Quotes About Culture

A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.

The only true and effective operator's manual for spaceship earth is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.

The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable.... It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that to work is to pray. (pg. 258, The Idea of a Local Economy)

She would do a mans work when she needed to, but she lived and died without ever putting on a pair of pants. She wore dresses. Being a widow, she wore them black. Being a woman of her time she wore them long. the girls of her day I think must have been like well wrapped gifts to be opened by their husbands on their wedding night, a complete surprise. 'Well! What's this!?

Wherever men exist, in all ages and in all parts of the world, they have some form of religion. The idea of God is impressed on every human language. And as language is the product and revelation of human consciousness, if all languages have some name for God, it proves that the idea of God, in some from, belongs to every human being.

if new orthodoxies of unbelief attack inherited faith, if scientism and a cult of technology lower our eyes to the gadgets in our hands, the effect ripples across a culture's soul.

As Catholic Christians, we may have come to a point today where we feel like foreigners in our own country—" strangers in a strange land," in the beautiful English of the King James Bible (Ex 2: 22). But the deeper problem in America isn't that we believers are "foreigners." It's that our children and grandchildren aren't.

We're a culture of self-absorbed consumers who use noise and distractions to manage our lack of shared meaning. What that produces in us is a drugged heart—a heart neither restless for God nor able to love and empathize with others. There

The late distinguished sociologist Robert Nisbet, following Tocqueville, argued that when the forces of personal liberation are dominant in a culture, the result is not maximal liberty, but the absorption of liberty by government.

We live in a culture eager to make truth a boutique experience as malleable as our personal tastes require.

If the goal is uprooting millennia of traditional sexual morality, a need exists for the means and the ruthlessness to enforce the uprooting. The process doesn't need to be vulgar or brutish. But it does need to be thorough—and in an advanced media culture, that can be achieved by reshaping public perceptions. And so what we face now is what the Wall Street Journal described as "the new intolerance.

Benedict XVI noted that this was how monks created European culture: "First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straight away that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past. Their motivation was much more basic. Their goal was: quaerere Deum.

The second way we lose the habit of truth is by refusing to think clearly when damaging cultural trends become political orthodoxies. The last thing too many people want is to be seen as retrograde in their views when the cost may be social exile. The same-sex marriage debate was, and remains, a classic case.

When we no longer have the courage to live by the truth ourselves, when we no longer really hunger for it, then we no longer insist on it from others. The result is a culture of evasive unreality, a nation of alibis. And we come to accept more dishonesty and less integrity in our politics as unavoidable rules of the road. The

It also attracts thousands of others to the faith. Bland secular platitudes, consumer junk, and cheap nihilism feed nobody's soul. These things strangle the heart.

To Kill a Mockingbird would become like Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, On the Road, Soul on Ice, and The Feminine Mystique—books that seized the imagination of the post–World War II generation

You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933.

You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933...Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.

It is true that other countries, particularly in Europe, have in the past several decades opened themselves up to immigration. But the real problem is not immigration but assimilation. Anyone can do immigration. But if you don't assimilate the immigrants—France, for example, has vast, isolated exurban immigrant slums with populations totally alienated from the polity and the general culture—then immigration becomes not an asset but a liability.

polygamists. But I'm not the one who put them

Why in the age of feminism do we still use the phrase "women and children"?

I must study politics and war," wrote John Adams, "that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

Sephardic Jewish tradition and home to

Espresso is to Italy, what champagne is to France.