Quotes
Quotes about Culture
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.
Most people would find it bizarre to speak of tolerating blonds. For whatever reason, hair color has not been a basis of tribal identity or group politics in our culture; the concept of tolerance is never invoked in this context because there is too obviously nothing to tolerate. In a rational culture, the same would be true of race, ethnicity, and the like.
The people who shape our lives and our cultures have the ability to communicate a vision or a quest or a joy or a mission.
Partial culture runs to the ornate; extreme culture to simplicity.
If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.
Cultures contain many cues and inducements to dissuade the individual from approaching ultimate limits, in much the same way that a special warning strip of land around the edge of a baseball field lets a player know that he is about to run into a concrete wall when he is preoccupied with catching the ball. The wider that strip of land and the more sensitive the player is to the changing composition of the ground under his feet as he pursues the ball, the more effective the warning. Romanticizing or lionizing as "individualistic" those people who disregard social cues and inducements increases the danger of head-on collisions with inherent social limits. Decrying various forms of social disapproval is in effect narrowing the warning strip.
The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie have armed themselves against the rising proletariat with, among other things, "culture." It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing "art" to defend their collapsing culture.
The acquiring of culture is the development of an avid hunger for knowledge and beauty.
General jackdaw culture, very little more than a collection of charming miscomprehensions, untargeted enthusiasms, and a general habit of skimming.
We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.
Every man's ability may be strengthened or increased by culture.
Olympism is the marriage of sport and culture.
The Greek word euphuia, a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to perceive it; a harmonious perfection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites "the two noblest of things"--as Swift . . . most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books, "the two noblest of things, sweetness and light."
Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.
Partial culture runs to the ornate; extreme culture to simplicity.
Television is the literature of the illiterate, the culture of the low-brow, the wealth of the poor, the privilage of the underprivilaged, the exclusive club of the excluded masses.
Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
