Quotes About Culture

Bad ideas offer explanations of experience that do not reflect reality. They read into life what is not there. Often we embrace invalid ideas because they have not been clearly stated and therefore cannot be evaluated. In our culture, influenced as it is by mass media, we are bombarded by ridiculous concepts that are deliberately left vague so we will act without thinking.

Ideas and their creators run the world…one's place in the world is due partially to the ideas that a culture has forced on one and/or the ideas that a person "freely" accepts and uses.

In the extreme, fads can arise, spread through, and then disappear from a community in a fraction of a human generation.

Cultures evolve. The culture associated with a community changes over time, moving this way and that, pushed by several forces.

The renowned biologist and thinker E. O. Wilson calls the study of gene-culture coevolution "one of the great unexplored domains of science.

Humpback song has clearly had its effects on human culture—influencing both our music and whaling practices—but what of our interest in whale culture? These discoveries are particularly important for us because there is only one way large numbers of animals can sing the same song that evolves over periods of time that are much less than an individual's lifetime: culture. Genes

The characteristics of the dynamics of humpback whale song, evolution at a rather steady rate, with occasional revolutions, match those of human art, music, and literature. In his 1990 book, The Clockwork Muse, Colin Martindale shows that trends over time in human art and music fit with laws derived from what we know of human psychology and the principles of cultural evolution.

This is all speculation, as are our ideas about the overall functions of the songs. However, what we do know about the humpback song is that it is an important part of the acoustic ecology of the ocean; that it is loud, long, complex, beautiful; and that it is culture.

Those who deck themselves out in stolen gods are not viable.

Immoral women do not exist, said the organist. That this only a superstition. On the other hand there exist women who sleep thirty times with one man, and women who sleep once with thirty men.

This was the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself, for bigger and better houses with more mod cons, the painstaking accumulation of comfort and, with it, status - the concrete display of earned cash.

NASSER: In this damn country that we hate and love, you can get anything you want. It's all spread out and availble. That's why I believe in England. You just have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system.

How many artists have created while drunk, high on laudanum, opium, chloral or amphetamines? What have antidepressants ever done for culture?

illegal drugs are better for you than the legal stuff. How many artists have created while drunk, high on laudanum, opium, chloral, or amphetamines? What have antidepressants ever done for culture?

Popeye the Sailor Man has more cultural longevity. Only women and poofs read or write now. Otherwise, these days, no sooner has someone been sodomised by a close relative than they think they can write a memoir. The game's up.

Papá me enseñó a coquetear con todo el mundo, chicas y chicos, y acabé por considerar el encanto -y no la cortesía o la franquza, o incluso la decencia- la principal virtud mundana

Narcissism is our religion. The selfie stuck is our cross, and we must carry it everywhere.

Narcissism is our religion. The selfie stick is our cross, and we must carry it everywhere.

Was I conceived like this, I wondered, in the suburban night air, to the wailing of Christian curses from the mouth of a renegade Muslim masquerading as a Buddhist ?

Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans.

The Jewish notables (as they were called in the nineteenth century) ruled the Jewish communities, but they did not belong to them socially or even geographically.

no one at the top knew or considered it important that the Vietnamese had been fighting foreign invaders for almost 2,000 years,"63 or that the notion of Vietnam as a "tiny backward nation" without interest to "civilized" nations, which is, unhappily, often shared by the war critics, stands in flagrant contradiction to the very old and highly developed culture of the region.

We don't just want what we want because we want it; we want what we want because that's what we've learned to want.

The opposite of "slut" is someone who has not been labeled a slut, someone who has never been charged with violating doxa.