Your Culture Quotes

“Modern American culture dictated the importance of touching the hand of someone you've just met, however counterintuitive it seemed. Why would he want to touch someone he didn't know?”

— Courtney Kirchoff

“We've bought into the idea that education is about training and "success", defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”

— Chris Hedges

“Horrible the fate of the advice-giver in our culture: to repeat oneself in a thousand contexts until death, or irrelevance.
I abjure advice-giver.”

— Frank Bidart

“Our culture will become like it was during the medieval times when there truly was a cultural elite. The rest of the people will just watch television, which will be their only frame of reference.”

— Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

“Our culture has the expectation that the memories of a happy childhood will somehow ground you and prepare you for adult life. But what about the memories that cut, that wound, that won't heal?”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

“New York is rich in culture, cuisine, and commerce.”

— Patricia Marx

“The thought system which dominates our culture is laced with selfish values, and relinquishing those values is a lot easier said than done. The journey to a pure heart can be highly disorienting. For years, we may have worked for power, money or prestige. Now all of a sudden we've learned that these are just the values of a dying world.”

— Marianne Williamson

“Dancing was always part of my culture growing up in Barbados. When I shot my 1st video I worked really hard with my choreographer to perfect the routines.”

— Rihanna

“I am pretty geeky, yes. I like odd sub-culture activities, I am often socially inept, I wore glasses in high school. But I am a modern geek.”

— Josh Zuckerman

“But foremost, I do not subscribe to the view that Islamic culture and democracy cannot be reconciled.”

— Recep Tayyip Erdogan

“Challenging and highlighting abusive power dynamics in our culture is my goal; replicating them is not.”

— Kara Walker

“Our culture has kind of let the concept of the Renaissance Man die out. We don't really tell the kids that it's okay to bounce around the world, work odd jobs, and do six different things.”

— Ronan Farrow

“Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation; if people weren't hungry, they wouldn't work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions.”

— B.F. Skinner

“Corporate culture matters. How management chooses to treat its people impacts everything - for better or for worse.”

— Simon Sinek

“I think the merging of high and low culture is so fascinating.”

— Lola Kirke

“The insistence in Darcy's voice is a symptom of his passion for Elizabeth; it emerges even in their most mundane interactions. We can trace the development of Darcy's feelings for Elizabeth in the tone of his voice. This reaches its climax in the scene in which he proposes to her. His negative persistence, beginning his speech with 'In vain have I struggled. It will not do,' becomes almost violent, in part because the novel itself is so restrained and Darcy is the most restrained of all the characters.
Now, please listen carefully to that 'you.' Darcy seldom if ever addresses Elizabeth by her name, but he has a special way of saying 'you' when he addresses her a few times that makes the impersonal pronoun a term of ultimate intimacy. One should appreciate such nuances in a culture such as ours, where everyone is encouraged to demonstrate in the most exaggerated manner his love for the Imam and yet forbidden from any public articulation of private feelings, especially love.”

— Azar Nafisi

“Cajun culture is dying.”

— Michael K. Williams

“America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society - in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage.”

— Thomas Friedman

“The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web, and they know their HTML and stuff. It's pretty shocking to me.”

— Jaron Lanier

“We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture. Why waste time creating a conscience for something that doesn't exist? For, you see, blood and skin do not think!”

— Ralph Ellison

“To claim that America's "culture of violence" is responsible for school shootings is tantamount to cigarette company executives declaring that environmental pollution is the chief cause of lung cancer.”

— Stephen King

“What is right? Simply put, it is any assignment in which the photographer has a significant spiritual stake ... spiritually driven work constitutes the core of a photographer's contribution to culture.”

— William Albert Allard

“New Orleans, more than many places I know, actually tangibly lives its culture. It's not just a residual of life; it's a part of life. Music is at every major milestone of our life: birth, marriage, death. It's our culture.”

— Wendell Pierce

“A legacy rises to become culture only when its elements are so common that they no longer attract comment-not because people have lost interest, but because people cannot imagine a world without them.”

— Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“We're teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. Create your own.”

