Quotes About Culture

Fernandez-Armesto, F. (2007). The world: A history. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

From the beginning most of history was a story of divergence: humans' biological and cultural differentiation as they evolved and dispersed across the planet. For the past millennium, history has been dominated by convergent forces, of which globalization is the latest phase. During this era that I call the Great Convergence, human interaction, trade, and intercommunication have increased at a rapid rate.

shareholders will only fund the significant investments companies must make in R&D, process improvement, and culture if they see adequate short-term returns on their investments. It's incumbent on leaders to pursue growth and deliver quarterly results.

While Keith Taylor, then, might dismiss questions of "whether Vietnam 'belongs' to Southeast Asia or [North] East Asia" as "probably the least enlightening in Vietnamese studies," it could equally be argued that it is precisely Vietnam's historical, geographical, and cultural location at the frontier of different, identifiable, and historically sedimented cultural formations that makes its situation so distinctive and interesting.

You know, those unboxing videos you see everywhere on YouTube. They are the epitome of consumerist fetishism.

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.

She and Naomi had joked about the sexuality of camera apertures, that they needed to write a woman's monograph on the symbolism and cultural relevance of the mechanics of image-making as it related to sex, so that, for example, stopping down the fixed 35mm lens's diaphragm – elegantly composed of nine shutter-leaf blades – to a tight f/16 would be the equivalent of a Kegel pelvic floor exercise.

Japanese medical people are traditionally very strange and creepily poetic.

It always amused me to observe the pathetically desperate hunger expressed in popular culture for life forms on other planets, when under the feet of these seekers of aliens, and roundly ignored by them, were the most exotic, grotesque, and fabulous life forms imaginable

Imagine, I said, what could happen if English continues to grow as it has. Maybe one day it will be the only language left to learn. If that happens, I concluded, it will be the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known.

Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts - in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been.

the gregarious intimacy, rare in a town of this size, the vivacious gossip, the cultural fizz, the wit and repartee at every social level . . .

For the French, talent excuses much, genius excuses all, and prudishness is inexcusable.

This, I think, is how political poison infects a whole culture—it enters the bloodstream through the cuts and bruises of personal disappointment and feeds on hearts wounded by feelings of inadequacy or rejection.

In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.

Evangelicals now stand among those who are on easiest terms with the world, for they have lost their capacity for dissent.

Our world is being shaken to its very foundations. Instead of offering great thoughts about God, the meaning of reality, and the gospel, there are evangelical churches that are offering only little therapeutic nostrums that are sweet but mostly worthless. One even wonders whether some current churchgoers might even be resistant were they to encounter a Christianity that is deep, costly, and demanding.

The experience of living in this modernized world has, indeed, shaken many of the assumptions upon which belief rests. It does so most often in indirect ways. It is more the psychology of our times that undermines Christian belief than it is, say, the arguments against it mounted by the new atheists

Without going into detail, after many years I have become convinced that the biblical references to same-sex behavior were written in a situational and cultural context that does not apply to people with a homosexual orientation, and that the Bible does not give specific instruction regarding how homosexuals should live.

Every civilisation has had its irrational but reassuring myth. Previous civilisations have used their culture to sing about it and tell stories about it. Ours has used its mathematics to prove it.

C]ameras, in the right hands-or at least in more and more hands of average citizens-may help create a culture in which the previously powerless have the welcome recourse of evidence against the culpable.

But to see the ovens into which humans were fed was enough to implicate the high culture of Europe; its value was drawn into question once it was suspected that such a culture had culminated in Dachau and Auschwitz. (Page 451)

Women preach all over the world as foreign missionaries, and it doesn't offend—it

Across the Atlantic, there beckons a third ideal, bigger than either: "Europe." For reasons of history, geography, and culture, no plausible supranationalism exists on this side of the ocean. If Americans do not identify as Americans, they will identify more narrowly and acrimoniously, not more universally and humanely.