Quotes About Culture

We live in a culture that celebrates activity. We collapse our sense of who we are into what we do for a living. The public performance of busyness is how we demonstrate to one another that we are important. The more people see us as tired, exhausted, over-stretched, the more they think we must be somehow … indispensable. That we matter.

Denial of death runs rampant through our culture, leaving us woefully unprepared when it is our time to die, or our time to help others die. We often aren't available for those who need us, paralyzed as we are by anxiety and resistance—nor are we available for ourselves.

an interesting situation has occurred in the Dominican Republic, where enough intersexed people lived in several villages to have produced a special social category, the guevedoche.

A willingness to lose one's self in a story was the first step to learning compassion, to appreciating other cultures, to realizing what possibilities the world held for people who kept at life despite the odds.

a concert at Albert Hall, immortalized by the Beatles in their Sergeant Pepper album.

You've been the rabbi here for thirty years and these guys who've never set foot here want to decide who should be rabbi or not. And to lead prayer in Hebrew for Jews who speak Arabic, they want you to write in French. So I say they're nuts.

Civilization must be preserved,' says he. 'Civilization's doing fine,' I said. 'We just don't happen to be where it is.

Shit," Clutch said after a few minutes. "The high-def has totally ruined porn. Are those ingrown hairs?

I started my career in journalism and researched outlaw motorcycle club culture extensively for my stories. This included talking to people in club life, many of whom answered questions for me throughout the writing process. The Reaper's Legacy manuscript was reviewed and corrected by a woman attached to an outlaw MC.

Whether you think a film will affect society or it's plain entertainment, it's all excellent, it's all noble.

I loved hip-hop. The first stuff I heard was Public Enemy, and I couldn't believe it. It was amazing, and I've always loved hip-hop.

Harassers were often accepted, or even cheered, as mischievous bad boys.

I could never leave,' Pine Sap said. 'Why?' she asked. Pine Sap shrugged, and gestured in the direction of the village. 'Because I think people must be the same everywhere. Only these people are my bones.

Because I think people must be the same everywhere. Only these people are in my bones.

Because I think people must be the same everywhere. Only these people are my bones.

I've always had this idea that I wanted movies to make people better not worse.

Ése es el grave problema de esta sociedad: está llena de deseos de consumir y de aparentar, pero hay muy pocas ganas de ser.

It's one of the perks of aging, I suppose—an eagerness to release the baggage that doesn't serve you. I know this goes against common wisdom; our therapy-obsessed culture seems to think old wounds must be reopened before they can heal. I'm not sure I agree.

Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.

Our culture has beheld with suspicion unproductive time, things not utilitarian, and daydreaming in general, but we live in a time when it is especially challenging to articulate the importance of experiences that don't produce anything obvious, aren't easily quantifiable, resist measurement, aren't easily named, are categorically in-between

One task is to identify what for some time I have referred to as the "epistemic politics" that often sever colonial pasts from their contemporary translations

see the interview done by Valentine Daniel for Public Culture (24, no. 3 [Fall 2012]: 487–508).

Heroin is a stand-in, a stop-gap, a mask, for what we believe is missing. Like the "objects" seen by Plato's man in a cave, dope is the shadow cast by cultural movements we can't see directly.

None of us is so mature that we cannot be influenced. The question is: Who or what do we want to shape our lives? Even the culture around us will try to 'disciple' us if we have not placed ourselves under the transforming influence of Jesus Christ.