Culture Quotes

"The negative side to globalization is that it wipes out entire economic systems and in doing so wipes out the accompanying culture"

Peter L. Berger, Sociologist

"Most of the debate over the cultures of death and life is about process. The debate focuses on the technology available to determine how we prolong life and how and when we end it"

Suzanne Fields

"Our institute's agenda is relatively simple. We study the relationship between social-economic change and culture. By culture we mean beliefs, values and lifestyles. We cover a broad range of issues, and we work very internationally"

Peter L. Berger, Sociologist

"In a spiritually sensitive culture, then, it might well be that age is something to be admired or envied"

Rowan D. Williams, Clergyman

"We were a Western civilisation, an English speaking civilisation, both NZ and Australia, and we had all these influences coming from both Great Britain and America to us; sending us their culture in the shape and form of movies and television"

Richard O'Brien, Actor

"It's because we are so flooded with American culture that we're startled when we see ourselves up there on the screen"

Yahoo Serious, Director

"Most of the monsters... are based on some sort of mythology. Every culture and even some geographical areas have monsters and mythology that is their own"

Laurell K. Hamilton, Writer

"American officials have bent over backwards to show how sensitive they are to Muslim culture. It didn't seem very effective. They seem to be worried about winning the respect of other people"

Tucker Carlson, Journalist

"There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind"

J. M. Coetzee, Author

"But one of the most fantastic things about Ireland and Dublin is that the pubs are like Paris and the cafe culture. And Dublin, in many ways, is a pub culture"

Hugh Dancy, Actor

"I've always been fascinated by Asian culture, and I love that women can play the lead in a horror film"

Sarah Michelle Gellar, Actress

"At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn't mean that you can't think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places"

Peter Singer, Philosopher

"When you learn something from people, or from a culture, you accept it as a gift, and it is your lifelong commitment to preserve it and build on it"

Yo-Yo Ma, Musician

"We've got a major problem in our culture, as it relates to the Internet and pornography and child pornography"

John Ashcroft, Public Servant

"There's been a lot of discussion about NASA culture and changing that. I think our culture has always been one of trying to do a very difficult job and do it well"

Mark Kelly, Musician

"Being Indian is not blood as much as it is culture"

Tony Hillerman, Author

"Well, it's an adventure story, and a Bildungsroman, of course, but there was also the intention to describe a culture that had been seen in rather narrow terms"

John M. Ford, Writer

"My father was a diplomat for part of his life and I jumped from country to country and culture to culture"

Walter Salles, Director

"We have convinced over one billion members of the Islamic faith that we are prejudiced against their religion, that we would deny them freedom of religion, that we want suppress their culture and invade their governments"

Theodore C. Sorensen, Lawyer

"The FBI. is a massive culture. It's been a culture that served America well, and it's been focused on prosecution. But what we need in terms of terrorism is prevention"

John Ashcroft, Public Servant

"When the National Security Agency recruited me, they put me through a day of lie detector tests. They found out all my weaknesses and immediately seduced me. They used the strongest drugs in our culture, sex, power and money, to win me over"

John Perkins, Economist

"Modern culture is constantly growing more objective. Its tissues grow more and more out of impersonal energies, and absorb less and less the subjective entirety of the individual"

Georg Simmel, Sociologist

"It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture"

Don DeLillo, Novelist

"I come from a country and also a continent whose identity is in the making. We're a very young culture, and I think that things are not yet crystallised"

Walter Salles, Director

"Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition"

Stephen Jay Gould, Scientist

"I can't tell you how much I love Target and Costco, that kind of culture, because it's something I never felt a part of. I've always felt like a tourist because I have never fit in anywhere"

Augusten Burroughs, Writer

"A soil, exhausted by the long culture of Pagan empires, was to lie fallow for a still longer period"

John Lothrop Motley, Historian

"The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life"

Georg Simmel, Sociologist

"We need only look to our Navajo Code Talkers during World War II to see the value that Native languages bring not only to their culture, but to the security of all Americans"

Rick Renzi, Politician

"Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream"

John Berger, Artist

"It's a wonderful thing to see a segment of our population that is open and eager to learn more about Chinese culture. It has filtered into the mainstream. You see credit-card ads on TV with white couples and Chinese babies"

Iris Chang, Historian

"There are lots of stories about my culture that I think bring a whole other perspective to who we are and where we have been and how we got here that I think need to be done"

Joe Morton, Actor

"That's the thing. in medicine, you're used to saying there's a problem within the person, and saying there's a problem within the culture, that's not a medical answer. Medicine has to look in one direction, so there's only one type of answer that they can find"

Chester Brown, Cartoonist

"You get more churches burned down in the United States in the last two years than in the last hundred, because of the lack of understanding of culture and diversity and the beauty of it"

Edward James Olmos, Actor

"Instead of kids just hearing about beads and baskets and fringe, and about what 'was' and 'were,' we present Native American culture as a living contemporary culture"

Buffy Sainte-Marie

"A culture, we all know, is made by its cities"

Derek Walcott, Playwright

"The present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country"

John Desmond Bernal, Scientist

"I could name a few songs and say exactly what summer they came out and what boy I thought I was in love with when I was fourteen years old, but I think that music used to be really more a part of the culture when people went out dancing in a different way than they do now"

Ann Beattie, Writer

"It is my hope that as we commemorate Black History Month in the future, we will continue to celebrate the many achievements and rich culture of African-Americans"

Eliot Engel, Politician

"I have always regarded global development as a struggle between the forces of good and evil. Not to be simplified as a struggle between Jesus and Satan, since I do not consider that the process is restricted to our own sphere of culture"

Alva Myrdal, Diplomat

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