Quotes About Culture

The most recent phase of the alternation between Occidentalism and primitivism has therefore concealed the essential thing, the universality of violence. A selective blindness in one of two forms has obscured the fact that all cultures, and all individuals without exception, participate in violence; that violence is what structures our collective sense of belonging and our personal identities.

The preference that cultures grant to themselves, in other words, must be perpetuated at any cost. This preference is inseparably bound up with the identity, the autonomy, the very existence of these cultures.

Les représentations théâtrales, elles aussi, sont enracinées dans la violence collective et ce sont des espèces de rites, mais plus nettoyés encore de leur violence que les sacrifices animaux, et plus riches sur le rapport culturel, puisque ce sont toujours, au moins indirectement, des méditations sur l'origine du religieux et de la culture tout entière, des sources potentielles de savoir.

Ka?de indywiduum przejawia tendencj? do czucia si? "bardziej innym" od wszystkich bli?nich i równocze?nie ka?da kultura przejawia tendencj? do my?lenia o sobie nie tylko jak o ró?nej od innych, lecz ponadto jak o maksymalnie ró?nej od innych, bowiem ka?da kultura podtrzymuje owo uczucie "inno?ci" w?ród pozostaj?cych w jej kr?gu jednostek.

Human culture is fundamentally and originally religious, rather than secondarily and supplementally.

Toujours et partout on peut résumer la situation initiale en termes d'une crise qui fait peser sur la communauté et son système culturel une menace de destruction totale. Cette crise est presque toujours résolue par la violence.

If the desire of children were not mimetic, if they did not of necessity choose for models the human beings who surround them, humanity would have neither language nor culture.

intellectual…and even religious.

The mimetic nature of desire accounts for the fragility of human relations. Our social sciences should give due consideration to a phenomenon that must be considered normal, but they persist in seeing conflict as something accidental, and consequently so unforeseeable that researchers cannot and must not take it into account in their study of culture.

Markus Müller, "Interview with René Girard," Anthropoetics 2, no. 1 (June 1996): 3–5. 2

Even in the most closed cultures men believe that they are free and open to the universal; their differential character makes the narrowest cultural fields seem inexhaustible from within. Anything that compromises this illusion terrifies us and stirs up the immemorial tendency to persecution.

So long as western people imagine that there only exists a single type of humanity, that there is only one 'civilization', at different stages of development, no mutual understanding will be possible.

Il y a là une différence qui est un peu du même genre que celle que nous avons signalée, pour la Chine, entre la langue écrite et la langue parlée : l'arabe littéral seul peut présenter toute la fixité qui est requise pour remplir le rôle de langue traditionnelle tandis que l'arabe vulgaire, comme toute autre langue servant à l'usage courant, subit naturellement certaines variations suivant les époques et suivant les régions.

les Péruviens n'ont jamais eu aucun autre procédé d'écriture, alors qu'ils possédaient une langue très parfaite et très raffinée ; cette sorte d'idéographie était rendue possible par de multiples combinaisons dans lesquelles l'emploi de fils de couleurs différentes joue un rôle important.

Dans la numération chinoise, la croix représente le nombre 10 (le chiffre romain X n'est d'ailleurs, lui aussi, que la croix autrement disposée)

There is a growing sentiment in America today that animals, too, have rights and that we collectively should afford them, at the very least, more respect and consideration as the sentient, autonomous beings they clearly are. Of course, this flies in the face of Western civilization's stated assumption of man's dominion over the beasts. The way we resolve this conflict in our culture, or fail to, has much to do with who we are, who we will become, and the legacy we leave for generations to come.

While there were some friends who could feel the enormity of my loss and offered tremendous compassion, the world in general has little patience or empathy for loss of an animal companion. Many people were unable to fathom the level of my grief because they could not fathom that level of connection with an animal. To me this is yet another reflection of the alienation from the animal world that our culture feels.

Diversity enriches the soul. It is at the very essence of the life experience."

I think replacement is an esential gesture, a change of charachter, an exchange of charachter essential to our civilization, and replacement is ofcourse also the introduction of falsity in objects and also in ideas of men, replacement is the introduction of falsity, of imitation, of copying, and the social expression of global replacism is mass negationism.

It is most significant i think, that the word discrimination which for ages has been the very name of excellence, is now a bad thing, discrimination which used to be the supreme virtue, has now become the supreme crime, one should not discriminate, ofcourse i personaly think with all the past centuries of western culture that on should always discriminate.

Comme si pendant le temps de notre vie, et moins encore, la France était en train de changer de peuple : on en voit un, on fait la sieste, c'en est un autre, ou plusieurs autres, et qui paraissent appartenir à d'autres rivages, à d'autres ciels, d'autres architectures, d'autres mœurs — c'est ce qu'ils semblent penser eux aussi.

People will travel anywhere for good food - it's crazy.

If only traveling were about showing off your language skills, if only it did not also demand a certain commitment of body communication, of outright singing or dancing--I think I would be absolutely global by now.

To pronounce French properly you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred of the Anglo-Saxon prejudices.