Quotes About Culture

Decolonising the Mind, by an important African writer and revolutionary, Ng?g? wa Thiong'o.

And so Mr. Brown came to be respected even by the clan, because he trod softly on its faith.

Language is too grand for these chaps; let's give them dialects!

Chinua Achebe (Author)

Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.

Our violent, narcissistic, noncommittal, "me first" culture is simply the logical and predictable expression of "truth" as a relative, subjective, unverifiable concept.

Indeed, the very word "zero" has Indian origins: The Indian word for zero was sunya, meaning "empty," which the Arabs turned into sifr. Western scholars Latinized this into zephirus, the root of our zero.

In short, we're seeing a shift from mass culture to massively parallel culture.

El vídeo después de la televisión La televisión no es vulgar y lasciva porque la gente que compone la audiencia sea vulgar y lasciva. La televisión es así simplemente porque las personas suelen ser muy similares en sus intereses vulgares y lascivos, y ampliamente diferentes en sus intereses refinados, estéticos y nobles. DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Then television took over, birthing the ultimate in lockstep culture.

In the 1950s and 1960s, it was a safe assumption that nearly everyone in your office had watched the same thing the previous night.

Una manera de considerar la diferencia entre las opciones limitadas de ayer y la abundancia de hoy es imaginar nuestra cultura como un océano en cuya superficie sólo existen islas de popularidad. Hay una isla musical compuesta de álbumes de gran venta, una isla de películas compuesta de éxitos de taquilla, un archipiélago de programas populares de televisión, y así sucesivamente.

Por lo tanto, a medida que la demanda se oriente hacia los nichos, mejorará la economía y creará una retroalimentación positiva que transformará todas las industrias (y la cultura) en las próximas décadas.

gentlemen's clubs—now there was a ridiculous euphemism

She cringed when she saw she needed a bikini wax - and cringed that she even got them in the first place. It wasn't the pain. It was the whole idea she was raising her daughter in a world where pubic hair was a problem.

A library is an arsenal of liberty.

Where else, but from the industrialized world, did the suicide hijackers learn that the huge explosions and death above a city skyline are a peculiar and effective form of communication? They have mastered the language.

Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective.

I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers- historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state- all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction.

Those who resist refuse to kneel before the idols of mass culture and the power elites. They are not trying to get rich. They do not want to be part of the inner circle of the powerful. They accept that when you stand with the oppressed you are treated like the oppressed.

the portrayal of reality in the state-controlled press and popular entertainment is harmonious and pleasant. Justice, in the narratives approved for public consumption, is always served. Goodness always triumphs. Goals are always attained. This dichotomy, although not on the level of Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's Nazi Germany, is nevertheless present in American culture and getting worse. The gap between who we are and who we think we are is steadily expanding.

A culture," the poet W. H. Auden observed, "is no better than its woods.

The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world—an average of 89 per 100 people