Quotes About Culture

...culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.

I don't think there is a 'gay lifestyle.' I think that's superficial crap, all that talk about gay culture. A couple of restaurants on Castro Street and a couple of magazines do not constitute culture. Michelangelo is culture. Virginia Woolf is culture. So let's don't confuse our terms. Wearing earrings is not culture.

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control.

Is it our task to force the biblical doctrine of God to answer to modern culture, or (is it our task) to address modern culture with the biblical doctrine of God? If modern culture-or any culture-establishes the baseline for the doctrine of God, such a doctrine will certainly bear little resemblance to the God of the Bible.

I grew up in a storytelling culture, a tribal culture, but also in an American storytelling culture.

A lot of native culture has been destroyed. So you already feel lost inside your culture. And then you add up feeling lost and insignificant inside the larger culture. So you end up feeling lost squared. And to never be recognized, to never have any power, you know, other minority communities actually have a lot of economic, cultural power.

If someone says: "I don't want to have a cochlear implant, because I want my child to grow up with a rich sense of deaf culture," he must acknowledge that the deaf culture that exists in the world today has a different scale than the deaf culture that's likely to exist in the world 50 years from now.

We need to define what culture is. Every human being lives within a culture, and culture means "To grow in." It means to literally fall, and this is exactly what I believe is happening all around us right now.

In writing of Indian culture, I am highly conscious of my own subjectivity; arguably, there is more than one Indian culture, and certainly more than one view of Indian culture.

I really feel concerned about young people within our present culture. Our present culture, we have to change. Change is inevitable and I wasn't raised in our present culture but it has great pressure that as a young person I never had. Material pressure, social pressure, visual pressure, how you look, and I just try to appeal to young people to think for themselves, to be their own person, and to ask questions and also be very attentive to our planet and our environment.

The only way to drive out bad culture is to create good culture. We need to recognize that artistic talent is a gift from the Lord - and that developing those talents is the only way to create good culture.

I think what Jewish culture taught me and what the - and Jewish culture now is everyone's culture - is all these embarrassing things, all these guilt-filled things, all these anxiety filled things are material.

There is a certain amount of righteous indignation I hold for the American culture, because to get back to the real root of it, to get broader about it, my opinion that is my species - and my culture in America specifically - have let me down and betrayed me. I think this species had great, great promise, with this great upper brain that we have, and I think we squandered it on God and Mammon. And I think this culture of ours has such promise, with the promise of real, true freedom, and then everyone has been shackled by ownership and possessions and acquisition and status and power.

I think one of the reasons anti-immigration state laws start to happen is they happen in states where there is an enormous influx. In these places, the dominant culture, the Anglo culture has held sway for such a very, very long time. Now, they are living in another culture, another language. They fear losing dominance and control. It is sadly human nature to find a group to scapegoat. This happens throughout man's history.

Historians differ on when the consumer culture came to dominate American culture. Some say it was in the twenties, when advertising became a major industry and the middle class bought radios to hear the ads and cars to get to the stores. ... But there is no question that the consumer culture had begun to crowd out all other cultural possibilities by the years following World War II.

I loved meditation. I love it because that's where you find what your voice is. You cannot really find it easily in this culture. This culture is the noisiest culture ever, ever. I think the damage that it has done to people is in that realm of silencing them. They are overwhelmed by gadgets. They don't know what to think because they're so heavily programmed about what it is that they should want and should think.

Social Science … led us to the fallacy that, since all men have their being in culture and as a result of culture, they owe a debt to that culture which even a lifetime of altruism could not repay.

Christians must go beyond criticizing the degradation of American culture, roll up their sleeves, and get to work on positive solutions. The only way to drive out bad culture is with good culture.

Humans are particularly interesting; our culture is incredible, there's no doubt about that. In many respects, no other species matches ours. But in quite a few respects, they do, and that can help us, perhaps, to better understand our own culture. We look at the ways humans are similar to other animals, and at the ways they differ, rather than just saying, "We have culture and you don't."

The introduction of LSD and psychedelics into the culture produced a transformation of the entire culture, the consciousness of the culture.

I used to believe that you could change the culture or behavior of a company. I still believe it's possible, but it is at least a five to ten year process, if you are successful at all. More recently, I have been attracted to the ideas of the behavioralist, Edgar Schein. Schein has argued that you cannot change the culture of a company, but you can use the culture of a company to create change. It's an interesting approach to overcoming resistance. And if you can change how a company does its work, you might eventually be able to change how its people think.

I think a lot of America turned to art and culture after Sept. 11. I know the sales of bibles went shooting up, but so did the sales of poetry. I think in a crisis one looks to one's culture, partially to give validation to why one would want that culture to survive.

