c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The stakes in this game are not low. Our enterprise is no less than the introduction of an alternative language, and with the language an altered perspective, for a group of phenomena that tradition tended to refer to with such words as 'spirituality', 'piety', 'morality', 'ethics' and 'asceticism'. If the manoeuvre succeeds, the conventional concept of religion, that ill-fated bugbear from the prop studios of modern Europe, will emerge from these investigations as the great loser. Certainly intellectual history has always resembled a refuge for malformed concepts - and after the following journey through the various stations, one will not only see through the concept of 'religion' in its failed design, a concept whose crookedness is second only to the hyper-bugbear that is 'culture'.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
All cultures have things to learn from all other cultures. Don’t get stuck in your culture! Go beyond it! Get out of your aquarium; get out of your farm; get out of your castle; break your bell jar! Give chance to other cultures and to other opinions! This is the best way for you to see the insufficiencies, absurdities and stupidities in your culture!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
New Rule: The White House doesn't have to release the dead Bin Laden photos, but don't pretend we can't take it. We've seen pictures of Britney Spears's vagina getting out of a car. Television has desensitizes us to violence, and porn has desensitized us to people getting shot in the eye.
— Bill Maher, The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass
Apropos of Eskimo, I once heard a missionary describe the extraordinary difficulty he had found in translating the Bible into Eskimo. It was useless to talk of corn or wine to a people who did not know even what they meant, so he had to use equivalents within their powers of comprehension. Thus in the Eskimo version of the Scriptures the miracle of Cana of Galilee is described as turning the water into blubber; the 8th verse of the 5th chapter of the First Epistle of St. Peter ran: ‘Your adversary the devil, as a roaring Polar bear walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.’ In the same way ‘A land flowing with milk and honey’ became ‘A land flowing with whale’s blubber,’ and throughout the New Testament the words ‘Lamb of God’ had to be translated ‘little Seal of God,’ as the nearest possible equivalent. The missionary added that his converts had the lowest opinion of Jonah for not having utilised his exceptional opportunities by killing and eating the whale.
— Frederick Hamilton, The Days Before Yesterday
To make the distinction unmistakably clear: Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life; Civilization is Giordano Bruno facing death by fire; culture is the Cardinal Bellarmino, after ten years of inquisition, sending Bruno to the stake in the Campo di Fiori...
— Edward Abbey
One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely. This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical cause the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don't know how to use energy, or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy. Nuclear power, if we are to believe its advocates, is presumably going to be well used by the same mentality that has egregiously devalued and misapplied man- and womanpower. If we had an unlimited supply of solar or wind power, we would use that destructively, too, for the same reasons.
— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders. Eating disorders are complex, but what they all seem to have in common is the ability to distract women from the memories, sensations, and experience of the sexual abuse through starving, bingeing, purging, or exercising. They keep the focus on food, body image, weight, fat, calories, diets, miles, and other factors that women focus on during the course of an eating disorder. These disorders also have the ability to numb a woman from the overwhelming emotions resulting from the sexual abuse — especially loss of control, terror, and shame about her body. Women often have a combination of eating disorders in in their history. Some women are anorexic during one period of their life, bulimic during another, and compulsive eaters at yet another stage.
— Karen A. Duncan, Healing from the Trauma of Childhood Sexual Abuse: The Journey for Women
America fears the unshaven legs, the unshaven men's cheeks, the aroma of perspiration, and the limp prick. Above all it fears the limp prick.
— Walter Abish
I think the church has done a pretty good job at reaching the "down and outers" but not a good job at reaching the "up and outers." I feel like one of my mandates is to reach corporate America with a message that relates to them. As an avid reader, I realized that the church at large was not speaking the language of corporate America or strategically to the needs of a corporate man/woman.
— Keith Craft
Like the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria or the supremely ignorant incineration of stacks of invaluable Mayan codices, the loss of knowledge we are experiencing as the last of the traditional elders pass from this physical plane of existence without heirs to their knowledge- as well as the very environment in which sacred plants grow- is a tragedy occurring right now as you read these lines, one that could well be beyond redemption.
