Quotes About Culture

Modern societies march towards morality in proportion as they leave religion behind.

The Swiss are the only nation to make the Germans appear inefficient, the French undiplomatic and the Texans poor.

Slowly but surely, we are acquiring that famous culture of democracy, which is our objective.

As the psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, "Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm ('That's the way it's done') into an explicit observation ('That's what our tribe happens to do now')." This is the point that Herodotus was making when he told the story of the Greeks and the Indians.

Based on the ideas of the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, this is the view that language doesn't just change minds by transferring thoughts from one head to another; it configures how people make sense of the world, including about space, time, and causality.

Steven Pinker has argued that just as a high level of self-control benefits individuals, cultural values that prize self-control are good for a society. Europe, he writes, witnessed a thirtyfold drop in its homicide rate between the medieval and modern periods, and this, he argues, had much to do with the change from a culture of honor to a culture of dignity, which prizes restraint.

Once again, none of this is to deny the importance of traits such as compassion and kindness. We want to nurture these traits in our children and work to establish a culture that prizes and rewards them. But they are not enough. To make the world a better place, we would also want to bless people with more smarts and more self-control. These are central to leading a successful and happy life—and a good and moral one.

The "business as usual" agency has a board made up of white, middle-aged or older males working with a "from us to them" attitude. The "business as usual" church supports crosscultural missionaries, but these folks are all the same culture and ethnicity of the majority of the members of the church.

When an American comes, he or she is often assumed by Africans to be credible and authoritative. This is part of the advantage Mutebe warns against losing.

On a teaching assignment of a one-week module in Nigeria, I asked my class to evaluate the class experience. One of the pastors responded, "You have come to us, stayed with us and eaten our food." He made no mention of my teaching! Instead, he saw me as part of the family.

Oscar described the idea of partnership from a more relational culture's perspective: "For us in Africa, we think from a family paradigm. When we come together in partnership, it's a partnership based on relationships (not tasks), and we stay partners for life.

We met Bautista several years ago. His amazing testimony of conversion to Christ, after being the shaman for a village of Yanomamo people in southern Venezuela, graphically taught us about the reality of spiritual warfare in the world.20

though the Western world has dominated Christianity for much of Christian history, Christianity is now primarily a nonwhite, non-Western, nonwealthy religion.

1.Does the church in America have a prophetic role in its own society, or does it simply mimic the culture and entertain its members?

A]nother important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.

The single greatest cultural contribution of postmodernity is that it eliminates the presumption of intellectual neutrality that modernity automatically associated with skeptical rationalism. (...) It shows, not that truth is socially constructed, but that the uniquely human act of bearing witness to the truth is always a moral as well as an intellectual or empirical or noetic act.

The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. We must not, however, be satisfied with retaining the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors.

that Chaldea was the original home of these stories and that the Jews received them originally from the Babylonians

There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

I am not sure the language I write in is spoken here, or anywhere.

the real is actually the intersubjective meaning arrived at by a community in semiosis. One

Most conduct is guided by norms rather than by laws. Norms are voluntary and are effective because they are enforced by peer pressure.

Not all developing countries are the same.

A refusal to countenance racially based differences in behavior is a manifestation of human decency. A refusal to countenance culturally based differences in behavior would be a manifestation of blinkered denial of the obvious.