Culture Quotes

“خفقة قلبك لامرأة,أو صداقتك لرجل,أو قراءتك لكتاب هى أسفار حقيقية و ميلاد جديد لك,و تاريخ جديد لحياتك.”
― مصطفى محمود, يوميات نص الليل

“To me, the best zombie movies aren’t the splatter fests of gore and violence with goofy characters and tongue in cheek antics. Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society… and our society’s station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too… but there’s always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness.”
― Robert Kirkman, Days Gone Bye

“
Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture? ”
― David Bohm

“What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

“Understanding languages and other cultures builds bridges. It is the fastest way to bring the world closer together and to Truth. Through understanding, people will be able to see their similarities before differences.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.”
― Clifford Geertz

“The only interesting ideas are heresies.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.”
― David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?

“One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway… We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking… The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.”
― Richard Rohr

“Never having experienced inequality, therefore, the majority of straight white men will be absolutely oblivious to their own advantages – not because they must necessarily be insensitive, sexist, racist, homophobic or unaware of the principles of equality; but because they have been told, over and over again, that there is no inequality left for them – or anyone else – to experience – and everything they have experienced up to that point will only have proved them right.

Let the impact of that sink in for a moment.

By teaching children and teenagers that equality already exists, we are actively blinding the group that most benefits from inequality – straight white men – to the prospect that it doesn’t. Privilege to them feels indistinguishable from equality, because they’ve been raised to believe that this is how the world behaves for everyone. And because the majority of our popular culture is straight-white-male-dominated, stories that should be windows into empathy for other, less privileged experiences have instead become mirrors, reflecting back at them the one thing they already know: that their lives both are important and free from discrimination.

And this hurts men. It hurts them by making them unconsciously perpetrate biases they’ve been actively taught to despise. It hurts them by making them complicit in the distress of others. It hurts them by shoehorning them into a restrictive definition masculinity from which any and all deviation is harshly punished. It hurts them by saying they will always be inferior parents and caregivers, that they must always be active and aggressive even when they long for passivity and quietude, that they must enjoy certain things like sports and beer and cars or else be deemed morally suspect. It hurts them through a process of indoctrination so subtle and pervasive that they never even knew it was happening , and when you’ve been raised to hate inequality, discovering that you’ve actually been its primary beneficiary is horrifying – like learning that the family fortune comes from blood money.

Blog post 4/12/2012: Why Teaching Equality Hurts Men”
― Foz Meadows

“Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives."

[Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]”
― Anna Quindlen

“Beauty" and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be "beautiful" to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both "beautiful" and "sexual" constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“Righteous, I like that. Kinda fitting when you think about it. If we danced and shared music, we'd be too busy en-joy-in' life to start a war.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“الثقافة فى رأى مفكرنا زكى نجيب محمود ممارسة وليست تنظيراً ،فنحن نعيش ثقافتنا فى كل تفصيلات حياتنا مثل الميلاد والموت والزواج وطريقة إكرام الضيف ..إلخ , يحدث ذلك حين تكون الثقافة منسابة فى عروق الناس مع دمائهم، فتصبح حياتهم هى ثقافتهم وثقافتهم هى حياتهم”
― خالد منتصر, فوبيا العلم

“If you really want to change a culture to empower women improve basic hygiene and health care and fight high rates of infant mortality the answer is to educate girls.”
― Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time

“Give a poet a pen”
― A. Jarrell Hayes

“I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“...What does the blessing of heaven mean? We know the kirin is just an animal, not a mythical creature."
It has become a symbol now.... That is the way human beings deal with the world.”
― Lian Hearn, The Harsh Cry of the Heron

“Dans notre longue histoire, la guerre et la diplomatie se sont révélées insuffisantes pour créer la paix sur notre planète. Il est maintenant temps de rechercher des alternatives et il ne fait aucun doute qu'une langue mondiale et une culture commune peuvent jouer un rôle essentiel dans la construction d'un monde pacifique qui peut nous réunir tous.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Don't let the culture influence your message, let your message influence the culture.”
― Mike Huckabee

“Western culture prefers us not to believe we're defined or limited. It wants us to buy the fiction that the self is open, free, nothing but pure, bright possibility; that we're all born with the same suite of potential abilities, as neural 'blank slates', as if all human brains come off the production line at Foxconn. This seduces us into accepting the cultural lie that says we can do anything we set our minds to, that we can be whoever we want to be. This false idea is of immense value to our neoliberal economy. The game it compels us to play can best be justified morally if all the contestants start out with an equal shot at winning. Moreover, if we believe we're all the same, this legitimizes calls for deregulated corporation and smaller government: it means that men and women who lose simply didn't want it badly enough, that they just didn't believe - in which case, why should anyone else catch their fall?”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

“Gay diversity is like the Village People. You can all wear different stupid outfits as long as you sing the same stupid song.”
― Jack Malebranche

“What makes a civilization real to its inhabitants, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at it centre, nor even the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, learned by its students and recollected in times of tribulation.”
― Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest

“Well, we are still the created, no matter how dark we’ve become. We are no more trespassers than the jaguar that had been trailing us. We all belong, because we all live, as simple as that.”
― Marie Montine, Mourning Grey: Part Two

“I would say that introverts make some of the best international philosophers. The less common attribute of the introverted lifestyle - a close societal connection, as such a connection disappears or changes in relevance as the currents of the winds change - leaves too much room for one's own cultural bias. Instead, introverts tend to turn inward, the laboratory of being and all its forms. This is the most accurate study of the individual human being, which is in turn, rather than those affected by cultural limitations, the most universal reflection of human understanding and human behavior.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The dominant myth of the day seemed to be that anybody could do anything, even go to the moon. You could do whatever you wanted -in the ads and in the articles, ignore your limitations, defy them. If you were an indecisive person, you could become a leader and wear lederhosen. If you were a housewife, you could become a glamour girl with rhinestone sunglasses. Are you slow witted? No worries -you can be an intellectual genius. If you're old, you can be young. Anything was possible. It was almost like a war against the self.”
― Bob Dylan

“Culture was actually humanity’s attempt to extend the womb.”
― Christopher Dawson

“If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing. When panic on one side is creating alarm on another, it is easy to forget there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism, exactly the same grounds, in fact. That is because we are human. We still have every potential for good as we ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect in one another. We are still creatures of singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be even despite our errors and degradations for as long as we abide on this earth. To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.”
― Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays

“Paul jumped, unable to hide his surprise. Then he grinned and said, "Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. For a Chinese woman, your English is extraordinary. There is not a trace of an accent to be found."
"I have an American accent," she replied dully.
Paul waved her off. "You know what I mean."
Do I? she wanted to say. Would I be less if I sounded like my mother, my father, and all those in this city who were forced to learn more than one language, unlike you?”
― Chloe Gong, These Violent Delights