Quotes About Culture

So, in a way, Chris Horner was right when he told his fellow Heartlanders that climate change isn't the issue. In fact, it isn't an issue at all. Climate change is a message, one that is telling us that many of Western culture's most cherished ideas are no longer viable.

our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and reengineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us.

When information about who is or is not a security threat is a product to be sold as readily as information about who buys Harry Potter books on Amazon or who has taken a Caribbean cruise and might enjoy one in Alaska, it changes the values of a culture. Not only does it create an incentive to spy, torture and generate false information but it creates a powerful impetus to perpetuate the fear and sense of peril that created the industry in the first place.

This deliberate attempt to shift cultural values is not about lifestyle politics; nor is it a distraction from the "real" struggles. Because in the rocky future we have already made inevitable, an unshakeable belief in the equal rights of all people and a capacity for deep empathy will be the only things standing between humanity and barbarism.

And, in the name of "national security," we will intervene in foreign conflicts over water, oil, and arable land, or start those conflicts ourselves. In short our culture will do what it is already doing, only with more brutality and barbarism, because that is what our system is built to do.

The search for the true meaning of brands - or the brand essence, as it is often called - gradually took the agencies away from individual products and their attributes and toward a psychological/anthropological examination of what brands mean to the culture and to people's lives. This was seen to be of crucial importance, since corporations may manufacture products, but what consumers buy are brands.

O]urs is a culture of the perpetual present, one that deliberately severs itself from the past that created us as well as the future we are shaping with our actions.

me. The tea was even offered exactly in the same way that Americans always did it, namely with the faint hint that they didn't really understand why I might like some tea, but they understood that this was the appropriate thing to do.

Uma casa que não tinha pelo menos dois ou três livros exibidos com orgulho nas paredes era uma casa pobre.

I don't know why Americans won't just talk about the weather like reasonable people

When my father was growing up inside the Old City of Jerusalem, he and his friends liked to trade desserts after diner.

Maybe we should just wander around other countries carrying books.

From Why I could not accept your invitation Forgive me. Culture is everything right now. But I cannot pretend a scrap of investment in the language that allows human beings to kill one another systematically, abstractly, distantly. The language wrapped around 37,000, or whatever the number is today, dead and beautiful bodies thrown into holes without any tiny, reasonable goodbye.

Remind us again, brave friend. What countries may we sing into? What lines should we all be crossing?

Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.' Critic John Berger's well-known quote has been true throughout the history of Western culture, and it is more true now than ever.

Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue.

Sexuality follows fashion, which follows politics.

There is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the beauty myth; what it is doing to women today is a result of nothing more exalted than the need of today's power structure, economy, and culture to mount a counteroffensive against women.

Dieting makes women think of ourselves as sick, religious babies.

We need to insist on making culture out of our desire: making paintings, novels, plays and films potent and seductive and authentic enough to undermine and overwhelm the Iron Maiden.

Porn, it turns out, eventually takes the sexiness - that is, the wildness - out of sex.

Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles...In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a 'problem' where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women's natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma...The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972...The lucrative 'transfer of guilt' was resurrected just in time.

The qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are merely symbols of the female behavior that that period considers desirable: The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance.