Quotes About Culture

Moralistic culture views government as a positive force, one that values the individual but functions to the benefit of the general public. Discussion of public issues and voting are not only rights but also opportunities to better the individual and society alike. Furthermore, politicians should not profit from their public service.

Navajo heaven is not a solemn gray high refuse heap for humble failures.

If there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute.

No man receives the full culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and there is no condition of life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is the cheapest, and the most at hand, and most important to those conditions where coarse labor tends to give grossness to the mind.

Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.

All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores.

Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages is preserved into perpetuity by a nation's proverbs, fables, folk sayings and quotations.

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.

Chaldeans came from an undetermined part of East Arabia.

We are what we myth.

You southerners, he said. I've been here for fifteen years and I'll never understand you.

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.

Asked about China, he marvels at its economic transformation, but laments that too many Chinese "like to gamble, and they actually believe in luck. Now, that is stupid. What you don't want to believe in is luck. You want to believe in odds.

Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated. They are the Midwest's open

A wise traveler never despises his own country.

The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman is this: The one thinks everything right that is French, while the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.

The true barbarian is he who thinks every thing barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.

Not all intelligence can be artificial now, so if we make a mistake, the consequences are no longer simply located within an institution or a national culture.

The teacher of history's work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.

Dramatic conquests often lead to startling serendipities: the most momentous Muslim acquisition at Talas was not territory or silk, but a commodity at once prosaic and precious. Among the Chinese prisoners taken at Talas were papermakers, who soon spread their wondrous craft into the Islamic world, and then to Europe, changing forever human culture and the course of history.