Quotes About Culture

The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps.

Every society has the criminals that it deserves.

Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.

Socially, politically, economically, militarily, culturally, racially, sexually, demographically, even mythologically, World War II was the crucible that forged modern America. It was the transforming event that reshaped all who lived through it, and continues to affect those born after it. Only the American Revolution that created the new nation and the Civil War that preserved the Union rank with it in importance.

Writing, long term, is mentally risky but vital culturally and contributes to a non-boring life.

we could say that, since this reaction is a matter of degree, your worldview is modern insofar as experiencing other cultures in your own backyard gives you vertigo.

Every institution is affected by the culture in which it lives and especially the culture in which it was born. That includes my church and denomination as well as yours.

The ways you and I conduct our Christian lives and the churches we attend are culturally influenced,

Twenty-first-century American churches have a history and an institutional culture rooted in the modern or premodern periods—the twentieth, nineteenth, or earlier centuries

In the eyes of postmoderns, then, modernism has failed, both as a prediction of progress and as a moral framework for culture. As a result, postmoderns take distinctly anti-modern views on the deeper questions of human life: social, political, moral, and spiritual questions.

Postmodernism is not a theory or a creed: it is more like an attitude or a way of looking at things. It didn't drop out of the sky—it showed up at this juncture in history, in Western culture, for specific reasons that have to do with the history of the West.

Because history has the functions it has—supplying practical lessons and moral examples, shaping a culture's identity and even influencing one's view of destiny—it is no surprise that a culture's history of itself will be somewhat self-serving, casting itself in the role of good guy, emphasizing its virtues and minimizing its shortcomings.

the church is part of God's plan for every Christian, that Christian selves are a work in progress that cannot be left to the culture at large, that discipleship is not an option for the spiritual elite but God's command for everyone.

For traditional Christians, the refusal to believe in moral absolutes is perhaps the most distressing aspect of postmodernism. The distress lies at the heart of what I called "the moral concern" with postmodernism in the first chapter. How should a Christian respond?

[There's] a culture clash that's happening all over the world between bewigged and bestockinged officials who think that they can rule over us, [and] a public who is no longer content with that arrangement.

A lot of our entertainment throws into detail the stagnation and illness of how we live today-it's sad and it's sick... and it's profitable.

Most people, when their culture began to run wood through sawmills and build homes out of the dimensional lumber that results, would not have thought to ask what, in our human experience and capability, might be affected by this.

Fire and cooking were necessary precursors to our use of food as social lubricant, as facilitator of culture and connection.

What, then, might deodorants and perfumes have done to our ability to smell the signals emitted by our bodies? What might lives filled with clocks have done to our sense of time? What have airplanes done to our sense of space, or the internet to our sense of competence? What have maps done to our sense of direction, or schools to our sense of family? You get the point.

Postmodernists have been at the leading edge of promoting the view that reality is socially constructed.

the human niche is niche switching. More specifically, we argue that the human niche is to move between the paired, inverse modes of culture and consciousness.

In times of stability, when inherited wisdom allows individuals to prosper and spread across relatively homogeneous landscapes: Culture reigns. But in times of expansion into new frontiers, when innovation and interpretation, and communication of new ideas, are critical: Consciousness reigns.

It is no accident that, in every human culture known, there is language that distinguishes male from female. It's a human universal.

If culture was not paying its way, the genes whose expression it is modifying would either go extinct or evolve to be as immune to culture as an oak tree.