— Jonathon Miller Weisberger, Rainforest Medicine: Preserving Indigenous Science and Biodiversity in the Upper Amazon
That's what you did when someone was having a hard time. You fed them. It was a tradition that crossed all cultures.
— Nichole Chase, Suddenly Royal
When she gets rattled, the South really comes out. Once when Daddy tried to cancel our country club membership because he said the dues were too high, she went from zero to Atlanta burning in zero point five seconds.
— Jen Lancaster, Here I Go Again
Many of the gaps in my knowledge and understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or application as I feared. Page 135
— Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World
Our culture's quest to hide death behind a facade of denial has made fools and pretended immortals of us all. Perhaps it would be more helpful and liberating to begin each day by repeating the words of Crazy Horse, "Today is a good day to die.
— Richard Paul Evans, A Step of Faith
Foreign behavior? What the fuck are you talking about? Foreign behavior? Have you read Things Fall Apart? Ifemulu asked, wishing she had not told Ranyinudo about Dike. She was angrier with Ranyinudo than she had ever been, yet she knew that Ranyinudo meant well, and had said what many other Nigerians would say, which was why she had not told anyone else about Dike's suicide attempt since she came back.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane.
— Yukichi Fukuzawa
Every cuisine has its characteristic 'flavor principle,' Rozin contends, whether it is tomato-lemon-oregano in Greece; lime-chili in Mexico; onion-lard-paprika in Hungary, or, in Samin's Moroccan dish, cumin-coriander-cinnamon-ginger-onion-fruit. (And in America? Well, we do have Heinz ketchup, a flavor principle in a bottle that kids, or their parents, use to domesticate every imaginable kind of food. We also now have the familiar salty-umami taste of fast food, which I would guess is based on salt, soy oil, and MSG.
— Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. It is not important that those who ask the questions arrive at my answers or Marshall McLuhan's (quite different answers, by the way). This is an instance in which the asking of the questions is sufficient. To ask is to break the spell.
— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.
— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.
— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
To challenge humanism in any field, you must possess a uniquely biblical view of God, man, law, and time.
— Gary North, Rapture Fever Hb
Character displays "the weighty impatience of having to explain something that should already be understood.
— Nathan McCall, Them
It’s a great honor, m’ijo. We know that. I’m sure everyone in Ysleta is proud of you. But this is who you are," she said, for a moment scanning the dark night air and the empty street. A cricket chirped in the darkness. "God help you when you go to this ‘Havid.’ You will be so far away from us, from everything you know. You will be alone. What if something happens to you? Who’s going to help you? But you always wanted to be alone; you were always so independent, so stubborn.""Like you.
— Sergio Troncoso, From This Wicked Patch of Dust
...I just don't think we could ever get our heads around the concept of learning to love a stranger". But you already do, the Indians replied. You didn't choose your siblings, and yet you learned to love them. Your parents shoved you in a room and said, "Get along". And you did. You found the good in each other. You discovered that the more respect, caring, and altruism you added to the relationship, the stronger it grew.
— Franz Wisner, How the World Makes Love: . . . And What It Taught a Jilted Groom
Irish and English are so widely separated in their mode of expression that nothing like a literal rendering from one language to the other is possible.
— Robin Flower
Concentrate on the goodness in the other, rather than the difference.
— Franz Wisner, How the World Makes Love: . . . And What It Taught a Jilted Groom
Houses are built brick-by-brick. HOMEs are built word-by-word. Houses don't build themselves. So YOU must build your home
— Fela Durotoye
But the culture-vultures and the intellectual snobs, and the self-appointed guardians of the Muses, often frighten off the average person from the free development of this appetite.
— Sydney J. Harris
Man is a culture, nothing but a culture! Question your culture! Just like monkeys picking lice from their skin, get rid of the stupidities in your culture!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think.
