Quotes About Cultural

Cultural conditioning is like bad software. Over and over it's diddled with and re-written so that it can just run on the next attempt. But there is cultural hardware, and it's that cultural hardware, otherwise known as authentic being, that we are propelled toward by the example of the shaman and the techniques of the shaman. ... Shamanism therefore is a call to authenticity.

The idea of cultural relativism is nothing but an excuse to violate human rights. Human rights is the fruit of various civilizations. I know of no civilization that tolerates or justifies violence, terrorism, or injustice. There is no civilization that justifies the killing of innocent people. Those who are invoking cultural relativism are really using that as an excuse for violating human rights and to put a cultural mask on the face of what they're doing.

We have been the benefactors of our cultural heritage and the victims of our cultural narrowness.

We saw, then, journalists and researchers being arrested. And so this is sort of the latest expansion they say - cultural targets where young people gather, where they exchange cultural and political ideas. So that may be one of the reasons, although the government hasn't made any public comments on these raids.

People who want to wage cultural wars ought to keep in mind that cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.

I have a fairly unwieldy set of concerns that go into determining what I do in the paintings, such as the history of the decorative, patterns of cultural migration, Islamic art and design, Byzantine architecture, the annals of natural history, as well as contemporary painting. All of these things are filtered through my own sense of cultural urgency. How I proceed with the work has to do with how I respond to this instinctively chosen mass of materials. I'm weighing many things and making many decisions before I even get started on a painting.

Life is wild by definition. And organic existence is violent. Though I find this hard to accept. And I know it goes against the cultural grain of therapeutic smoothing so dominant in what we like to call 'cultural discourse'.

Christian adults need to think about talking to our own children as a form of cross-cultural missions. Cultural change happens so quickly that teens are exposed to ideas and worldviews very different from those of previous generations.

Countries will cooperate with each other, and are more likely to cooperate with each other when they share a common culture, as is most dramatically illustrated in the European Union. But other groupings of countries are emerging in East Asia and in South America. Basically, as I said, these politics will be oriented around, in large part, cultural similarities and cultural antagonism.

I think a lot of Indians want Indian artists to be cultural cheerleaders rather than cultural investigators.

I think that in the diaspora, and among immigrants, religion becomes a vehicle for the transmission of cultural information, and cultural codes, and this does end up re-inscribing certain things about the religion - like caste. Caste discrimination and hierarchy are still a very fundamental and violent part of Hinduism. My family was upper caste, and that was very clear. I feel like caste and religious practice are inextricable, actually.

There are cultural issues everywhere - in Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa, wherever you go. But somehow when we talk about cultural differences, we magnify those differences.

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

We have ignored cultural literacy in thinking about education We ignore the air we breathe until it is thin or foul. Cultural literacy is the oxygen of social intercourse.

Since the notion that we should all forsake attachment to race and/or cultural identity and be “just humans” within the framework of white supremacy has usually meant that subordinate groups must surrender their identities, beliefs, values, and assimilate by adopting the values and beliefs of privileged-class whites, rather than promoting racial harmony this thinking has created a fierce cultural protectionism.

I think that the sheer fact that music can raise certain questions or put topics on the agenda has in itself already an effect. Just like any other art of cultural expression can do that - books, films, photos, painting - it can bring people together who share certain ideals, who don't find their ideas expressed properly, or even expressed at all, in the mainstream media.

The union of a man and a woman is the most enduring human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith." ... "Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society.

Satire must always accompany any free society. It is an absolute necessity. Even in the most repressive medieval kingdoms, they understood the need for the court jester, the one soul allowed to tell the truth through laughter. It is, in many ways, the most powerful form of free speech because it is aimed at those in power, or those whose ideas would spread hate. It is the canary in the coalmine, a cultural thermometer, and it always has to push, push, push the boundaries of society to see how much it’s grown.

Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.

Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for that of the natural world, all ecological problems will have their roots in social problems.

The world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic as that of the Industrial Revolution.

Bookishness, highest literacy, every technique of cultural propaganda and training not only can accompany bestiality and oppression and despotism but at certain points foster it.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.

There's such cultural rot taking place, such a disintegration throughout our culture. Values, morality, you name it. Standards have been relaxed, and people are not being held to them. People's intentions, if they're said to be good and honorable, that's all that matters.

Colonialism has completed the destruction of the American Indian in the United States - the cultural destruction.

The creativity of people on the schizophrenic end of the human continuum is a creativity that springs from the inability to accept the standardized cultural denials of the real nature of ex­perience. And the price of this kind of almost "extra human" crea­tivity is to live on the brink of madness, as men have long known.

I think it's interesting, from a creative point of view, to have witnessed the loss of consciousness on a national level and on a cultural level - Bush had 91 percent support in the polls after 9/11. We wanted to kick some ass!

I try to understand place on a deeper level than just the physical or environmental aspects. It includes cultural and intellectual forces, too. Its an inclusive approach that brings in many disciplines and sees place as a dynamic thing.

Upon its debut, The Room was a spectacular bomb, pulling in all of $1,800 during its initial two-week Los Angeles run. It wasn't until the last weekend of the film's short release that the seeds of its eventual cultural salvation were planted. While passing a movie theater, two young film students named Michael Rousselet and Scott Gairdner noticed a sign on the ticket booth that read: NO REFUNDS. Below the sign was this blurb from a review: “Watching this film is like getting stabbed in the head.” They were sold.

Several Southeastern tribes have long said that their ancestors received immigrants from Mesoamerica and that these immigrants introduced many cultural changes. Far too few anthropologists were listening.

When I was growing up and somebody like Robert De Niro had a movie come out, it was a cultural event. Because he had such a confidence and a single mission that was so intimate.

Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.

The gospel always comes to people in cultural robes. There is no such thing as a ‘pure’ gospel, isolated from culture

It is not OK for anyone to be obese. There needs to be a cultural shift.

University, as institutions, pre-date the information economy by many centuries and are not for-profit cultural entities, whose reason of existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization not just download data into student skulls.

New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life.

Certainly our cultural fallback position seems to be that our technologies will get us out of everything they have got us into. That looks like a magical thinking to me, but we don't really have a better idea.

What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all.

We live fragmented, compartmentalized lives in which contradictions are carefully sealed off from each other. We have been taught to think linearly rather than comprehensively, and we do this not through conscious design or because we are not intelligent or capable, but because of the way in which deep cultural undercurrents structure life in subtle but highly consistent ways that are not consciously formulated.

English is the 'language of liberty' for nations emerging from years of cultural oppression.

The worst thing that can happen to anybody in this cultural environment is to fail.

The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.

A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism - the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.

As a Liberal of course I am very strongly committed to the notion of artistic freedom and very hostile to the idea of there being a single view of cultural policy dictated from on high.

Even though I was chronologically 21, I was pretty immature and naive for my age, having grown up in a small, isolated ranching town, eighty desolate miles from the nearest city, and back when there was much less cultural homogenisation by way of TV.

Our language and literature are without a doubt Britain's greatest contribution to the cultural heritage of the world.

Transience is what is normal. The problem is that we are busily trying to create political structures and cultural expressions that deny that and to deny that is to deny the basic idea of what is human.

Sam Walton was a master storyteller who used illustrative stories to reinforce his cultural standards.