For example, we have developed an artistic and a literary culture. Nevertheless, the ideals of technological culture remain underdeveloped and therefore outside of popular culture and the practical ideals of democracy.

Culture is the most potent method of adaptation that has emerged in the evolutionary history of the living world. - Theodosius Dobzhanksky...the 'facts' of culture history are interpretations based upon assumed culture process.

People don't think that bread is part of Asian culture or Asian food culture, but it's quite prevalent in Northern China, and you see it throughout Japan and as you go to Taiwan.

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.

Much of the rest of the world has already learned some English. They pretty much understand the American way of doing things, because our culture has been ubiquitous and has been the 500-pound gorilla in the global economy. But the world is far more interrelated than ever before, and no one culture can thrive without the knowledge of how to function in other cultures.

There is a resentment and rejection of liberal culture. That culture is not available to many people in America. And the liberal coastal elite, who may never have been to rural America, just think everyone there is racist and homophobic and judge them to be terrible people. They think there is nothing wrong to be making jokes about 'meth heads', who are actually a group of people with poverty-related drug issues. They don't see their own hypocrisy. I think this is a huge issue and one that cannot be ignored.

Each of us has a mission . . . each of us is called to change the world, to work for a culture of life, a culture forged by love and respect for the dignity of each human person.

We shouldn't just consider the desire of government to do what it wants to do. We should always consider the resistance of people. The culture of Iranian people doesn't let the government drag people into deep trouble or backlash. Maybe government wants it, but the culture doesn't let it go on.

Every time I would arrive in China I would go through a few days of depression from being reminded of both short-term and long-term ruin; the ruining of the city that is happening in the short-term, and the ruining of culture and history that has happened over decades. When you see a building that says so much about the culture that built it being destroyed, there are a lot of emotions. You feel a lot of anger when you see a building being destroyed and realize that it's just a small part of what's going on in the entire country.

Most music culture these days runs on systems and networks devised to deal with the aftermath of thermonuclear war. Music culture has a habit of using these moods and machines in creative, unintended ways.

The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.

Hip-hop is a part of rock & roll because it comes from DJ culture. DJ culture is the embodiment of all genres and all recorded music, if you actually pay attention to it.

I think it's always important for academics to study popular culture, even if the thing they are studying is idiotic. If it's successful or made a dent in culture, then it is worthy of study to find out why.

The one thing I will say is management is management. Culture is culture. You have to have a formula for those things. You have to believe in what you do and how you do it, but then you go to different environments and you have to be willing to adapt. You have to be willing to tweak things based on where you are.

We're in a decaying culture now. Naturally, the young people in the culture are going to feel themselves to be products of the decay.

The shaman is a person who is able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence. They know more than the people they serve. The people they serve are like children within the game of culture. Only the shaman knows that culture is a game. Everyone else takes it seriously. That's how he can do his magic.

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so... I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.

And so popular culture raises issues that are very important, actually, in the country I think. You get issues of the First Amendment rights and issues of drug use, issues of AIDS, and things like that all arise naturally out of pop culture.

We do objectify women in our culture. We're starting to objectify men a little bit more. And there is nothing wrong with that. Objectify maybe is the wrong word. Celebrate their bodies and use beautiful men, beautiful women as a tool to get your attention and to sell things. But no-one - we're very, very uncomfortable in our culture with looking at a naked man. You know, naked women are everywhere, selling everything. And again, this is quite sexist. But naked men make us nervous.

Language both reflects and shapes society. Culture shapes language and then language shapes culture. Little wonder that the words we use to talk to each other, and about each other, are the most important words in our language: they tell us who I am, they tell us who you are, they tell us who 'they' are.

Slow travel now rivals the fly-to-Barcelona-for-lunch culture. Advocates savour the journey, travelling by train or boat or bicycle, or even on foot, rather than crammed into an airplane. They take time to plug into the local culture instead of racing through a list of tourist traps.

My thinking is that if we're going to take from a culture, let's take from a culture that has exemplified success for thousands of years.

Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.

If the culture you have is radically different from an 'experiment and take-risk' culture, then you have a big change you going to have to make - and no little gimmicks are going to do it for you.

The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie have armed themselves against the rising proletariat with, among other things, culture. It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing art to defend their collapsing culture.

I don't want to rescind American directors but I think that European directors in general, because of the size of the nations in Europe are exposed to all different cultures, they can easily travel from one distinct culture to another in a matter of hours - you can drive for two weeks across the United States and you're in the same basic culture - so there is a certain breadth of understanding and sophistication that they bring to it and frankly, in some cases they are less expensive than American directors.