— Stephen King, Duma Key
I was having dinner…in London…when eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part about “Your country’s never been invaded.” And so I said, “Let me tell you who those bad guys are. They’re us. WE BE BAD. We’re the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We’re three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother’s side. You take your Germany, France, and Spain, roll them all together and it wouldn’t give us room to park our cars. We’re the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats in Cap d’Antibes. And we’ve got an American Express card credit limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go. You say our country’s never been invaded? You’re right, little buddy. Because I’d like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who’d have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying 'Cheerio.' Hell can’t hold our sock-hops. We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, fuck longer and buy more things than you know the names of. I’d rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than king, queen, and jack of all Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and shit them out before lunch.
— P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This"
In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959
We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative connotations of words like alien or outlandish. And yet the monuments and cultures of each of our civilizations merely represent different ways of being human. An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Hip-hop is storytelling.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.
— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Cultural contamination that is directed outward is always seen as ‘enlightenment.
— David Brin, Glory Season
I work hard to stay cynical enough! I keep my expectations of our culture and our leaders low, low, low, and I do it so I don't have to be let down. And yet again I am lowballed by the brokenness of the American cultural machine.
— Vinnie Tesla
Christianity, in contrast, is for all cultures. This is a theme of the New Testament, St. John’s vision of the redeemed in Revelation 7. Christianity is for every tribe, every nation, every language, every time, for every culture. That’s really quite unique from other religions because Christ died for the sins of the world.
— Gene Edward Veith Jr.
Hindus and Westerners alike see in the meat-eating taboos of India a triumph of morals over appetite. This is a dangerous misrepresentation of cultural processes. Hindu vegetarianism was a victory not of spirit over matter but of reproductive over productive forces.
— Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures
My culture is my identity and personality. It gives me spiritual, intellectual and Emotional distinction from others, and I am proud of it.
— M.F. Moonzajer
Free culture depends upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an over-regulated culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an over-regulated-regulated market.
— Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
...he refused to consider the Moroccans' present culture, however decadent, an established fact, an existing thing. Instead, he seemed to believe that it was something accidentally left over from bygone centuries, now in a necessary state of transition, that the people needed temporary guidance in order to progress to some better condition.
— Paul Bowles, The Spider's House
Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis.
— Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
What God says to His Church at any given period depends altogether upon her moral and spiritual condition and upon the spiritual need of the hour.
— A.W. Tozer
In Japan, however, if you against someone and create a bad atmosphere, your relations may break-off completely. People tend to react emotionally, and most are afraid of being excluded from the group.
— Roger J. Davies, The Japanese Mind: Understanding Contemporary Japanese Culture
In order to live without creating any serious problems for the group's harmony, people avoid expressing their ideas clearly, even the point of avoiding giving a simple yes or no answer. If a person really wanted to say no, he or she said nothing at first, then used vague expressions that conveyed the nuance of disagreement.
— Roger J. Davies, The Japanese Mind: Understanding Contemporary Japanese Culture
Two hundred years from now people will find out how we have been influenced by our culture in ways we have yet to recognize and they'll wonder, "How can those people claim to be Christians who lived back there in 2009?". There will be things people will find out about us that we are too blind to see right now.
— Joseph C. Morecraft III
What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.
— Terence McKenna
Why does no one speak of the cultural advantages of the country? For example, is a well groomed, ecologically kept, sustainably fertile farm any less cultural, any less artful, than paintings of fat angels on church ceilings?
— Gene Logsdon, Living at Nature's Pace: Farming and the American Dream
People from different cultures have different definitions for beauty. Isn't that sad to judge others with our standards... rather than appreciate them?
— Mizuki Nomura
Also she went in for culture, which gave her a certain moral authority. It wouldn't now; but people believed, then, that culture could make you better - a better person. They believed it could uplift you, or the women believed it. They hadn't yet seen Hitler at the opera house.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Humankind, which discovers its capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through its own work, forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original gift of things that are. People think that they can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to their wills, as though the earth did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which human beings can indeed develop but must not betray.
