Quotes About Culture

The British are civilized. People still read and some conversations can be interesting. By contrast American are fat and stupid and so thoroughly brain-blurred and over-sold by our culture that there's a numbing, unapologetic, arrogance and desperation about us. In fact, I've just defined the perfect consumer.

Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torey proposed that psychotherapy is little more than a culturally specific healing ritual, similar to that of folk healers in primitive cultures.

After more than two decades here, I know that kindness is not a value that's encouraged. It's often seen as a weakness. Instead, the culture encourages keeping your head down, minding your own business, and never letting yourself be vulnerable.

France Talk and Frogs' Legs

be that children would explore, learn, and become part of their world. But now they just snap digital pictures of each other, Facebook their friends

Cats were considered valuable in ancient Egypt, and they appear in ancient art showing that they were important.

You cling to culture like an orphan drags her rag doll from foster home to foster home. It is your last soiled reminder of what you think you were. You'd rather die at the stake than adapt or evolve because change is scary. So you guard the same tired shit as if it's a precious, sacrosanct relic from the holy crusades of your ancestors when, in fact, it is a withered turn wrapped in butcher paper.

Los Angeles, you've got to be more than the sum of your hats.

Just because it is recorded in the Bible does not mean God agrees with it, nor did he create it. Instead, we see God working within the culture with the institutions and social patterns humans established, transforming them, but not approving of them.

We believe the Bible was written for us, that it's for everyone of all times and places because it's God's Word. But it wasn't written to us. It wasn't written in our language, it wasn't written with our culture in mind or our culture in view. —DR. JOHN WALTON, PROFESSOR, AUTHOR1

boys suffer deeply as a result of the destructive emotional training our culture imposes upon them, that many of them are in crisis, and that all of them need help.

Any place with a founder who brings a teddy bear to meetings," he writes, "is a step away from Jonestown.

I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

It is important not to confuse "patriotism" with "nationalism." As I define it, nationalism is a monologue in which you place your country in a position of moral and cultural supremacy over others. Patriotism, while deeply personal, is a dialogue with your fellow citizens, and a larger world, about not only what you love about your country but also how it can be improved.

I]nclusion, not assimilation, should be the key concept in seeking, ever seeking, a more perfect national union. Our own history has shown that we are stronger as a mosaic than a melting pot. Our nation is bound together more by ideals than by blood or land, and inclusion is in our cultural DNA. We should feel proud that we are not all the same, and that we can share our differences under the common umbrella of humanity.

But when you look at the demographic trends of the United States, Alaska is more a throwback to the past, and Hawaii a glimpse of the future.

We now understand that the great American story is not confined to history books or political speeches. It is sung, and danced, and dramatized, and turned into verse. It is painted, and sculpted, and written, and filmed. Artists may not swear an oath to serve in government or the military, but they swear an oath to freedom of expression that is no less worthy of recognition, especially in a democracy such as ours.

Our own history has shown that we are stronger as a mosaic than a melting pot.

books were not only important, they were also objects of beauty.

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy . . . in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, [and] Musick.

It is important not to confuse "patriotism" with "nationalism.

And I saw how thoroughly these families embraced their American identity—they were patriots, just like the people with whom I had grown up. But they also understood that they were from another continent. This is one of the greatest lessons of our nation's improbable makeup: A united citizenry can be quilted together from so many different cultural fabrics.

Back in 1980, the science-fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote, "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.