Culture Quotes

"Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture"

"The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving"

"In the light of our culture, these are not unreasonable questions and tactics, but if once again, we try to see the lens through which we look, we can see that there is far too great an emphasis placed on the future"

Alan Dundes, Educator

"To play June, I had an immediate connect with her background and culture. We grew up with the same religion and shared a lot of the same values of family and spirituality. But I was really so inspired by what a modern woman she was"

Reese Witherspoon, Actress

"I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates"

Angela Carter, Novelist

"Goth culture, as mired in the past as it is, even it goes through changes, so Goth when I was growing up is not what it is now. When I think of Goth culture as it is at the moment I think of mall culture"

Jhonen Vasquez, Cartoonist

"I'm surprised and disappointed in American culture"

Tabitha Soren, Celebrity

"So I've never found there was any particular separation between the two cultures at all, musically speaking"

Neville Marriner, Musician

"And there are so many people in the third world suffering so horribly right now, and we are so focused on ourselves and our culture that a lot of things are showing up in our culture that are making it impossible for us to focus on others. We're so self-focused"

Martin Sheen, Actor

"Wherever I go, I bring the culture with me, so that they can understand that it's attainable. I didn't do it any other way than through hip-hop"

Jay-Z, Musician

"Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to"

David Cronenberg, Director

"I have lived my life in a culture that hates fat people"

Camryn Manheim, Actress

"As Congress continues to debate ways to address illegal immigration, we must remember the many hard-working legal immigrants that contribute so much to our nation's economy and culture"

Bob Filner, Politician

"It's what the Iraqi people are going through right now. They have encountered a victorious, hostile force-but, you know, there they still are. There their culture is, there their history is, they're not going anywhere"

Michael Nesmith, Musician

"You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it's so rich"

Robert Duvall, Actor

"Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires"

Muriel Rukeyser, Poet

"There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization"

Steven Pinker, Scientist

"The Ice Storm, because of the movie, has had, or is to have, a vigorous life in other cultures"

Rick Moody, Novelist

"Afghan society is very complex, and Afghanistan has a very complex culture. Part of the reason it has remained unknown is because of this complexity"

Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Director

"Yes and our obsession with youth in our culture and how we, women lie about their age after 35 obsessively and no one wants to let anyone know they're getting older, et cetera"

Sela Ward, Actress

"There's been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with"

Michael Pollan, Educator

"Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts"

Norman Mailer, Novelist

"Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species"

Konrad Lorenz, Scientist

"My thing is related to who I am as a person. The clothes are an extension of me. The music is an extension of me. All my businesses are part of the culture, so I have to stay true to whatever I'm feeling at the time, whatever direction I'm heading in. And hopefully, everyone follows"

Jay-Z, Musician

"What we try to say is that it doesn't matter if you are a Republican or a Democrat or conservative or independent. You are equally responsible for your place in the culture, and you must make a contribution, and you must accept responsibility for what goes down on your watch"

Martin Sheen, Actor

"We have not invaded anyone. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them"

Abdul Kalam, Statesman

"I'm still very aware of the violence in our culture, more so than other people. I know where it comes from when someone is trying to suppress someone else, sometimes they fight back"

Jack Bowman, Actor

"Basically the school system sets you up with what it wants to set you up with. They're really good at it. I think they're too good. Problem is, what they're doing is conditioning kids to merely accept the culture at hand. But the rebels won't accept it"

Jack Bowman, Actor

"Even before Europe was united in an economic level or was conceived at the level of economic interests and trade, it was culture that united all the countries of Europe. The arts, literature, music are the connecting link of Europe"

Dario Fo, Playwright

"Although, this is often used with negative connotations, I see ideology as an inherent part of culture"

Dario Fo, Playwright

"At times in my life, I have been utterly lonely. At other times, I've had disgusting infectious diseases. Try admitting these things in our culture"

Martha Beck, Author

"Partial culture runs to the ornate, extreme culture to simplicity"

Christian Nestell Bovee, Author

"Over the past several years, all of us as Canadians, and as members of the North American cultural and economic environment, have been to a greater or lesser extent party to a significant attitudinal change towards our culture"

Alex Campbell, Politician

"People in this country haven't stopped hating fat people, but they've become more kind to me, since in our culture, even though we hate our fat people, we love our celebrities even more"

Camryn Manheim, Actress

"Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man"

Arnold Bennett, Novelist

"Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit"

Jawaharlal Nehru, Leader

"So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids"

Todd Gitlin, Sociologist

"It is just not enough to strengthen the secret services for the fight against terrorism but it's also necessary to advance dialogue between cultures"

Horst Koehler, Statesman

"I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet"

Lord Chesterfield, Statesman

"The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools"

Anna Quindlen, Journalist

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