— John Paul II
Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past.
— David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision
Starting at life's cryptogram, we either see His name unmistakably resplendent or we see the confusion of religions with no single message, just garbled beliefs that plague our existence, each justified by the voice of culture.
— Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other Gods: The Absolute Claims of the Christian Message
Great philosophers become immortal - they make undeniable impacts on culture.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Criminologists have documented that the amount of coverage a crime victim receives affects how much attention police devote to the case and the willingness of prosecutors to accept plea bargains.
— Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things
Curiously, only in sports do we agree to eschew technological advances, making rules, for example, to limit the power potential of baseball bats. We understand that technology will ruin our games, but we do not understand that it can also ruin cultures.
— Gene Logsdon, At Nature's Pace: Farming and the American Dream
Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.
— Jeff Bezos
Another lesson to file away about Scotland: insulting other people in a childish manner was the national pastime.
— Molly Ringle, What Scotland Taught Me
By “the Permanent Things” [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the great mysterious incorporation of the human race.
— Russell Kirk
We have been trained by a culture of violence and we are all agents of passive violence.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
We all know there is something wrong with our culture, the state of our world, and with ourselves.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
The inherent prejudice in unnaturally-produced nationalism causes a form of cultural blindness, which prevents us from seeing the obvious ways we could co-exist in the world as a co-operative human family.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
Modern American culture dictated the importance of touching the hand of someone you’ve just met, however counterintuitive it seemed. Why would he want to touch someone he didn’t know?
— Courtney Kirchoff, Jaden Baker
Do I have any recommendations for a Sadiri boys' night out?" I shrugged, smiled, and allowed myself a laugh. "I can come up with somet
— Karen Lord, The Best of All Possible Worlds
The time you save is just what makes the difference between trivia and culture.
— James Herron
It's the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim
— Jason Najum, Delusions of Grandeur
So this needs to be said, and so I will try to say it
— Jason Najum, Delusions of Grandeur
Our culture tries to convince us on just about every front that more is better. More is a sign of wealth, luxury, power. Gone are the days when meals were moments of connection and conversation; now it’s all about consumption and calories.
— Mary DeTurris Poust, Cravings: A Catholic Wrestles with Food, Self-Image, and God
Self-governing cultures both inspire alignment and eject elements that don't fit in.
— Dov Seidman, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business
Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named...but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Friday
To know your way round a library is to master the whole of culture, i.e. the whole world.
— Sophie Divry, Signatura 400
I lean back and tilt my head so all I see are the clouds in the sky. I'm looking back inside my head with my eyes wide open. I still don't know where I'm going; I decided I'm not crazy or alien. It's just that I'm more like one of those kids they find in remote jungles or forests []. A wolf child. And they've dragged me into this fucking schizo-culture, snarling and spitting and walking around on curled knuckles.
— David Wojnarowicz, The Waterfront Journals
The overriding reason why we should take other people's cultures seriously is because God has taken ours seriously.
— John R.W. Stott
You get what you expect and you deserve what you tolerate.
— Mark Graban, Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction
In WASP families, if you don't get along with someone, you have as little to do with them as possible. In Jewish families, you move next door, to make them as miserable as possible.
— Doreen Orion, Queen of the Road: The True Tale of 47 States, 22,000 Miles, 200 Shoes, 2 Cats, 1 Poodle, a Husband, and a Bus with a Will of Its Own
Art is the bridge across the gap between peoples and cultures. Writing is one of the arts that can help link people.
