Quotes About Culture

It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

We need to get over our reluctance to speak openly about the good we do. Silent giving will not change a culture that deems it sensible to spend all your money on yourself and your family, rather than to help those in greater need—even though helping others is likely to bring more fulfillment in the long run.

To learn how to read any map is to be indoctrinated into that mapmaker's culture.

Cultural traits, however, are a more general category than memes, because they also include quantitative (smoothly-varying) characteristics that cannot be easily represented as discrete alternatives: for example, the inclination to trust strangers. (More on that below.)

In fact, the most important influence predicting a person's level of generalized trust is the attitude of his parents.84 And that would make generalized trust a culturally transmitted trait. Lorenzo

Nearly our entire intellectual education originates from the Greeks. A thorough knowledge of their origin is the indisputable prerequisite for freeing ourselves from their overwhelming influence.

Rock and roll is the hamburger that ate the world.

Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, William Shakespeare, and Michelangelo Buonarroti stand together at the peak of Western culture.

All things being equal, contend Logan and his colleagues, a stage 5 culture will outperform a stage 4 culture, which will outperform a 3, and so on. In addition, the rules change when you move from one culture to another. That's why the so-called universal principles that appear in most leadership textbooks rarely hold up. In order to shift a culture from one stage to the next, you need to find the levers that are appropriate for that particular stage in the group's development.

I was also moved by William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, which not only helped me put my childhood experience in perspective but also showed me how my search to find a new, more authentic spiritual identity fit within the vast landscape of American culture.

NBA is not exactly the friendliest environment for teaching selflessness. Even though the game itself is a five-person sport, the culture surrounding it celebrates egoistic behavior and stresses individual achievement over team bonding.

most of the world is bubbling with religious passions."1

Phil Zuckerman, "Is Faith Good for Us?" Free Inquiry 26, 5 (2006): 35–38; Gregory S. Paul, "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies," Journal of Religion and Society 7, 1 (2005):

The Yirkalla aborigines of Arnhem Land in Australia hear sacred song words in the babbling of babies. To them, songs are never composed but only discovered: all songs exist already.

A port city relies on its relationship to elsewhere.

It was doubtful that their technology, and its intelligent use, would ever match their ability to create social stupidities.

We live in a society where detachment is almost essential.

Madness, he thought. The ultimate horror for our para­noid culture: vicious unseen mechanical entities that flit at the edges of our vision, that can go anywhere, that are in our very midst.

This is most authentic of dying old U.S. culture, a rare retained artifact carrying flavor of bygone halcyon day.

You cook the native foods to perfection, Robert Childan thought. What they say is true: your powers of imitation are immense. Apple pie, Coca-Cola, stroll after the movie, Glenn Miller...you could paste together out of tin and rice paper a completely artificial America. Rice-paper Mom in the kitchen, rice-paper Dad reading the newspaper. Rice-paper put at his feet. Everything.

And yet now and then he let himself steal a glance at her. Lovely dark colors of her skin, hair, and eyes. We are half-baked compared to them. Allowed out of the kiln before we were fully done. The old aboriginal myth; the truth, there.

It looks," Lotze said, gazing down, "as if it was designed by a Jew.

lived on the Coast, in San Francisco. They have the skin thing there, too.

Parsifal is one of those corkscrew artifacts of culture in which you get the subjective sense that you've learned something from it, something valuable or even priceless; but on closer inspection you suddenly begin to scratch your head and say, 'Wait a minute. This makes no sense