Quotes About Culture

The obsidian flake and the silicon chip are struck by the light of the same campfire that has passed from hand to hand since the human mind began.

the economically more powerful culture may not be the more powerful culture spiritually and morally.

religion arises from culture; spirituality arises from biology.

Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.

Football combines the two worst features of American life. It's violence punctuated by committee meetings.

Pessimism is as American as apple pie — frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.

Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

Americans would prefer that immigrants do their jobs and then disappear at the end of the day.

Sex education in the modern manner has been well-described as plumbing for hedonists.

Television news is akin to audible wallpaper.

Behavior was better when cinemas were opulent.

Multiculturalism attacks individualism by defining people as mere manifestations of groups (racial, ethnic, sexual) rather than as self-defining participants in a free society. And one way to make racial, ethnic, or sexual identity primary is to destroy alternative sources of individuality and social cohesion, such as a shared history, a common culture, and unifying values and virtues.

Anger does not make history. Power does. And power may be supplemented by anger, but it derives from more fundamental realities; geography, demographics, technology, and culture.

The selection process at the best schools is presently designed not to find the best minds but rather to find minds already shaped to the culture and ideology the universities regard as being able to benefit from their education.

The foundation of any empire is not guns, something that Hitler and Stalin never grasped. It is money, and the envy that brings. But more important than money or guns is the technology that represents the future and the culture that speaks of being contemporary. All lasting empires are empires of the mind and soul, empires that cause others to crave to emulate them.

Cultures live in one of three states. The first state is barbarism. Barbarians believe that the customs of their village are the laws of nature and that anyone who doesn't live the way they live is beneath contempt and requiring redemption or destruction. The third state is decadence. Decadents cynically believe that nothing is better than anything else. If they hold anyone in contempt, it is those who believe in anything. Nothing is worth fighting for.

It is interesting to note that Copernicus was German/Polish, Luther was German, and Gutenberg was German.

Because immigrants came here precisely for the social and economic benefits, refusing to learn English was self-defeating.

Inventing the government was the preface to inventing a nation. Governments can be machines, but nations have to accommodate the actual lives of people. People don't live abstract lives. They live real ones, within nations, and those nations give them a sense of who they are.

There is a fierce unity to America, and simultaneously there are deep differences that turn into mutual contempt at times of stress. This tension actually has a virtue hidden within it. The tension within the country, the radical differences in culture and outlook, actually become a goad driving the country forward but leaving some behind.

Japan will need to foster deep

The nation provided a human with the things that are most human—language and a past that stretched back before his birth.

True music… must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans. My time is today.

Superstitions add texture to life.