— Charles Ray, Dead Men Don't Answer
...Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable—the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals
When we finally achieve the full right of participation in American life, what we make of it will depend upon our sense of cultural values, and our creative use of freedom, not upon our racial identification. I see no reason why the heritage of world culture—which represents a continuum—should be confused with the notion of race. Japan erected a highly efficient modern technology upon a religious culture which viewed the Emperor as a god. The Germany which produced Beethoven and Hegel and Mann turned its science and technology to the monstrous task of genocide; one hopes that when what are known as the “Negro” societies are in full possession of the world’s knowledge and in control of their destinies, they will bring to an end all those savageries which for centuries have been committed in the name of race. From what we are now witnessing in certain parts of the world today, however, there is no guarantee that simply being non-white offers any guarantee of this. The demands of state policy are apt to be more influential than morality. I would like to see a qualified Negro as President of the United States. But I suspect that even if this were today possible, the necessities of the office would shape his actions far more than his racial identity.
— Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act
Seattle is for people who love culture, but refuse to sacrifice their wild nature to attain it.
— Kimberly Kinrade, Seduced by Innocence
Conformity is a problem for many small groups. Members put a higher priority on cohesion than on coming up with a well-reasoned choice. They pressure dissenters, shield themselves from negative feedback, keep silent when they disagree ...
— Craig E. Johnson, Meeting the Ethical Challenges of Leadership: Casting Light or Shadow
Strategy and culture should have breakfast together.
— Max McKeown, The Strategy Book
I have come to the conclusion that just as the Japanese live to work, Asians live to eat.
— Anastacia Oaikhena
Japan is the first nation in the world to accord 'comic books'--originally a 'humorous' form of entertainment mainly for young people--nearly the same social status as novels and films.
— Frederik L. Schodt, Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga
Everyone over 50 in America feels like a refugee. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because parenting is hard. Inadequate parents could say, 'Go outside and play in the culture,' and the culture -- relatively innocent, and boring -- could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Grown ups now know that you can't send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed.
— Peggy Noonan
Every artifact of human culture is a positive response to God's general revelation and simultaneously a rebellious assertion against His sovereign rule over us.
— Timothy J. Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World
Our own attitude is that we are charged with discovering the best way of doing everything.
— Mark Graban, Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction
Rebellion is all we'll be talking about. Love is revolution, a kind of coup d'état and cultural reprogramming in its own little way.
— The Harvard Lampoon, The Hunger Pains: A Parody
The epitome of culture is the search for truth, or at least a reasonable approximation of reality, most notably the need to know ourselves and the world around us.
— Eric Chaisson, Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos
The truths embodied in historical stories are thus not absolute or universal, but relative to the cultural context in which they are made.
— Richard Handler, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg
While these Christians (the majority in a recent poll) are particularly concerned that religious freedoms are being eroded in this country, “they also want Judeo-Christians to dominate the culture,
— David Kinnaman
Shigemori's body of work is a compelling manifesto for continuous cultural renewal.
— Christian Tschumi, Mirei Shigemori: Modernizing the Japanese Garden
Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, before somebody tells you you shouldn’t like pink because that’s for girls, or you’d instantly become a gay two-year-old. Why would anyone pick blue over pink? Pink is obviously a better color. Everyone’s born confident, and everything’s taken away from you
— Kanye West
The way a culture treats women in birth is a good indicator of how well women and their contributions to society are valued and honored.
— Ina May Gaskin, Birth Matters:  A Midwife's Manifesta
The Swedes have coined the term 'management by perkele' to portray the Finnish managerial approach. Instead of collectively pondering all the possible alternatives and letting every member of the staff from the cleaner to the MD voice their views, as the Swedes do, the Finns act swiftly and don't waste time on the decision-making process. If something isn't happening quickly enough, it is necessary for the top managers to slam their fists on the table and yell, 'Perkele!' Repeatedly, if necessary.
— Tarja Moles, Xenophobe's Guide to the Finns
All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.
— Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.
— Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new.
— G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas
Corporate strategy is usually only useful if you get people engaged with helping you to make it work.
— Max McKeown, The Strategy Book
Look at the kind of people who most object to the childishness and cheapness of celebrity culture. Does one really want to side with such apoplectic and bombastic bores? I should know, I often catch myself being one, and it isn’t pretty. I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each. Monocultures are uninhabitably dull and end as deserts.
— Stephen Fry
Our life stories are at one and the same time reality, fallacy and fantasy...
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
The person senses what it feels like to be free from inhibitions. At the same time he feels connected and integrated – with his body and, through his body, with his environment. He has a sense of well-being and inner peace. He gains the knowledge that the life of the body resides in its involuntary aspect. […] Unfortunately these beautiful feelings do not always hold up under the stress of daily living in our modern culture. The pace, the pressure and the philosophy of our times are antithetical to life.
— Alexander Lowen, Bioenergetics: The Revolutionary Therapy That Uses the Language of the Body to Heal the Problems of the Mind
From New Year's Eve through the third of January, the streets of Tokyo grew quiet, as if all the people had disappeared.
— Shogo Oketani, J-Boys: Kazuo's World, Tokyo, 1965
Culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.
— Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic
Unless the relationship of law to Christianity is re-established, there is no future except destruction for Western culture.
— R. J. Rushdooney
In World War II, some Japanese soldiers preferred to take their own lives rather become prisoners of war. In Saipan hundreds of civilians jumped to their deaths over cliffs in order to avoid falling into American hands. Even in life-or-death situations cultural ties and duties often outweigh the instinct for survival. This is why people die in the attempt to rescue a dog from drowning, or decide to become suicide bombers.
— Harald Welzer, Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying
Illusory universality is the universality of the art of the culture industry, it is the universality of the homogeneous same, an art which no longer even promises happiness but only provides easy amusement as relief from labour.
— J.M. Bernstein, The Culture Industry
We are, as a culture and as a specias, in the midst of a great awakening, remembering that there is a nature of things, an inherent, Divine design. The more aware of and in alignment with that design we can become, the more we will experience the deep desires of our hearts and souls, and perhaps, together, we can truly create a world that works for everyone.
— Jeffrey R. Anderson, The Nature of Things - Navigating Everyday Life with Grace
Culture is what we choose to repeat.
— Mark Richard Beaulieu, Alienor - The Young Life of Eleanor of Aquitaine
For while spirituality has the dynamic to transcend and transform culture, it invariably expresses itself in and through culture.
— Kirkley C. Sands, Early Bahamian Slave Spirituality: The Genesis of Bahamian Cultural Identity
The physical impact of taiko music, along with the sheer visual poetry of a choreographed ensemble presenting its music in perfect synchrony, is so powerful and inviting that taiko is beginning to catch on as Japan's most influential and lasting gift to world music.
— Gil Asakawa, Being Japanese American: A JA Sourcebook for Nikkei, Hapa . . . and Their Friends
It is often out encounter with culture that first reveals to us our own culture.
— Tim Chester, Unreached
When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn’t see it. He can’t. He’s average. And is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.
— George Saunders
There is a difference between the inmates of your criminal prisons and the inmates of your cultural prison: The former understand that the distribution of wealth and power inside the prison had nothing to do with justice.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.
— Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
It is necessary to have “watchers” at hand who will bear witness to the values of Tradition in ever more uncompromising and firm ways, as the anti-traditional forces grow in strength. Even though these values cannot be achieved, it does not mean that they amount to mere “ideas.” These are MEASURES…. Let people of our time talk about these things with condescension as if they were anachronistic and anti-historical; we know that this is an alibi for their defeat. Let us leave modern men to their “truths” and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins.
— Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World
‎"I feel certain that Conservatism is through unless Conservatives can demonstrate and communicate the difference between being concerned with [the unemployed, the sick without medical care, human welfare, etc.] and believing that the federal government is the proper agent for their solution.
— Barry M. Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative
Misunderstanding a culture's symbols is a common root of predujice.
— Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
Truly a good horse, good ground to gallop on, and sunshine, make up the sum of enjoyable travelling.
— Isabella L. Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan
Its culture: the fruit of its life, the product of its own efforts in thought and art. This culture is not international. It is the expression of the national genius, of the blood. The culture is international in its brilliance but national in origin. Someone made a fine comparison: bread and wheat may be internationally consumed, but they always bear the imprint of the soil from which they came.
— Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaries
Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it sank into submission, marked the end of their resistance.
— J.G. Ballard, High-Rise
Today we have a weakness in our education process in failing to understand the natural associations between the disciplines. We tend to study all our disciplines in unrelated parallel lines. This tends to be true in both Christian and secular education. This is one of the reasons why evangelical Christians have been taken by surprise at the tremendous shift that has come in our generation.
— Francis A. Schaeffer
The secret to making yourself stronger is to absorb the strength of the people around you—energy begets energy.
— Adachi Zenko, My Life in Japanese Art and Gardens: From Entrepreneur to Connoisseur
A nation lives forever through its concepts, honour, and culture. It is for these reasons that the rulers of nations must judge and act not only on the basis of physical and material interests of the nation but on the basis of the nation's historical honour, of the nation's eternal interests. Thus: not bread at all costs, but honour at all costs.
— Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaries
I meet people and they enforce me their culture and then I choose to fly away and I meet other people and these people force me their religion and I wanna fly away. I meet other people, these people are silent, we begin to sing the song of the ocean and then we fly away together ~
— Grigoris Deoudis
I’m very headstrong. Once I’ve caught fire, there’s no dousing the flames—all engines full speed ahead.
— Adachi Zenko, My Life in Japanese Art and Gardens: From Entrepreneur to Connoisseur
Comics are drawings, not photographs, and as such they present a subjective view of reality.
— Frederik L. Schodt, Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga
Western civilisation, the élitists all understood, is built upon discrimination: a culture that does not rest on discrimination, that penalises people who discriminate, or rewards the undiscriminating, is worth very little and has only callow, childish pleasures.
— Richard Davenport-Hines, Proust at the Majestic
The new fans of Japan won’t be Orientalists, but they will be anime-savvy.
— Morinosuke Kawaguchi, Geeky-Girly Innovation: A Japanese Subculturalist's Guide to Technology and Design
In the Catskills, nostalgia runs backwards. The upwardly mobile Jewish masses of the 1950s and 1960s have been replaced by the Jews of 19th century Poland.
— Kevin Haworth, Famous Drownings in Literary History: Essays on 21st-Century Jewishness
Japanese had never seen a Western-style circus, and most of them had probably never seen foreigners, either.
— Frederik L. Schodt, Professor Risley and the Imperial Japanese Troupe: How an American Acrobat Introduced Circus to Japan--and Japan to the West
In spite of what most assume, it is surprisingly tough to make the mind and body work together as a unit.
— H.E. Davey, The Japanese Way of the Artist: Living the Japanese Arts & Ways, Brush Meditation, The Japanese Way of the Flower
In Japanese swordsmanship, it is not uncommon to speak of a unity of mind, body, and sword.
— H.E. Davey, The Japanese Way of the Artist: Living the Japanese Arts & Ways, Brush Meditation, The Japanese Way of the Flower
He did not care about titles and was proud to be a farmer beyond all else.
— Tsuneichi Miyamoto, The Forgotten Japanese: Encounters with Rural Life and Folklore
The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.
— George Santayana
And she says she wants to expose me to all these great things. And to tell you the truth, I don't really want to be exposed to all these great things if it means that I'll have to hear Mary Elizabeth talk about all the great things she exposed me to all the time. I don't understand that. I would give someone a record so they could love the record, not so they would always know that I gave it to them.
— Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were educated. But a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.
— C.S. Lewis
The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite—on calories and portion size and what's going into the body versus what's being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel—keeps the larger, more fearsome questions of desire blurred and out of focus. American women spend approximately $1 million every hour on cosmetics. This may or may not say something about female vanity, but it certainly says something about female energy, where it is and is not focused. Easier to worry about the body than the soul, easier to fit the self into the narrow slots of identity our culture offers to women than to create one...that allows for the expression of all passions, the satisfaction of all appetites. The great preoccupation with things like food and shopping and appearance, in turn, is less of a genuine focus on hunger—indulging it, understanding it, making decisions about it—than it is a monumental distraction from hunger.
