Quotes About Culture

My American and Japanese personalities are distinct, and I carry myself differently depending on which language I'm using and which mode I'm in.

Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

And there was no ultimate reality—any culture that would judge the perceptions of another, particularly one outside its own traditions, should proceed cautiously.

What perished with their cultures were their unique ideas of what it meant to be courteous, reverent, courageous, and just. What disappeared with them were their thoughts about what could be expected to be going on in the places into which we cannot see. As our own cultures continue to unfold around the riptides of aggressive commerce and heedless development, it seems these thoughts might have been good things to have made note of.

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but in oneself? There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

If the real human environment in developed countries today is third-growth monocultured "forests," tar-sand petroleum, cow-burnt grasslands, and smog-like clouds of microplastics floating in oceans where fish once thrived, then human cultures need to distinguish between sentimentality about loss and the imperative to survive. They need to establish a more relevant politics than the competitive politics of nation-states. And to found economies built not on profit but on conservation.

the possibilities in all this are so extensive that to gather it all under one name, Homo sapiens, borders on absurdity.

And of the Thule, who carried large stones into their camps and set them up in a pattern for a jumping game, like hopscotch.

We know what we do; the engines that eat us up-this is what science fiction has been saying (among other things) for a long time now. It may be preaching only to the converted, but the objective truth, the inner beast, will not go away and so neither-despite the hostility of culture, the ineptitude of many of its practitioners, the loathing of most of its editors, the corruption of its readers-neither will science fiction.

IT IS MAXIMIZERS WHO SUFFER MOST IN A CULTURE THAT PROVIDES too many choices.

The illusion that each person can have the body that he or she wants is especially painful for women, and especially in societies, like ours, in which the "ideal" body is extremely thin.

Forty years ago, the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz said that human beings are "unfinished animals." What he meant is that it is human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society that surrounds us. That human nature is more created than discovered.

We "design" human nature, by designing the institutions within which people live. So we must ask ourselves just what kind of a human nature we want to help design.

Rather it is the result of a complex interaction among many psychological processes that permeate our culture, including rising expectations, awareness of opportunity costs, aversion to trade-offs, adaptation, regret, self-blame, the tendency to engage in social comparisons, and maximizing.

Clearly, our experience of choice as a burden rather than a privilege is not a simple phenomenon. Rather it is the result of a complex interaction among many psychological processes that permeate our culture, including rising expectations, awareness of opportunity costs, aversion to trade-offs, adaptation, regret, self-blame, the tendency to engage in social comparisons, and maximizing.

Identity is much less a thing people "inherit" than it used to be.

I believe that many modern Americans are feeling less and less satisfied even as their freedom of choice expands. This book is intended to explain why this is so and suggest what can be done about it.

At present, the potential causal role that the availability of choice has in making people into maximizers is pure speculation. If the speculation is correct, we ought to find that in cultures in which choice is less ubiquitous and extensive than it is in the U.S., there should be fewer maximizers.

Most people at the time Jesus lived, apart from the upper-crust Roman elite

One of the clearest ways to evaluate the common beliefs of a society is to consider the satires that arise within it. Satire makes fun of standard assumptions, perspectives, views, and beliefs.

For ancient people, male and female were not two kinds of human; they were two degrees of human.

books played virtually no role in the polytheistic religions of the ancient Western world.

The widespread notion that stories never should be changed but should be repeated without alteration every time is an innovation of modern written cultures.

most ancient people did not see the divine and earthly realms this way.