Quotes About Cultural shift

I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

The sound of the in-crowd was no longer folk or jazz but the bouncing rhythms of rock and roll

Just in our lifetime our society has become looser and more private, it becomes extremely difficult to hold to any permanent commitment whatever, least of all to organized religion.

We seem to be moving as a society from a group of expert readers with uniquely personal, internal platforms of background knowledge to a group of expert readers who are increasingly dependent on similar, external servers of knowledge. I want to understand the consequences and costs of losing these uniquely formed internal sources of knowledge without losing sight of the extraordinary gifts of the abundant information now at our fingertips.

The Old English names began to die out: out went Ethelbert, Aelfric, Athelstan, Dunstan, Wulfstan, Wulfric; in came Richard, Robert, Simon, Stephen, John, and most popular and sycophantic (or was it politic?) of all, William.

In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.

The American system of education, in its incipiency, and for a long while, was one founded on Bible-teaching and religious exercises. The present system is un-American, anti-American.

Back then the population was 83% white; today the exact opposite is true.

Belief change comes from a combination of personal psychological readiness and a deeper social and cultural shift in the underlying zeitgeist, which is affected in part by education but is more the product of larger and harder-to-define political, economic, religious, and social changes.

He was postliterate—total television.

The fact that Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox's angry common man was another sign that we were living in an upside-down world.

Meanwhile, new ideas crept like a damp stain into the very fabric of Tang culture, casting a shadow across the world of the old aristocratic clans that had survived.

Ce n'était plus Nirvana, mais Radiohead.

glorify and justify goals in terms of tangible experience. According to Sorokin, sensate culture predominated in Europe from about 440 to about 200 B.C., with a peak between 420 and 400 B.C.; it has become dominant once again in the past century or so, at least in the advanced capitalist democracies.

Our generation has learned to hold to the standard of each other instead of the standard of God. That is the travesty: God is no longer the standard; we are.

It's probably not coincidental that corsets passed from the world at the same time as "fainting couches.") But it wasn't health concerns that killed the corset; it was World War I. The need for metal for ammunition led the US War Industries Board in 1917 to urge women to stop buying corsets. Serendipitously, the very first modern bra had been patented only three years earlier, by debutante Caresse Crosby.

We have learned that "politics is downstream from culture, not the other way around," says Bill Wichterman, policy advisor to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. "Real change has to start with the culture. All we can do on Capitol Hill is try to find ways government can nurture healthy cultural trends.

First I would probably place men at the bottom of the food chain. On a grander scale, I would say they're reacting to change. Feminism has got to be part of that.

television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing; that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase "serious television" is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice—the voice of entertainment

Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.

They delude themselves who believe that television and print coexist, for coexistence implies parity. There is no parity here. Print is now merely a residual epistemology, and it will remain so, aided to some extent by the computer, and newspapers and magazines that are made to look like television screens.

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.

The clock played a crucial role in propelling us out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment.