Quotes About Culture

We live in a world with "free" content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights.

It might be crazy to expect a high government official to speak the truth. It might be crazy to believe that government policy will be something more than the handmaiden of the most powerful interests. It might be crazy to argue that we should preserve a tradition that has been part of our tradition for most of our history -- free culture. If this is crazy, then let there be more crazies. Soon.

London has changed enormously and so have the English in the past decade. They're more like Americans and more like Europeans, too. They're always eating out, and when they're at home they don't cook the way they did ten years ago. They're all sitting around in cafés, like the Continentals, drinking coffee and chattering and watching the world go by.

Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.

The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about 'what is true for me' is an evasion of the serious business of living. It is the mark of a tragic loss of nerve in our contemporary culture. It is a preliminary symptom of death.

The sociology of knowledge has taught us to recognize the fact, which is obvious once it is stated, that in every human society there is what Peter Berger calls a "plausibility structure," a structure of assumptions and practices which determine what beliefs are plausible and what are not. It is easier to see the working of the plausibility structure in a culture of a different time or place than it is to recognize it in one's own.

It has often been said that during the period of liberal Protestantism, when innumerable "lives of Jesus" were written, designed to help educated middle-class Europeans and Americans to respond to the gospel, the portraits that resulted were very obviously self-portraits. They told you more about the writer than about Jesus.

But one may acquire what MacIntyre calls a "second first language," a language which is learned in the same way that a child learns to use the native tongue. A missionary or an anthropologist who really hopes to understand and enter into the adopted culture will not do so by trying to learn the language in the way a tourist uses a phrasebook and a dictionary.

The value of the word contextualization is that it suggests the placing of the gospel in the total context of a culture at a particular moment, a moment that is shaped by the past and looks to the future.

The top rockers have a mythic aura about them, the "superstar," and that's a basically unhealthy state of things, in fact it's the very virus that's fucking up rock, a subspecies of the virus I spoke of earlier that infests our culture from popstars to politics.

If Lou Reed seems like rock's ultimate closet queen by virtue of the fact that he came out of the closet and then went back in , it must be also observed that lots of people, especially lots of gay people, think Lou Reed's just a heterosexual onlooker, exploiting gay culture for his own ends. And who knows but that they may be right.

Springsteen] sort of catarrh-mumbles his ditties in a disgruntled mushmouth like Robbie Robertson on Quaaludes with Dylan barfing down the back of his neck.

We have achieved the most amazing things, a few million people opening up half a continent. But we have not yet found a Canadian soul except in time of war. (On lack of national identity)

No other society in the history of the world has searched so long for a meaningful cultural identity and failed in its quest as has America, the land of You Are What You Do.

The phrase 'Marxism before Marx' has no meaning, but Marx's thought would be emptied of its content if it were not considered in the setting of European cultural history as a whole, as an answer to certain fundamental questions that philosophers have posed for centuries in one form or another.

The search for the ultimate foundation is as much an unremovable part of European culture as is the denial of the legitimacy of this search.

Mankind can never get rid of the need for religious self-identification: who am I, where did I come from, where do I fit in, why am I responsible, what does my life mean, how will I face death? Religion is a paramount aspect of human culture. Religious need cannot be ex-communicated from culture by rationalist incantation. Man does not live by reason alone.

Christian humanists were engaged in a vast enterprise to make the spiritual and intellectual riches of ancient culture available to the Christian world; they did so with no sense of unease or internal conflict, for they believed that paganism – in other words, the 'forces of nature' themselves, not yet sanctified by the blessings of incarnation – could achieve splendid things in all areas of culture.

Modern history might be told by a succession of dinners.

Scientists have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is life after death -- though they say it's virtually impossible to get decent Chinese food.

They say there are about 12 million illegal immigrants in this country. But if you ask a native American, that number is more like 300 million.

It was Italy after all. People probably hit each other all the time.

The year I graduated from college was the year Richard Linklater released Slacker and Douglas Coupland published Generation X . A quarter-century later it's hard to recover a sense of how radical and powerful those works were at the time, but to me they felt authentically contemporary in a way that nothing else did.

Now that Marilyn Monroe is kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her.