Quotes About Culture

Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham's Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good.

The scientific world view works so well, explains so much and resonates so harmoniously with the most advanced parts of our brains that in time, I think, virtually every culture on the Earth, left to its own devices, would have discovered science. Some culture had to be first. As it turned out, Ionia was the place where science was born.

I reject the notion that science is by its nature secretive. Its culture and ethos are, and for very good reason, collective, collaborative, and communicative.

In every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe Few found the similarity suspicious.

we completely decrypt it, how good could the translation be? You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the back of a piece of tapestry.

Would the Gardners and the workers at the Yerkes Primate Center be remembered dimly as legendary folk heroes or gods of another species? Would there be myths, like those of Prometheus, Thoth, or Cannes, about divine beings who had given the gift of language to the apes?

ELLIE IGNORED random access and advanced sequentially through the television stations. Lifestyles of the Mass Murderers and You Bet Your Ass were on adjacent channels. It was clear at a glance that the promise of the medium remained unfulfilled.

We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library. A

She tried to imagine it spinning, with millions of people glued to it, talking different languages, wearing funny clothes, all stuck to the same ball.

Si uno crece en una casa donde hay libros, donde alguien le lee, donde padres, hermanos, tías, tíos y primos leen por placer, es natural que aprenda a leer. Si no hay nadie cerca que disfrute leyendo, ¿dónde está la prueba de que vale la pena?

Si la calidad de la educación que uno tiene a su alcance es inadecuada, si a uno le enseñan a memorizar al pie de la letra y no a pensar, si el contenido de lo que se nos da para leer viene de una cultura casi ajena, la alfabetización puede ser un camino lleno de obstáculos.

I have only one regret," he had said in his gravelly voice. "My daughter married a Bulgarian.

reject the notion that science is by its nature secretive. Its culture and ethos are, and for very good reason, collective, collaborative, and communicative.

Dicho de otro modo, cualquier predisposición a la creencia religiosa puede verse poderosamente influida por la cultura indígena, viva uno donde viva. Especialmente si los niños están expuestos desde muy pequeños a una serie concreta de doctrinas, música, arte y ritual, es algo tan natural para ellos como respirar, motivo por el cual las religiones hacen tantos esfuerzos para atraer a los más jóvenes.

Pre-scientific people are people. Individually they are as clever as we are. Field interrogation of informants from a different culture is not always easy.

Isolation, even if incomplete, breeds diversity.

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth—scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books—might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?

Perhaps when everyone knows that gods come down to Earth, we hallucinate gods; when all of us are familiar with demons, it's incubi and succibi; when fairies are widely accepted, we see fairies; in an age of spiritualism, we encounter spirits; and when the old myths fade and we begin thinking that extraterrestrial beings are plausible, then that's where our hypnogogic imagery tends.

A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilization. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins. They wanted to know who was visiting the Moon these days.

Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.

No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.

Monotheism strenuously denies the need to return to a cultural style that periodically places the ego and its values in perspective through contact with a boundary-dissolving immersion in the Archaic mystery of plant-induced, hence mother-associated, psychedelic ecstasy and wholeness, what Joyce called the mama matrix most mysterious.

You don't go on bended-knee to petition the official culture for your rights. You have to take them.

The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news.