Quotes About Culture

To be a truly radical disciple does require a relentless evaluation of life's priorities and concerns, together with an ongoing, rigorous critique of our culture, to ensure we are not adopting values that subvert the very life and message we are called to live out.

There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism

Did nobody spank their children these days?

Over the past twenty-five years much has been written about the need for the church to change; however, if we are to hear what God might be doing in the massively shifting contexts in which we live, we must move beyond conversations about the church, about how to make it work, and about patterns for success. I find most of these conversations are really seeking to restore the church to some imagined place in culture.

Good thing I'm driving or I'd kick you in the balls. Oh, wait, we're in England. I'd kick you in the bollocks.

That photo was taken in Bialystok, Poland, sometime around 1725.

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.

Professor Henry Higgins: There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years!

When we, through our educational culture, through the media, through the entertainment culture, give our children the impression that human beings cannot control their passions, we are telling them, in effect, that human beings cannot be trusted with freedom.

The power of both myth and art is this magical ability to open doors, to make connections — not only between us and the natural world, but between us and the rest of humanity. Myths show us what we have in common with every other human being, no matter what culture we come from, no matter what century we live in. . .and at the same time, mythic stories and art celebrate our essential differences...

Information tech in the era of the personal computer and network is today's equivalent of a Love Bug that not only works but creates a new image of work that allows corporate and other organizational cultures to imagine a cool new vision of themselves. Information technology, in other words, is an institutional desiring engine.

Birds are sensitive to mispronunciation, even more sensitive than the French.

Humans are exempt from biology.

Reading American photographs is also a way of reading the past-not just the scenes recorded and the faces immobilized into permanent images, but the past as culture, as ways of thinking and feeling, as experience

Perceived as an incalculable force in its own right, reified, fetishized, even demonized, the machine thus found a troubled place in the culture of the times.

Born into prosperity, the two sisters were inseparable; they traveled widely in pursuit of culture, and in the early 1840s they settled for a time in Paris, where Jane took piano lessons from the English pianist Lindsay Sloper, who was himself a pupil of Chopin's.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.

Los llaneros son reservados con la gente que acaban de conocer —le respondió el médico—. Ten paciencia.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

America's a very traumatized society.

Beauty is now defined by your bones sticking out of your decolletage. For that to be the standard is really perilous for women.

Canada has a passive-aggressive culture, with a lot of sarcasm and righteousness. That went with my weird messianic complex. The ego is a fascinating monster. I was taught from a young age that I had to serve, so that turned into me thinking I had to save the planet.

We are so accustomed to classifying judgments, arguments and deeds in terms of morality that we forget how relatively new the notion was in the culture of the Enlightenment.