Culture Quotes

"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

"Science, for hundreds of years, has spanned the differences between cultures and between countries"

Laurel Clark, Astronaut

"I've always enjoyed traveling and having experience with different cultures and different people. But it's also a wonderful thing to be able to benefit and enable research, not only in our country but around the world"

Laurel Clark, Astronaut

"Language is not only the key to a culture, but also the mirror in which it can be seen"

Ismail Kadare, Novelist

"The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting-points, and by unconnected roads"

Walter Pater, Critic

"Now they're attracted to one another, but repelled by their ethnic origins, so that there was something to overcome. They had to overcome their own prejudices, which had been imposed by the culture - their own shame at being Mexican and Italian"

Robert Towne, Actor

"The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out"

Lance Morrow

"We also have a cultural phenomenon: the emergence of a global culture, or of cultural globalization"

Peter L. Berger, Sociologist

"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, Musician

"It seems to me that in the western world, culture has something to do with appearance. A person that's out creating good stuff has got to appreciate someone when they take the time to have an appearance that goes with what they're doing"

Ornette Coleman, Musician

"The culture of independent film criticism has totally gone down the drain and this seems to come with the territory of the consumer age that we are now living in"

Wim Wenders, Director

"Well, I am very happy that I was able to play a part in bringing music from the streets onto the radio and into modern culture, I worked very hard and always believed in the sounds I was creating"

Ice T, Musician

"When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"To me, the decathlon is its own little society and I am part of that culture"

Dan O'Brien, Athlete

"I think it talks about that there needs to be some proactive attack against drugs infiltrating our culture"

Joe Morton, Actor

"So I feel a responsibility to help first-time film-makers in Brazil, but also to increase the dialogue between film cultures which are really wonderful and so much closer to us than what we do see on our screens"

Walter Salles, Director

"In an individualistic culture, the narcissist is God's gift to the world. In a collectivist society, the narcissist is God's gift to the collective"

Christopher Lasch, Historian

"Black culture is something I don't relate to much at all"

Dennis Rodman, Athlete

"I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place"

Helen Dunmore, Poet

"Cinema reflects culture and there is no harm in adapting technology, but not at the cost of losing your originality"

Jackie Chan, Actor

"I have a need to make these sorts of connections literal sometimes, and a vehicle often helps to do that. I have a relationship to car culture. It isn't really about loving cars. It's sort of about needing them"

Matthew Barney, Artist

"I think in Atlantic Canada, because of what happened in the decades following Confederation, there is a culture of defeat that we have to overcome"

Stephen Harper, Politician

"Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing"

Rowan D. Williams, Clergyman

"I kind of worry about that a little bit - we lost our film culture for 30 years because the Americans came in and bought up all the cinema chains and wouldn't show any Australian films"

Yahoo Serious, Director

"The challenge is the culture. You have to have a vision for the BBC-it can't merely be that it's big and has a place in the market"

Jonathan Dimbleby, Writer

"A lot of knowledge in any kind of an organization is what we call task knowledge. These are things that people who have been there a long time understand are important, but they may not know how to talk about them. It's often called the culture of the organization"

Howard Gardner, Psychologist

"So we have to be careful because if you don't protect your culture you won't have it for very long"

Yahoo Serious, Director

"The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation"

Walter Pater, Critic

"The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization"

Oriana Fallaci, Journalist

"The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period"

Oriana Fallaci, Journalist

"It's too hard for me to comment on the sorry state of our culture"

Trevor Dunn, Musician

"The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"There is a Canadian culture that is in some ways unique to Canada, but I don't think Canadian culture coincides neatly with borders"

Stephen Harper, Politician

"In a kind of a way there's a bit of that happening now so we have to be careful to preserve our culture"

Yahoo Serious, Director

"Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"I've had women tell me that when their daughters see them taking care of themselves, and being defined from within, and thinking for themselves instead of thinking about that silly culture out there, it's powerful modeling"

Naomi Judd, Musician

"For years all I seemed to be doing was lobbying politicians and others to persuade them that European culture needed movies, and that we had to protect it"

Wim Wenders, Director

"The tango is really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the national music of Argentina"

Yo-Yo Ma, Musician

"Pop culture is not about depth. It's about marketing, supply and demand, consumerism"

Trevor Dunn, Musician

"When certain branches of the economy become obsolete, as in the case of the steel industry, not only do jobs disappear, which is obviously a terrible social hardship, but certain cultures also disappear"

Peter L. Berger, Sociologist

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