Quotes About Culture

The psychological cement of this system was a culture of subordination which modern historians call deference.

Alexander Hamilton, a native West Indian, naturalized New Yorker and extreme nationalist who had no roots in any regional culture.

It is poppycock to think that it is necessary to resort to laws to make America greater by banning comic books... This is a matter for the home, the school, the church, and other family influences - not the legislatures.

One reason that Americans as a people became nostalgic about the fifties more than twenty-five years later was not so much that life was better in the fifties (though in some ways it was), but because at the time it had been portrayed so idyllically on television.

Baseball was rooted not just in the past but in the culture of the country; it was celebrated in the nation's literature and songs. When a poor American boy dreamed of escaping his grim life, his fantasy probably involved becoming a professional baseball player. It was not so much the national sport as the binding national myth.

He was not what gentlemen usually thought a gentleman was.

It was the kind of country that made you feel better about yourself.

particular rootlessness of the society had always lent itself to powerful extremes of both the left and the right, there was, in the volatility and evanescence of the culture an atmosphere ripe for extremism, each side with its own Utopian dreams, each side driving the other to a more polarized position.

Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.

the fact that different cultures have different practices no more refutes [moral] objectivism than the fact that water flows in different directions in different places refutes the law of gravity

Here then we are first to consider a book, presented to us by a barbarous and ignorant people, written in an age when they were still more barbarous, and in all probability long after the facts which it relates, corroborated by no concurring testimony, and resembling those fabulous accounts, which every nation gives of its origin.

The two men spoke in German, although von Hessen, who had spent years living in Italy, could also speak Italian

The child was born in the Arab world, and in that sense, Roger and Alice had gone into the land itself, been penetrated by it, bled into its veins (p. 349).

Periodic revivals of Plato's and Aristotle's ideas made a great impact on the church and pagan societies in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and on much of today's culture. These ideas have been mass marketed. Many have eaten of these men's fruit, not realizing the roots of what they were taught. The ideas of these men have insidiously clouded the clear understanding of the Bible for many, setting us up to view women as an inferior, subordinate "other".

Christianity can endure, not by surrendering itself to the modern mind and modern culture, but rather by a break with it: the condition of a long future both for culture and the soul is the Christianity which antagonizes culture without denying its place."77

Robbie Robertson of the Band said he always knew when they were playing in the south, because that's where everybody claps on the backbeat. Exactly.

In October, 1819—six months before the first Christian missionaries arrived on the islands—Liholiho, under the inspiration of Kaahumanu, one of the widows of his father, suddenly, and in the presence of a large concourse of horrified natives, broke the most sacred of the tabus of his religion by partaking of food from vessels from which women were feasting, and the same day decreed the destruction of every temple and idol in the kingdom.

In Conservatory of Death we see modern culture tired and kicking at the end of a rope. It is perhaps the first "deathpunk" novel.

Carmack wasn't worried that there was suddenly going to be some secret link exposed between games and murder; disturbed people are disturbed people, pure and simple.

320 pounds of gamer meat

In the United States, however, we have lost the thread of logic in the stories that we tell.

Pierce is referring to the collapse of collective narrative, which is what we are experiencing as a culture: left and right relying on their own news sources, Raw Story and the Daily Caller, MSNBC and Fox News. Not only that, but even the factions are factionalized, and have been since at least the 1960s. Purity, the rabid fervor of the true believer (the same for all extremists, left and right), versus pragmatism, competence.

How come all lunatics and murderers are religious these days?

if you operate in an unhealthy culture you risk becoming just as unhealthy yourself and – who knows – perhaps it is the will to please that leads people to crime just as often as evil or greed.