Quotes About Culture

If Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, one day favours me bountifully, Oxford is fifth on the list of cities I would like to visit before I pass on, after Mecca, Varanasi, Jerusalem and Paris.

Happy is the people that is without history. And thrice is the people without sociology.

Language is the gateway to the human world. (...) Language is far older than civilization. (...) The fact that it is possible to teach apes to ride bicycles, but impossible to teach them to talk, suggests that it is the use of language rather than the use of tools which is the essential characteristic of humanity. The word, not the sword or the spade, is the power that has created human culture.

It is essential to realize that the Christian community in the past was not a pious ideal, but a juridical fact which underlay the social organization of Western culture.

No culture is so primitive that it is entirely determined by the natural influences of environment and economic function, nor yet any is so advanced that it is not conditioned by these influences.

Nowhere is this idea of divine revelation so strongly expressed or so clearly identified with the tradition of culture as in the case of Israel. For here the whole social form and historical destiny of the people had been imposed on them by the Word of Yahveh, which was not merely, as in other cases, a sacred tradition of learning, but a way of life embodied in a moral law and a sacred history which set it apart from all the other peoples of the ancient world.

education has always meant the initiation of the young into the social and spiritual inheritance of the community: in other words, education has meant the transmission of culture.

L'Europa conseguì la leadership della cultura mondiale non mediante la ricchezza materiale, ma mediante la preminenza nelle cose dello spirito: nella scienza, nella letteratura e nelle idee. Essa creò gli ideali che il resto del mondo seguì. Se la democrazia moderna dovesse comportare la cessazione di questa missione e l'abbandono della leadership spirituale per l'appagamento materiale, allora ciò significherebbe proprio il declino della cultura occidentale.

The modern ideological world movements - the Enlightenment, Liberalism, Democracy and Socialism - are none of them comprehensible without a knowledge of the Christian culture which underlies them all.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it's a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.

'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.

The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me'.

I am here to change and make policy. The culture of LAPD versus the community and honest/good officers needs to and will change. I am here to correct and calibrate your morale compasses to true north.

Imperiul hun a fost, mai intai de toate, unul parazitar; succesul sau a constat in abilitatea de a imita cultura celor cuceriti, de a se folosi de bunurile lor si de a consuma hrana produsa de acestia.

Imperialist societies were governed by an essentially aggressive and militaristic attitude towards outside cultures, which they regarded as potential objects of conquest and economic gain. At their most extreme, they prohibited intermarriage with other cultures in order to preserve the "purity" of their own race.

Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.

In an individualistic culture, the narcissist is God's gift to the world. In a collectivist society, the narcissist is God's gift to the collective.

In a dying culture, narcissism appears to embody—in the guise of personal "growth" and "awareness"—the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment. The custodians of culture hope, at bottom, merely to survive its collapse.

It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.

Today it is the elites...those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate--that have lost faith in the values, or what remains of them, of the West.

The "old priestly office" having been "abolished," Mann and his allies aimed to revive it, in effect, by promoting the school at the expense of the press, the lyceum, and other agencies of popular education. By giving the school system exclusive control over education, Mann's reforms encouraged a division of cultural labor that would weaken the people's capacity to educate themselves.