Quotes About Culture

Joseph Ratzinger commented that the opening line of the Nicene Creed, Credo in unum Deum (I believe in one God), is a subversive statement because it automatically rules out any rival claimant to ultimate concern. To say that one accepts only the God of Israel and Jesus Christ is to say that one rejects as ultimate any human being, any culture, any political party, any artistic form, or any set of ideas.

if we really want to change the current course of our culture and challenge its guiding ideas, then we need to start with the author of that culture. That means examining man himself.

love the life of the mind, and I've spent my whole life studying and reading. Yet because of where we are now, the 'true' and the 'good' are offensive in a culture that is so radically subjective and relativist, and the minute you say, 'Hey, I've got the truth for you,' every defense goes up, and even more if you say, 'I've got what's good for you.

The liturgical person discovers who he is in the context of a community that listens to and explains the Bible and acts in accord with it. In this, he stands opposed to those whose identity is shaped by the heroes, ideals, and norms of the environing secular culture and to those whose sense of self is formed by the texts and practices of other religions.

result, he's firmly persuaded that the Catholic Church must always speak its truths to the surrounding culture, without adjusting those teachings to make them more palatable.

That's the way with civilized men. When they can't explain something by their half-baked science, they refuse to believe it.

What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie?

Civilizirani ljudi neugodniji su od divljaka zato Å¡to znaju da mogu biti nepristojni, a da im zbog toga netko ne raspolovi glavu.

los hombres civilizados son más descorteses que los salvajes, pues saben que por lo general pueden ser maleducados sin que nadie les abra la cabeza. Se

By Crom, though I've spend considerable time among you civilized peoples, your ways are still beyond my comprehension

As the increasing number of Americans attempting to do business in China are discovering, the Chinese may move, but not in direct response to demands or on someone else's timetable. In the twenty-first century, China will be a formidable and staunchly independent force.

The trouble with me is, I belong to a vanishing race. I'm one of the intellectuals.

Most important for our purposes here is that the [Jewish] obsession with learning and cultivating the intellect had no precise parallel in Christian Europe in the early medieval period.

Durante casi un milenio, Bagdad fue la capital cultural del mundo árabe, la población más cultivada de Oriente Próximo. El nieto de Gengis Jan incendió la ciudad en el siglo XIII y, según se decía, el Tigris fluyó negro a causa de la tinta de los

When I arrived in Beirut from Europe, I felt the oppressive, damp heat, saw the unkempt palm trees and smelt the Arabic coffee, the fruit stalls and the over-spiced meat. It was the beginning of the Orient. And when I flew back to Beirut from Iran, I could pick up the British papers, ask for a gin and tonic at any bar, choose a French, Italian, or German restaurant for dinner. It was the beginning of the West. All things to all people, the Lebanese rarely questioned their own identity.

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.

Because humanity is part of nature, it should be no surprise that people act consistently with natural law. But for most of us, this is a new idea. In our culture we have been taught to ignore our relationship to nature, to treat nature simply as the stage or background that we use, adopt, tolerate, or oppose, as the case may be.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Theology is a superstition—Humanity a religion.

Superstition is the child of ignorance and fear.

Religion has not civilized man - man has civilized religion. God improves as man advances.

A religion that does not command the respect of the greatest minds will, in a little while, excite the mockery of all.

the Bible is a book written by ignorance—at the instigation of fear.