— Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
— Samuel P. Huntington
You know how thick I am. I don't even eat yoghurt because it's got culture in it.
— Elly Griffiths, The Janus Stone
In truth, the crossing from nature to culture and vice versa has always stood wide open. It leads across an easily accessible bridge: the practising life. People have committed themselves to its construction since they came into existence - or rather, people only came into existence by applying themselves to the building of said bridge. The human being is the pontifical creature that, from its earliest evolutionary stages, has created tradition-compatible connections between the bridgeheads in the bodily realm and those in cultural programes. From the start, nature and culture are linked by a broad middle ground of embodied practices - containing languages, rituals and technical skills, in so far as these factors constitute the universal forms of automatized artificialities. This intermediate zone forms a morphologically rich, variable and stable region that can, for the time being, be referred to sufficiently clearly with such conventional categories as education, etiquette, custom, habit formation, training and exercise - without needing to wait for the purveyors of the 'human sciences', who, with all their bluster about culture, create the confusion for whose resolution they subsequently offer their services.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken by as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue.But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time. And it is no remedy for the fragmentation of character and consciousness that is the consequence of specialization. At the simplest, most practical level, it would be difficult for most of us to give enough in donations to good causes to compensate for, much less remedy, the damage done by the money that is taken from us and used destructively by various agencies of the government and by the corporations that hold us in captive dependence on their products. Most important, even if we could give enough to overbalance the official and corporate misuse of our money, we would still not solve the problem: the willingness to be represented by money involves a submission to the modern divisions of character and community. The remedy safeguards the disease.
— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
If we are going to live with our deepest differences then we must learn about one another.
— Deborah J. Levine, Matrix Model Management System: Guide to Cross Cultural Wisdom
I have devoted my whole life to Physical Culture. I shall devote the rest too for the same. I have seen the degradation in which we are at present. I have travelled extensively and all that I have remarked here is from experience; and my suggestions are to meet the situation. I know they would, if adapted remedy the evil; for, I have studied carefully the position. If we in all seriousness wish to call ourselves the descendants of the mighty Yoddhas of past, if we wish not to cast a blot on the fair name of India, if we wish that India should have a future vying with its glorious past, if we wish that we should gain an honorable and equal place among the peoples of the world it should be our sacred resolve from now to wake up from the sleep as a lion; we should muster muscle and steel the body. For all greatness lies in Culture and 1 should only be too gratified if my scheme could put the youth of the country on the right track to achieve our most cherished Ideals.
— Kodi Ramamurthy Naidu, To the Youth of India
Girl, we need to get you on a study program, fast. You're not going to last a week around here if you can't keep up with the pop culture references. How about Lord of the Rings? Firefly? Doctor Horrible? No? Clearly we have a lot of work to do.
— Rachel Caine, Fall of Night
What we mean when we say that something is "cultural" is that it is roughly similar to what we find in other members of the particular group we are considering, and unlike what we would find in members of a contrast group. This is why it is confusing to say that people share a culture, as if culture were common property. We may have strictly identical amounts of money in our respective wallets without sharing any of it!
— Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
The growth of the exploiters' revolution on this continent has been accompanied by the growth of the idea that work is beneath human dignity, particularly any form of hand work. We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from.
— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
We must be compelled to hold this doctrine to be false, and the old and new law called the Old and new Testament, to be impositions, fables and forgeries
— Thomas Paine, The life and writings of Thomas Paine
When you think about new-born babies being killed in our own lifetime,' he said, 'all the efforts of culture seem worthless. What have people learned from all our Goethes and Bachs? To kill babies?
— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate