Quotes About Culture

Planters clung to their proslavery beliefs even when there were facts to the contrary because the stakes involved in abandoning them were too high. They could not reject or even compromise their central myths, for to do so would mean condemning a whole culture as a lie...Ideologies, once constructed, have lives of their own. Any evidence which might have contradicted the planters' basic beliefs faced an a priori denial.

Catholic missionaries labored earnestly to convert indians. They fervently believed that God expected them to save the Indians' souls by convincing them to abandon their old sinful beliefs and to embrace the one true Christian faith. But after baptizing tens of thousands of Indians, the missionaries learned that many Indians continued to worship their own gods. Most priests came to believe that the Indians were lesser beings inherently incapable of fully understanding Christianity.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

He's like you, Talloo." "Bisexual?" "American, I mean.

If all you are doing is spending time with the struggling members of your church and you are not building proactively into your church's culture, and you are being shortsighted and limiting the effectiveness of your ministry.

The biblical counselor must always remember that the ROOT problem is deeper than skin; it is sin. The ultimate cure is not culture, but Christ.

While the United States is becoming the most culturally diverse nation in the world, less than 5.5% of Christian congregations are multiethnic.

Christians have a way of crouching in their own culture instead of penetrating the one they live in with the gospel. Too many migrate to a faith that elevates issue debate and substitutes a set of personal preferences for the glorious gospel.

In other words, none of us are perfect, spiritual teachers included We are all here in this Earth school to grow and learn in a host of different ways, and only now are we humans beginning to understand how difficult that can be in an increasingly global pluralistic world full of people whose cultures, beliefs, worldviews, and levels of consciousness are very different from our own.

In Europe they call geeks 'smart people ' and frankly I think we live in a culture that doesn't value intelligence enough so I am very proud in saying that I am a geek.

In fact, respect, compassion, and sensitivity are undervalued gifts for dealing with conflict and disagreement in general, gifts that can be shared with the wider culture.

You got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.

I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?

as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out [...] the literary novel has become extraordinarily privatistic of late. It's as if the big issues (Does God exist? from whence springs decency? what sort of species is Homo Sapiens?) were either settled or not worth discusssing, and serious writers should therefore confine themselves to their various ethnic heritages and interpersonal relationships.

Any culture that continues to influence our vision continues to grow in the very exercise of that influence.

Properly speaking, the Renaissance is not a period but a people, moreover, a people without a boundary, and therefore without an enemy. The Renaissance is not against anyone. Whoever is not of the Renaissance cannot go out to oppose it, for they will find only an invitation to join the people it is.

Because culture as such can have no temporal limits, a culture understands its past not as destiny, but as history, that is, as a narrative that has begun but points always toward the endlessly open. Culture is an enterprise of mortals, disdaining to protect themselves against surprise. Living in the strength of their vision, they eschew power and make joyous play of boundaries.

Just as infinite play cannot be contained within finite play, culture cannot be authentic if held within the boundaries of a society. Of course, it is often the strategy of a society to initiate and embrace a culture as exclusively its own. Culture so bounded may even be so lavishly subsidized and encouraged by society that it has the appearance of open-ended activity, but in fact it is designed to serve societal interests in every case-like the socialist realism of Soviet art.

Society and culture are therefore not true opponents of each other. Rather society is a species of culture that persists in contradicting itself, a freely organized attempt to conceal the freedom of the organizers and the organized, an attempt to forget that we have willfully forgotten our decision to enter this or that contest and to continue in it.

If we think of society as all that a people does under the veil of necessity, we must also think of it as a single finite game that includes any number of smaller games within its boundaries.

Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.

If society is all that a people feels it must do, culture "is the realm of the variably free, not necessarily universal, of all that cannot lay claim to compulsive authority (Buckhardt).

A society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon.

The Renaissance, like all genuine cultural phenomena, was not an effort to promote one or another vision. It was an effort to find visions that promised still more vision.