Culture Quotes

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them"

"That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness"

"Xenophobia manifests itself especially against civilizations and cultures that are weak because they lack economic resources, means of subsistence or land. So nomadic people are the first targets of this kind of aggression"

Antonio Tabucchi, Writer

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it"

Anais Nin, Author

"Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual"

Antonio Tabucchi, Writer

"I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture"

Saul Bellow, Novelist

"My thinking is that if we're going to take from a culture, let's take from a culture that has exemplified success for thousands of years"

Busta Rhymes, Musician

"When I look at the system here and look at my position - not just as a basketball player, but when I look around me at the values of the people and the culture and compare them with the values of where I came from - I feel so blessed to be from Africa"

Hakeem Olajuwon, Athlete

"Well, right now, I'm very fascinated with 1920s Berlin. I mean, probably the more interesting thing would be to go to the beginning of civilization or precivilization - like polytheistic times. It would be interesting to see what came before modern religion and culture - what circumstances created the environment or the need for it"

Natalie Portman, Actress

"We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture"

Moshe Sharett, Statesman

"I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture"

Laurence Olivier, Actor

"A man is a man in every part of the world. It has nothing to do with race. It has to do with the culture and education that each man has received since he was a child, in his home. It has to do with how he was raised"

Alicia Machado, Celebrity

"English culture is basically homosexual in the sense that the men only really care about other men"

Germaine Greer, Activist

"We can make a commitment to promote vegetables and fruits and whole grains on every part of every menu. We can make portion sizes smaller and emphasize quality over quantity. And we can help create a culture - imagine this - where our kids ask for healthy options instead of resisting them"

Michelle Obama, First Lady

"The problem is when that fun stuff becomes the habit. And I think that's what's happened in our culture. Fast food has become the everyday meal"

Michelle Obama, First Lady

"Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers"

Simone Weil, Philosopher

"I came to office promising major ethics reform to end the culture of self-dealing. And today, that ethics reform is a law. While I was at it, I got rid of a few things in the governor's office that I didn't believe our citizens should have to pay for. That luxury jet was over-the-top. I put it on eBay"

Sarah Palin, Politician

"If you want to change the culture, you will have to start by changing the organization"

Mary Douglas, Scientist

"Dying people in pre-industrial cultures typically died in the context of an extended family, clan, or tribe"

Stanislav Grof, Psychologist

"It is simply not part of my culture to preserve notes. I have never heard of a writer preserving his early drafts"

Naguib Mahfouz, Novelist

"For any culture which is primarily concerned with meaning, the study of death - the only certainty that life holds for us - must be central, for an understanding of death is the key to liberation in life"

Stanislav Grof, Psychologist

"Just in the past few years - since I've been making movies, which isn't a very long time - you now have a culture that is fascinated and informed about the box office in a way that sometimes filmmakers weren't even"

Neil LaBute, Director

"My main mistake was to have made an ancient people advance by forced marches toward independence, health, culture, affluence, comfort"

Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Royalty

"Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents"

Alan Dundes, Educator

"We are witnessing an enormous shift of collective consciousness throughout the world. We are at the precipice of great transformation within our culture and government"

Zachary Quinto, Actor

"Everybody blames the culture without taking responsibility"

James Levine, Musician

"Again, as a gay man I look at that and say there's a hopelessness that surrounds it, but as a human being I look at it and say 'Why? Where's this disparity coming from, and why can't we as a culture and society dig deeper to examine that?' We're terrified of facing ourselves"

Zachary Quinto, Actor

"I grew up in an atmosphere where words were an integral part of culture"

Wole Soyinka, Dramatist

"I just think that some version of the past in our culture is going to rise up and become dominant"

Peter Davison, Actor

"Ancient eschatological texts are actually maps of the inner territories of the psyche that seem to transcend race and culture and originate in the collective unconscious"

Stanislav Grof, Psychologist

"The adequate study of culture, our own and those on the opposite side of the globe, can press on to fulfillment only as we learn today from the humanities as well as from the scientists"

Ruth Benedict, Scientist

"Many cultures have independently developed a belief system in reincarnation that includes return of the unit of consciousness to another physical lifetime on Earth"

Stanislav Grof, Psychologist

"Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex"

Ruth Benedict, Scientist

"Respecting other people's cultures is well and good, but I draw the line at where some branches of Islam, what they do to women. It's indefensible"

Jello Biafra, Musician

"I gave up my base in popular culture when I left the Tonight Show"

Branford Marsalis, Musician

"The theory of cultural bias... is the idea that a culture is based on a particular form of organization. It can't be transplanted except to another variant of that organization"

Mary Douglas, Scientist

"You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions"

John Perry Barlow, Writer

"Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture"

Johan Huizinga, Historian

"An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic"

Johan Huizinga, Historian

"Culture means control over nature"

Johan Huizinga, Historian

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