Quotes About Culture

Exactly. What about Rhodesia, and Barbados, and India? We can't be expected to ask the natives' permission before we civilize them.

People said that bathing was bad for your health, and Edgar never bathed in winter, but those who never bathed at all stank all their lives. Ma and Pa had taught their sons to keep themselves fresh by bathing at least once a year.

The way I remember it the tribe got paid some huge amount. That's what they said to him. He said, What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for the way a man is? They didn't understand.

Rany, nawet chinscy komunisci niejednego by sie mogli od siostry nauczyc!

We are the culture. All those people that are doing those dumb TV things and promoting hate…that's the 'counter'culture.

Students were expected to learn hundreds of lines from the Greek and Roman classics, then, later, from poetry in their native tongues. This tradition has faded from our lives, and something powerful has been lost.

To know some Shakespeare gives you a head start in life.

The culture was constantly telling us one thing, and the realities of society were consistently failing to deliver it—the culture was lying. This was a deep and serious legitimation crisis: a culture that is consistently lying to its members simply cannot move forward for long.

There is a phrase for this that has become quite common: "I'm spiritual but not religious." Polls show that some 20 percent of Americans identify overall with that phrase. And some polls have shown that, in the younger generation—those between eighteen and twenty-nine—this percentage explodes to an astonishing 75 percent!2 In other words, three out of four young individuals have a deep spiritual yearning that no existing religion is addressing.

The mythic god is the god of a particular peoples—it is sociocentric and ethnocentric, not postconventional and worldcentric

The worldview of fulcrum-4 is still mythological, and so care and concern are extended to believers in the same mythology, the same ideology, the same race, the same creed, the same culture—but no further. If you are a member of the myth, you are my brother, my sister. If not, you go to hell.

In the United States, for example, almost 60 percent of the population today is "churched"—hence likely at a Mythic or lower level (correlatively, Robert Kegan, in In Over Our Heads, estimates that 3 out of 5 Americans, 60 percent, are at Mythic or lower)—whereas in northern Europe, only 11 percent are churched. But the leading edge, in any event, and the mainstream cultural background philosophy, is Rational/Pluralistic, and NO GOD is its credo.

In observing the Sabbath, man was culturally structuring his time in accordance with a holy pattern. This was part of his cultural commision, along with the task of being an architect of space by tending the Garden. Space and time were thus consecrated by man's original culture.

Until our bodies are made new, like the body Jesus now enjoys, our calling is not to escape fleshly existence, nor to sanctify culture (since it is common, shared by believer and unbeliever, and cannot be made holy), but to so influence our culture as to make it more consistent with the created nature of man, and to sanctify our own lives, because we are also living in the Spirit , with our minds set on things that are above.

As I have said, it may be difficult to define civilization, but it isn't so difficult to recognize barbarism.

To me, there's two kinds of music these days. There's ephemeral music, and there's music that has lasting power and depth.

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

The Hindus have cultivated the power of analysis and abstraction. No nation has yet produced a grammar like that of Panini.

Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they've had forever. And they've been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.

The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water.

Reggae music is not an easy music to like when it comes to the power in society. 'Cause it talks about changing society. You won't find it readily accepted.

Social intercourse -- a very limited thing in a half civilized country, becomes in our centers of civilization a great power. . .

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

Representation, then, is not - nor can it be - neutral; it is an act - indeed the founding act - of power in our culture.