Quotes About Culture

At one point in the course of this discussion, the idea took possession of us that culture was a peculiar process passing over human life and we are still under the influence of this idea.

To put it briefly, there are two widely diffused human characteristics which are responsible for the fact that the organization of culture can be maintained only by a certain measure of coercion: that is to say, men are not naturally fond of work, and arguments are of no avail against their passions.

There are innumerable civilized people who would shrink from murder or incest, and who yet do not hesitate to gratify their avarice, their aggressiveness and their sexual lusts, and who have no compunction in hurting others by lying, fraud and calumny, so long as they remain unpunished for it; and no doubt this has been so for many cultural epochs.    If

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.

every individual is virtually an enemy of culture, which is nevertheless ostensibly an object of universal human concern. It is remarkable that little as men are able to exist in isolation they should yet feel as a heavy burden the sacrifices that culture expects of them in order that a communal existence may be possible. Thus culture must be defended against the individual

May we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization—possibly the whole of mankind—have become 'neurotic'?

On découvrit alors que l'homme devient névrosé parce qu'il ne peut supporter le degré de renoncement exigé par la société au nom de son idéal culturel, et l'on en conclut qu'abolir ou diminuer notablement ces exigences signifierait un retour à des possibilités de bonheur.   Il est encore une autre cause de désillusion.

It was found that men become neurotic because they cannot tolerate the degree of privation that society imposes on them in virtue of its cultural ideals, and it was supposed that a return to greater possibilities of happiness would ensue if these standards were abolished or greatly relaxed.

La société transforme le désagréable en injuste.

The liberty of the individual is not a benefit of culture. It was greatest before any culture, though indeed it had little value at that time, because the individual was hardly in a position to defend it.

Je vous montrerai que toute votre culture antérieure et toutes les habitudes de votre pensée ont dû faire de vous inévitablement des adversaires de la psychanalyse, et je vous dirai ce que vous devez vaincre en vous-même pour surmonter cette hostilité instinctive.

Eros und Ananke sind auch die Eltern der menschlichen Kultur geworden.

Thus we may perhaps be forced to become reconciled to the idea that it is quite impossible to adjust the claims of the sexual instinct to the demands of civilization; that in consequence of its cultural development renunciation and suffering, as well as the danger of extinction in the remotest future, cannot be avoided by the human race.

Em matéria de sexualidade, somos todos, no momento, doentes ou sãos, não mais do que hipócritas.

Of all the erroneous and superstitious beliefs of mankind that have supposedly been surmounted there is not one whose residues do not live on among us to-day in the lower strata of civilized peoples or even in the highest strata of cultural society. What has once come to life clings tenaciously to its existence. One feels inclined to doubt sometimes whether the dragons of primaeval days are really extinct.

Mit Sicherheit weiß ich nur das eine, daß die Werturteile der Menschen unbedingt von ihren Glückswünschen geleitet werden, also ein Versuch sind, ihre Illusionen mit Argumenten zu stützen. Die Schicksalsfrage der Menschenart scheint mir zu sein, ob und in welchem Maße es ihrer Kulturentwicklung gelingen wird, der Störung des Zusammenlebens durch den menschlichen Aggressions- und Selbstvernichtungstrieb Herr zu werden.

I like that the Aborigines say dogs make people human

He is convinced--and what immigrant isn't?--that all Americans are crazy.

During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see.

You posted an essay, "How to Be a Flâneur," on the custom of urban strolling and loitering and its place in literary culture. You caught some flak for questioning whether there could really be such a thing as a flâneuse. You didn't think it was possible for a woman to wander the streets in the same spirit and manner as a man. A female pedestrian was subject to constant disruptions: stares

She believed that, in our culture, at least, people were much freer than they thought they were and had more options than they seemed willing to acknowledge.

Gay men are French women...with penises.

stunned it. Santiago, schooled in the ways

Scotland's all heather and haggis and men in skirts.