— Caroline Knapp
Some believe that every library looks like a splendid cemetery of human thoughts and ideas. Could librarians be called grave-diggers? However that may be, like a cemetery, a library will never stop being of use.
— Lara Biyuts
What is so incredible and essential about an authentic cultural scene is it rejects a value system based on consumption and productivity and instead celebrates creation, critical thought, aesthetics and expression. That can’t be mass marketed.
— Claire Vaye Watkins
To you, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism look very different, but to me they look the same. Many of you would say that something like Buddhism doesn't even belong on the list, since it doesn't link salvation to divine worship, but to me this is just a quibble. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism all perceive human beings as flawed, wounded creatures in need of salvation, and all rely fundamentally on revelations that spell out how salvation is to be attained, either by departing from this life or rising above it.
— Daniel Quinn
But we're not humanity, we're just one culture - one culture out of hundreds of thousands that have lived their vision on this planet and sung their song. If it were humanity that needed changing, then we'd be out of luck. But it isn't humanity that needs changing, it's just...us.
— Daniel Quinn
Rural places have hemorrhaged their best and brightest children, their intellectuals, thinkers, organizers, leaders, and artists-those who would create change and who would parent another generation of thinkers. All gone.Our seeds are disappearing.
— Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food
...imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine.
— Hector Berlioz, Life and Letters of Berlioz
The raw data of anthropologists can be misleading
—  it can make the differences in values between cultures appear greater than they are...It is only that life forces upon them choices that we do not have to make.
Yes, it is true that one generally needs to speak to the members of the key audience for a product or service. But as we are not trying to plumb an individual psyche for psychological motivation, but are rather trying to elucidate the relevant symbolic cultural meanings and practices, information garnered from those who do not like something is also relevant to understanding the cultural picture. In fact, contestation between points of view and meanings is a crucial aspect of the social dynamic. These nodal points of disagreement and different points of view can be precisely the most intriguing domains of cultural movement and thus new opportunities.
— Patricia L. Sunderland, Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research
The world of tricky-tacky boxes, defined social behaviour, untrammeled egotism, sexism and material acquisitiveness, all powered by insecurity that passes for security, is rarely cajoled, least of all questioned. Much of the magic of of life space contrast has passed out of North American life.
— Geoff Mains, Urban Aboriginals: A Celebration of Leathersexuality
កត្តាដែលភ្លេចអក្សរសាស្រ្តជាតិរបស់ខ្លួនហ្នឹង អាចនឹងធ្វើឲ្យពួក គេថ្ងៃក្រោយមិនអាចដឹងនូវដើមកំណើតឫសនៃមូលដ្ឋានជាតិរបស់គេនោះកូនចៅខ្មែរក្រោមអាចនឹងកា្លយជាជនជាតិវៀតណាមទៅវិញ ។I think in the future, the younger generation of Khmer Krom people could forget the Cambodian national literature. They won’t know about their roots and the basics of Khmer. I’m afraid that the Khmer Krom youth can easily become Vietnamese.
— Thach Preichea Koeun VOA News
Not my daughter, you bitch!
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
The best fighter is never angry.
— Lao Tzu
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
— Maya Angelou
Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
— Aristotle
I want to commit the murder I was imprisoned for.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
— Ambrose Bierce
When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.
— Mark Twain
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
— Mark Twain
I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
— Malcolm X
Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.
— Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Declare your jihad on thirteen enemies you cannot see -egoism, arrogance, conceit, selfishness, greed, lust, intolerance, anger, lying, cheating, gossiping and slandering. If you can master and destroy them, then you will be read to fight the enemy you can see.
— حجة الإسلام أبو حامد محمد الغزالي
My mother's psychologist says I have an overactive anger switch, but people just keep pissing me off.
— Meg Cabot, Darkest Hour