Culture Quotes

"In some South Pacific cultures, a speaker holds a conch shell as a symbol of temporary position of authority. Leaders must understand who holds the conch that is, who should be listened to and when"

Max de Pree

"To recover a spiritual tradition in which creation, and the study of creation, matters would be to inaugurate new possibilities between spirituality and science that would shape the paradigms for culture, its institution, and its people"

Matthew Fox

"A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom"

Lawrence Lessig, Educator

"In addition to the research, I enjoyed learning French and assimilating the culture of another country"

James Cronin, Physicist

"If there are signs that Americans bow to the gods of advertising, there are equally indications that people find the gods ridiculous. It is part of the popular culture that advertisements are silly"

Michael Schudson, Sociologist

"The truth is that our way of celebrating the Christmas season does spring from myriad cultures and sources, from St. Nicholas to Coca-Cola advertising campaigns"

Richard Roeper, Critic

"The system of domination is founded on depriving nations of their true identity. It seeks to deprive nations of their culture, identity, self-confidence and in this way dominate them"

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Statesman

"In most places that are rich in guitar culture, everyone uses their fingers, like in Spain or Africa. In Japan there are string instruments played that way. It is not until you get in the States that you find people using picks"

Kevin Eubanks, Musician

"I always feel more comfortable in chaotic surroundings. I don't know why that is. I think order is dull. There is something about this kind of desire for order, particularly in Anglo Saxon cultures, that drive out this ability for the streets to become a really exotic, amorphous, chaotic, organic place where ideas can, basically, develop"

Malcolm Mclaren, Musician

"With what's happened in the world the last three years, it's easier to see why it's become popular again to diminish and revile Arabs and Muslims in American popular culture"

Tony Shalhoub, Actor

"As I stand here today and tell you about these, I am heavy with an awareness of the fact that I am in more than one sense a product of both the Chinese and Western cultures, in harmony and in conflict"

Chen Ning Yang, Physicist

"Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come"

John Thorn, Historian

"Therefore reinforcing a stereotype, therefore thinking that the entire Indian culture is just made of people that are against their children's decisions"

Parminder Nagra, Actress

"I feel like being into the beat of your own drum has become too prominent in the culture"

Mos Def, Musician

"We are somehow natured, not just to reproduce, but for sociality and even for culture"

Leon Kass, Educator

"Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture"

Michael Lewis

"We are women. We are a subject people who have inherited an alien culture"

Kate Millett, Activist

"Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who when their turn comes will manufacture professors"

Simone Veil, Lawyer

"From 1962 to 1965, the guitar became this icon of youth culture, thanks mostly to the Beatles"

Pat Metheny, Musician

"There's an assumption in many of these cultures that these children are mentally retarded, when in fact they're not at all. I saw how the operation affects the child, as well as the child's family and often the village"

Roma Downey, Actress

"Well, the most important thing about Islam is that we have to differentiate between two kinds of Islam. The first one is the institution of Islam... second, the culture of Islam"

Abdurrahman Wahid, Statesman

"I don't really know much about pirates, or pirate culture. I'd be a contrarian pirate"

Todd Barry, Comedian

"Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different"

Kate Millett, Activist

"We're warriors, this culture, and we're very puritanical about sex and very embracing about violence and I don't know why that is"

Mark Ruffalo, Actor

"The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive"

Lionel Trilling, Critic

"What I love the most about modeling is that it opens you a lot of different doors of opportunities and takes you to many different places, which then put you in touch with various people and cultures"

Karolina Kurkova, Model

"Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life"

Hannah Arendt, Historian

"With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art"

Sydney Pollack, Director

"If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it"

S. I. Hayakawa, Politician

"When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature - this very unique to Japan"

Tadao Ando, Architect

"By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets"

Richard Russo, Novelist

"Then there was the whole concept of coal mining, which is a culture unto itself, the most dangerous occupation in the world, and which draws and develops a certain kind of man"

Martin C. Smith

"Mos Def is a name that I built and cultivated over the years it's a name that the streets taught me a figure of speech that was given to me by the culture and by my environment and I feel I've done quite a bit with that name and it's time to expand and move on"

Mos Def, Musician

"Yeah, I don't deal with current events or pop culture, and I avoid politics like the plague"

Max Cannon, Artist

"However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power"

Kate Millett, Activist

"The video game culture was an important thing to keep alive in the film because we're in a new era right now. The idea that kids can play video games like Grand Theft Auto or any video game is amazing. The video games are one step before a whole other virtual universe"

Vin Diesel, Actor

"At Cardozo, study of law is part of a larger culture. You can get a law degree and make a good living, but it is best that you do that having studied the discipline for its own inherent merit, because you love studying"

Norman Lamm, Educator

"The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes"

Salman Rushdie, Novelist

"I'm a British intern going in. I'm hoping that John will just kind of tackle it from who this person is and what she's about rather than trying to go in on her culture. We need to move a step forward than that"

Parminder Nagra, Actress

"The Holocaust committed by the Nazis turned this country, where most of the European Jews used to live and where their culture used to flourish, into a massive grave. This is why initiatives to revive Jewish culture in Poland is so important"

Marek Belka, Economist

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