— Mitch Albom

“The culture of Greece is not the same as the culture of Germany, and to fuse them into a single unit is extremely difficult.”

— Alan Greenspan

“We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.”

— John Berger

“A lot of people in my world - in the acting world - have either lost friends to Aids or live with HIV because its origin in our culture, in New York for instance, was in the gay community.”

— Emma Thompson

“There were history's gifts to my family-and if the resources of that grocer, the fruits of those riots, the possibilities of that culture, and the privileges of that skin tone had been extended to others, how many more would now live a life of fulfillment, in a beautiful house high on a hill?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

“Shouldn't we be presenting an alternative to the prevailing culture rather than simply mimicking it? What would a church look like that created space for quietness, that bucked the celebrity trend and unplugged from noisy media, that actively resisted our consumer culture? What would worship look like if we directed it more toward God than toward our own amusement?”

— Philip Yancey

“Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the Web. There is something profoundly postnational about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the postmodern world, whether we want to be or not.”

— William Gibson

“I can't. I'm not a good influence on him. I keep getting him shot. I swear too much, I don't brush my teeth every time I go to bed, and I never remember to eat a balanced breakfast. You want someone with culture. Poise. A lack of gunfire.
-Toby”

— Seanan McGuire

“But wouldn't we see more women willing to give their children life if they'd seen with their own eyes what an adoption culture looks like? And wouldn't these mothers and fathers, who may themselves feel unwanted, be a bit more ready to hear our talk about a kingdom where all are welcomed?”

— Russell D. Moore

“Sacrifices have to be made if you want to make a dent in the world, and that's what I started out to do - to make a dent in pop culture.”

— RuPaul

“The gut-check message is do we have the right balance in our culture? Or are we in a position where hero worship and winning at all costs has subordinated our core values?”

— Mark Emmert

“Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture”

— Arthur Koestler

“It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud. The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident.”

— Charles Ferguson

“One of the first things was I made Arlo [the Apatosaurus] a younger character. And then when I was that age (around 11 or 12), what was I like? Sweat pants, turtle-neck kid; didn't know anything about fashion or style, the culture of the world. I was very sheltered.”

— Peter Sohn

“In world history, those who have helped to build the same culture are not necessarily of one race, and those of the same race have not all participated in one culture.”

— Ruth Benedict

“The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions ... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art ... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.”

— Rutherford B. Hayes

“When I was growing up in the mid-'50s, the Roaring Twenties were a huge part of the culture. There were a number of films and a bunch of television shows that dealt with the mythology of the underworld from that period.”

— Martin Scorsese

“We're [New York] the world's second home, the place where every religion is practiced and every culture is celebrated.”

— Michael Bloomberg

“Sanity, soundness, and sincerity, of which gleams and strains can still be found in the human brain under powerful microscopes, flourish only in a culture of clarification, which is now becoming harder and harder to detect with the naked eye.”

— James Thurber

“Personally, I do not support the concept of suicide bombings. This is not part of our [syrian] culture. But whether you condemn them or not, suicide bombings are a reality.”

— Bashar Al-Assad

“It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas ... And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.”

— Terence McKenna

“Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.”

— John Dewey

“In a culture of technique, we often confuse authority with power, but the two are not the same. Power works from the outside in, but authority works from the inside out ... I am painfully aware of the times in my own teaching when I lose touch with my inner teacher and therefore with my own authority. In those times I try to gain power by barricading myself behind the podium and my status while wielding the threat of grades ... Authority comes as I reclaim my identity and integrity, remembering my selfhood and my sense of vocation.”

— Parker J. Palmer

“When I hear the word 'culture,' I get out my revolver.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“The highest end of government is the culture of men.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Culture implies all which gives the mind possession of its own powers, as languages to the critic, telescope to the astronomer. Culture alters the political status of an individual. It raises a rival royalty in a monarchy. 'Tis king against king. It is ever a romance of history in all dynasties
the co-presence of the revolutionary force in intellect. It creates a personal independence which the monarch cannot look down, and to which he must often succumb.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson