Quotes About Culture

We live most days and most of the hours of those days in a world permeated with the making and purchasing of idols.

When we read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music, than we can possibly absorb the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to, is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind it than yesterday's newspaper.'12

All theology is rooted in geography.

The contrast between world and church in this regard is stark: American culture is doing its dead level best with its celebrities, consumerism, and violence to keep us in a perpetually arrested state of adolescence. Yet all the while the church is quietly and without false advertising immersing us in the conditions of becoming mature to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

I didn't want to be a religious professional whose identity was institutionalized. I didn't want to be a pastor whose sense of worth derived from whether people affirmed or ignored me. In short, I didn't want to be a pastor in the ways that were most in evidence and most rewarded in the American consumerist and celebrity culture.

It is Christ, not culture, that defines our lives. It is the help we experience, not the hazards we risk, that shapes our days.

We are traveling in the light, toward God who is rich in mercy and strong to save. It is Christ, not culture, that defines our lives. It is the help we experience, not the hazards we risk, that shapes our days.

People who don't read are brutes.

In a culture that prizes the can-do, self-starter attitude, to be a pessimist is simply to be a complainer – if you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem. To live in such a culture is to constantly live in the shadow of an obligatory optimism, a novel type of coercion that is pathologized early on in child education in the assessment: "Does not like to play with others.

To the culture of the early Renaissance, the demon presents a limit to the empiricism of the unknown, something that can only be verified through contradictions – an absent manifestation, an unnatural creature, a demonic malady.

Capitalism has already impoverished the working people who generate wealth for others. And capitalism has already impoverished us culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its value.

I realized this is what white people do to each other—they cultivate each other's fear. It's very violent.

Italian men do appreciate beautiful women. They're not afraid of the beauty, which is nice.

History is the key to everything: politics, religion, even fashion.

The soul can shrivel from am excess of critical distance, and if I don't want to remain in arid internal exile for the rest of my life, I have to find a way to lose alienation without losing my self. But how does one bend toward another culture without falling over, how does one strike an elastic balance between rigidity and self-effacement?

I said a picnic,' said Quin sternly. 'In Britain a picnic means sitting on the ground and being uncomfortable, preferably in the rain.

A cultural change is less a matter of content than a restructuring of relationships between subordinate and dominant elements.

Heterosexual romantic love contains the two most important cultural revolutions of the twentieth century: the individualization of lifestyles and the intensification of emotional life projects; and the economization of social relationships, the pervasiveness of economic models to shape the self and its very emotions.

Culture thus is a matter of shared meanings, but it is not only that: it is also one of the ways in which exclusion, inequality, and power structures are maintained and reproduced.

The culture of capitalism is self-contradictory, demanding that people be hard workers by day and hedonists by night.

Commodities have now penetrated the romantic bond so deeply that they have become the invisible and unacknowledged spirit reigning over romantic encounters.

Culture is sometimes only a context in which people relate to each other, but sometimes culture has a power of its own to shape and transform social relationships.

Far from being a 'haven' from the marketplace, modern romantic love is a practice intimately complicit with the political economy of late capitalism.

The beauty-romance link was extended to cover the desire for self-expression, and the new nexus of beauty, self-expression, and romance was in turn fostered by the culture of consumption. Love was thus made to reinforce a definition of selfhood centered around the commodities that provided youth, beauty, charm, glamour, and seductive power.