Quotes About Culture

Among Whorf's "kaleidoscopic flux of impressions

The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment.

Though the United States and other Western nations are often accused of being misogynistic patriarchies, the rest of the world is immensely worse.

In the United States, Canada, and Australia, fewer than 3 percent of women report that their partners assaulted them in the previous year, but the reports from other countries are an order of magnitude higher: 27 percent in a Nicaraguan sample, 38 percent in a Korean sample, and 52 percent in a Palestinian sample.

Language is a window into human nature, exposing deep and universal features of our thoughts and feelings.

The San of the Kalahari, once called "the original affluent society," turn out to work at least eight hours a day, six to seven days a week, on food alone.

The sin of ingratitude may not have made the Top Seven, but according to Dante it consigns the sinners to the ninth circle of Hell, and that's where post-1960s intellectual culture may find itself because of its amnesia for the conquerors of disease.

After noting Snow's "utter lack of intellectual distinction and . . . embarrassing vulgarity of style," Leavis scoffed at a value system in which "'standard of living' is the ultimate criterion, its raising an ultimate aim.

PHILOSOPHY TODAY GETS no respect.

La violencia se considera moral, no inmoral: por todo el mundo y a lo largo de toda la historia, se ha asesinado a más personas para imponer la justicia que para satisfacer la codicia.

They write as if the consumption of elite art is the ultimate moral good.

It is about the relation of words to a community—how a new word, which arises in an act of creation by a single speaker, comes to evoke the same idea in the rest of a population, so people can understand one another when they use it.

Also, a large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and Western society.

the same time, the mental health professions, and perhaps the culture at large, has been lowering the bar for what counts as a mental illness.

Our understanding of life has only been enriched by the discovery that living flesh is composed of molecular clockwork rather than quivering protoplasm, or that birds soar by exploiting the laws of physics rather than defying them. In the same way, our understanding of ourselves and our cultures can only be enriched by the discovery that our minds are composed of intricate neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning rather than blank slates, amorphous blobs, or inscrutable ghosts.

Culture is an autonomous entity that carries out a desire to perpetuate itself by setting up expectations and assigning roles, which can vary arbitrarily from society to society.

certain facts are objectively true just because people act as if they are true. [...] a social fact depends entirely on the willingness of people to treat it as a fact.

Language is re-created every generation as it passes through the minds of the humans who speak it.

But the supposedly mind-broadening anecdotes owe their appeal to a patronizing willingness to treat other cultures' psychologies as weird and exotic compared to our own.

Chinese, in contrast, lacks a subjunctive and any other simple grammatical construction that directly expresses a counterfactual.

The moral sense sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people in a culture, sometimes in ways that decrease violence, though often (when the norms are tribal, authoritarian, or puritanical) in ways that increase it.

The thing I love about being an actor is the ability to travel and experience new cultures.

I love Latino culture but I hate the concept of "la raza." It is a divisive mindset.

I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.