Quotes About Culture

These frozen faces, these frozen frames in a film that is running down, mark a civilisation which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge. That is the failure of the New World cultures, dying in their own symbolic Ice Age.

cultural evolution; once it takes off, it goes as the ratio of those two numbers goes, at least a hundred times faster than biological evolution.

Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty—the spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world and of the body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and establishing the principle of political freedom.

A valuable possession of a people is its first heroic epic.

As William Ferris is fond of saying, "in Africa when an older person dies, a library burns.

Something's happening to this country. We're going to go immoral. And television is doing it.

institutional self-reform is rare; the conscience is willing, but the culture is rough.

When nothing is revered, irreverence ceases to indicate critical thought.

Blackmail is the only refuge of the literate man against barbarism.

Rampaging horsemen can conquer; only the city can civilize.

Afghanistan, one of the most inconspicuous nations on earth. In 1946 it was just emerging from the bronze age, a land incredibly old, incredibly tied to an ancient past. At the embassy we used to say, "Kabul today shows what Palestine was like at the time of Jesus.

To travel across Spain and finally to reach Barcelona is like drinking a respectable red wine and finishing up with a bottle of champagne.

The South Pacific was once the playground for ship-sick European sailors. Then it became the roistering barricade of the last great pirates. Next it was the longed-for escape from the canyons of New York. Then the unwilling theatre for an American military triumph. But now it has become the meeting ground for Asia and America.

especially the Japanese and Russian

Over a hundred German scientists arrived here [Huntsville] at eleven o'clock on an April morning and by nightfall more than sixty had applied for cards at the free library.

James A. Michener

James A. Michener

western paintings did not occur.

James A. Michener

James A. Michener

I have no hope that the white man can ever say something and mean it, because we never deal with the same white man. One makes the treaty, and he goes. Another comes, but he never heard of the treaty. With us it is different. When the calumet passes, every Arapaho now and to be born is bound.

You love the Hawaiians as potential Christians, but you despise them as people. I am proud to say that I have come to exactly the opposite conclusion, and it is therefore appropriate that I should be expelled from a mission where love is not.

university of rural Poland with its two colleges: the farm soil and the kitchen argument.

You will have to live among Americans, and they despise most freedoms, so conform.