Quotes About Culture

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

As a big music fan, England is an amazing place to go.

It's really amazing that two people from such different backgrounds and geographical origins ever got together. That was perhaps part of the attraction.

So much of our culture is bought and manufactured - not to say great art can't come out of that. Some art is really amazing that is manufactured and sold, like action movies and stuff.

There's not a lot of people expressing anger in the culture. They're expressing a lot of hyper-exaggerated sexuality.

It was no thought or word that called culture into being, but a tool or a weapon. After the stone axe we needed song and story to remember innocence, to record effect- and so to describe the limits, to say what can be done without damage.

That one American farmer can now feed himself and fifty-six other people may be, within the narrow view of the specialist, a triumph of technology; by no stretch of reason can it be considered a triumph of agriculture or of culture. It has been made possible by the substitution of energy for knowledge, of methodology for care, of technology for morality.

But a man with a machine and inadequate culture—such as I was when I made my pond—is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

And there is no use in saying that if we can invent the nuclear bomb and fly to the moon, we can solve hunger and related problems of land use. Epic feats of engineering require only a few brilliant technicians and a lot of money. But feeding a world of people year to year for a long time requires cultures of husbandry fitted to the nature of millions of unique small places—precisely the kind of cultures that industrialism has purposely disvalued, uprooted, and destroyed.

However, if we conceive of a culture as one body, which it is, we see that all of its disciplines are everybody's business, and that the proper university product is therefore not the whittled-down, isolated mentality of expertise, but a mind competent in all its concerns.

A living culture of work lived close to the ground, carried forward into time in the ordinary work and speech of every day, is as far as possible unlike any record that may be made of it. It may be documented as 'oral history', its stories may be remembered and written into books, it may be pictured in old photographs, but no true likeness of it can ever be reenacted or reproduced. When such a culture dies, it is not only dead, it is gone .

Such an attitude does not come from technique or technology. It does not come from education; in more than two decades in universities I have rarely seen it. It does not come even from principle. It comes from a passion that is culturally prepared—a passion for excellence and order that is handed down to young people by older people whom they respect and love. When we destroy the possibility of that succession, we will have gone far toward destroying ourselves.

The more local and settled the culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert.

The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical—in short, a victim. When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous.

The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly -an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a practical point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.

the American Indian, who was ignorant by the same standards, nevertheless knew how to live in the country without making violence the invariable mode of his relation to it; in fact, from the ecologist's or the conservationist's point of view, he did it no violence. This is because he had, in place of what we would call education, a fully integrated culture, the content of which was a highly complex sense of his dependence on the earth.

We have, in fact, been turning our country into an economy as fast as possible, and we have been doing so by an unaccounted squandering of its actual, its natural and its cultural, wealth.

But good farming is first and last an art, a way of doing and making that involves human histories, cultures, minds, hearts, and souls. It is not the application by dullards of methods and technologies under the direction of a corporate-academic intelligentsia.

The singular demand for production has been unable to acknowledge the importance of the sources of production in nature and in human culture.

At every point in our food economy, present conditions remaining, we must expect to come to a time when demand (for quantity or quality) going up will meet the culture coming down. The fact is that we have nearly destroyed American farming, and in the process have nearly destroyed our country. from the essay Nature As Measure

We haven't accepted—we can't really believe—that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so.

Until the mid-1700s, newborn babies were often fed, or "dry-nursed," with bread, cake or biscuit mixed with cow's milk, butter and sugar—known as "pap"—supplemented by brandy, rum or wine

Who will speak of Africa's silences? Who will know where the work of true excavation must be done? •

Americans believe that they are normal, that they make sense, and that the rest of the world is exotic. They do not seem to understand that they are the most exotic people in the world right now.