Quotes About Culture

It takes a society to raise a generation.

I'm afraid of Americans.

It wasn't so much about how I felt about things, but rather how things around me felt. To put it simply, I had discovered the Englishman's true place in rock and roll.

Martianus Capella strove to collect what he considered the highest accomplishments of his culture, the Seven Liberal Arts, and his collection—in weird poesical format—seemed a candle to many, during the Dark Ages. That story inspired Isaac Asimov, by the way, to write his famed Foundation sci-fi series.

All Scots are engineers, and all engineers are Scots.

There's a reason why kings built large palaces, sat on thrones and wore rubies all over. There's a whole social need for that, not to oppress the masses, but to impress the masses and make them proud and allow them to feel good about their culture, their government and their ruler so that they are left feeling that a ruler has the right to rule over them, so that they feel good rather than disgusted about being ruled. —George Lucas, New York Times, 1999

Always, before, whenever one culture went into decline, there were others ready to take up the slack. If Rome toppled, there was light shining in Constantinople, then the Baghdad Caliphate and in China. If Philippine Spain turned repressive, Holland welcomed both refugees and science. When most of Europe went mad, in the mid–twentieth century, the brightest minds moved to America. When America grew self-indulgent and riven by new civil war, that migration sloshed and shifted East.

We need feedback from outside ourselves. Life consists of interacting pieces, free to jiggle and rearrange themselves. That's how you make a working system, like an organism, or a culture, or a biosphere.

There isn't one America anymore. If there ever had been.

TCK builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the TCK's life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background.

When we think of the word culture, obvious representations such as how to dress, eat, speak, and act like those around us come to mind. But learning culture is more than learning conformity to external patterns of behavior. Culture is also a system of shared concepts, beliefs, and values. It is the framework from which we interpret and make sense of life and the world around us.

All children, including TCKs, face a myriad of developmental tasks as they grow from helpless infants into healthy adults. Among them is the need to develop a strong sense of personal identity as well as group identity, answering the questions Who am I? and Where do I belong? Traditionally, the family and community mirror back the answers and the child sees his or her image reflected in them.

In driving for cultural change, it's a mistake to become overly constrained by your desired culture as you've defined it. Are there any other, related behaviors, values, or principles that support high performance than the ones you've formally adopted? If so, don't hesitate to push these as well.

When institutionalizing the culture, don't just graft it blithely onto existing processes or practices. Go deeper and question whether those processes or practices themselves need improvement.

Understand the significance of mind-set and culture. If the mind-set doesn't change, operations won't change either. In particular, be sure to get people past the mentality of "I have to do my job and this too?

Criticizing privately might be appropriate in certain, sensitive cases, but in general both criticism and praise should be public. Your people have to understand that certain behaviors or performance are unacceptable. Otherwise they'll wonder why the organization allows it. When leaders share both criticism and praise publicly, team members learn about the high performance culture you're striving to create.

Understand the significance of mind-set and culture. If the mind-set doesn't change, operations won't change either.

Language could be used as an instrument of control, a way of establishing hierarchies that suggest one set of people is better or more special than another. Through language, one automatically identifies one's place within a social and cultural hierarchy and we all carry with us illogical attitudes about the bearers of particular language, based on our own cultural background and continued exposure to local political ideals.

Nobles and peasants marry early. Businessmen tend to wait.

I'm truly amazed at you, Garion, Polgara said. I didn't think you had the faintest idea of how to speak a civilized language. Thank you, he said, I think.

The quality of student work has definitely gone downhill since they discontinued the use of the whipping post. -Silk

There is a danger in exposing yourself to too much vapid art. It can weaken your judgment and erode your sensibilities, until the time comes when you see things that are merely passable, and somehow think that they're good.

If you don't develop mainstream tastes at any time of your life, it's not likely that you'll attract a mainstream audience.

He knew America, and even though he hadn't been there in fifteen years, he knew what its soldiers liked because of what one of them had written on the door of a metal locker that was in the room he'd been given to live in. Sex, potato soup, and Johnny Cash, it said.