Quotes About Culture

I think reading is part of the birthright of the human being

I'm so fascinated by the concept of teen pregnancy for some reason. Not that I condone it or promote it, but it's just a very real thing in our country and culture.

Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep ... music is a part of the fabric of everyday life.

The sound of the blues, rhythm and blues, country music, is what we lived for, black and white alike. It gave you strength to sit on one of those throbbing Allis-Chalmers tractors all day if you knew you were gonna hear something on the radio or maybe see a show that evening.

So we made some big plans to be Sonny Boy's band and sat down to some good barbecue in a place I'd been eating in all my life in the black part of town. We ordered sandwiches, coleslaw, and some sodas. While we waited, someone asked Sonny Boy whether he'd known Robert Johnson. "Knew him?" Sonny Boy asked incredulously. "Boy, Robert Johnson died in my arms!

The history of the race is but that of the individual "writ large".

The further off from England the nearer is to France—Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.

An entire generation now regards Nirvana as its version of the Beatles. They are of course hopelessly mistaken, but I would not recommend you tell them so.

We are each born into a situation—a particular body (its race, sex, health...), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation—and born into the stories told of each of these.

The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society. The

As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation's educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.

What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself.

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.

Loving underlies effective learning: indeed, it is the basis of all cultural transference and interchange. No teaching machine can supply this.

In the working of this parallel and in the tracing of the archetypal machine through later Western history, I found that many obscure irrational manifestations in our own highly mechanized and supposedly rational culture became strangely clarified. For in both cases, immense gains in valuable knowledge and usable productivity were cancelled out by equally great increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination.

Now, the whole picture of 'backwardness' changes as soon as we cease to judge earlier technologies by the provincial standards of our own power-centered culture, with its worship of the machine, its respect for the uniform, the mass-produced, the mass-consumed, and with its disregard for individuality, variety and choice, except in strict conformity to the demands of the megamachine.

our megatechnic culture, based as it is on the strange supposition that subjective malice has no reality and that evils do not exist, except in the sense of reparable mechanical defects, has proved itself incompetent to take on such responsibilities.

No single trait, not even tool-making, is sufficient to identify man. What is specially and uniquely human is man's capacity to combine a wide variety of animal propensities into an emergent cultural entity: a human personality.

This proposal for genetic control exposes the idea of control itself in its ultimate absurdity: the arrogant notion that finite minds, operating with the limited equipment of their particular culture and historic moment, will ever be qualified to exercise absolute control over the infinite future possibilities of human development.

The ancient commks though that their own respect for custom and common law, as against tyrannous caprice, was a unique product of their culture. But actually it was a witness to their continuity with an older village democracy we first meet in Mesopotamia: an institution that seems to precede all more sophisticated exercise of control by a dominant minority, imposing their alien traditions or their equally alien upper-class innovations upon a subjugated if acquiescent population.

Only now that village ways are rapidly disappearing throughout the world can we estimate all that the city owes to them for the vital energy and loving nature that made possible man's further development.

When Galileo divided experienced reality into two spheres, a subjective sphere, which he chose to exclude from science, and an objective sphere, freed theoretically from man's visible presence, but known through rigorous mathematical analysis, he was dismissing as unsubstantial and unreal the cultural accretions of meaning that had made mathematics-itself a purely subjective distillation-possible.

The ability to transmit in symbolic forms and human patterns a representative portion of a culture is the great mark of the city: this is the condition for encouraging the fullest expression of human capacities and potentialities, even in the rural and primitive areas beyond.