Quotes About Culture

What is crucial here, however, is this anthropological point: that contemporary science is as cultural as shamanism, opera, Catholicism, or the Boy Scouts. It does not stand outside of culture in a space of perfect objectivity.

Scientists are people, and they are subject to the influences of their times. Theories explaining the world change diachronically or vary synchronically not only because of variation in the available data, but because of change and variation in the people producing the theories. Objectivity itself is culturally constituted.

The more we know about science, the more we know culture and cosmos are connected, to such an extent that we can now see that the cosmos is inextricably intertwined with human destiny, both in the short term and the long-term, impinging on (and arguably essential to) questions normally reserved for religion and philosophy.

Guatemalan Antigua.

when one looks at innovation in nature and in culture, environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments.

I went to a restaurant that serves 'breakfast at any time.' So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.

the failure of language." "It's a creative destruction. Out of that failure comes culture. Out of culture comes desire. Out of desire come products.

The world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic as that of the Industrial Revolution. (OK, it doesn't take a genius, or even a politician, to figure out that big changes are afoot when we have a medium that lets someone throw up a virtual storefront on the Web and instantly gain access to the global market.)

fragile. So that to be able to defy a culture which states that 'Thou shalt not touch this,' and to defy that with one's own creative powers is . . . the essence." The essence, of course, of the Hacker Ethic.

The high holy day of Google culture is April 1, when imaginations already encouraged to run wild are channeled into elaborate pranks requiring months of work. The effort involves considerable organization, as ideas go through an elaborate approval process to find a place in the company's ever-increasing roster of seasonal spoofs.

Without music, the prehistoric past is just too quiet to be believed.

and any discussion of art vs. entertainment in the present cultural climate invites accusations of elitism and snobbery.

And if the novel [ The Education of Cyrus ] remains dull by modern standards, we have to remind ourselves Xenophon didn't set out to write a "novel" — there was no such thing yet in his culture — but was feeling his way to a new form somewhere between factual history and fanciful epic. Our hat is always off to innovators.

If you travel to Germany, it's still absolutely Germany. If you travel to Sweden, it still has a Swedish identity.

There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.

Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.

At once [the buffalo] is a symbol of the tenacity of wilderness and the destruction of wilderness; it's a symbol of Native American culture and the death of Native American culture; it's a symbol of the strength and vitality of America and the pettiness and greed of America; it represents a frontier both forgotten and remembered; it stands for freedom and captivity, extinction and salvation.

This is America, after all, where a man's hygiene and sense of humor are more important than his pedigree.

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses.

They meant that a people who used common lands for common uses lived within a deviant economic culture.

Hill-Billie was threatening for being free from hierarchy and unassimilated into Atlantic capitalism.

It seems to me that to understand these early Greeks, it is better to think of them not as physicists or scientists or even philosophers, but as poets.

The idea that memes exist is a meme meme.