CULTURE QUOTES

quotations about culture

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Culture is one thing, and varnish another.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

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Culture is the bedrock, the final wall, against which one leans one's back in a godforsaken chaos.

J.C. POWYS

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The triumph of culture is to overpower nationality.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

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Culture affects our views of reality. It provides the mental concepts by which people perceive, interpret, analyze, and explain events in the world around them.

JAMES G. PEOPLES

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A nation's culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

MAHATMA GANDHI

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The first step -- especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money -- the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK

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Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love and of thought, which, in the course of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved.

ANDRÉ MALRAUX

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Because culture is learned, members of a given society seldom question the culture of which they are a part, unless for some reason they become outsiders or establish some critical distance from the usual cultural expectations. People engage unthinkingly in hundreds of specifically cultural practices every day; culture makes these practices seem "normal." If you suddenly stopped participating in your culture and questioned each belief and every behavior, you would soon find yourself feeling detached and perhaps a little disoriented; you would also become increasingly ineffective at functioning within your group.

MARGARET L. ANDERSON

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Civilization is the wild river; culture, 592,000 tons of cement; civilization flows; culture thickens and coagulates.

EDWARD ABBEY

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The way you sustain and improve upon a culture is by fostering a sense of gratitude for what is best about it. You celebrate the good in your story while putting the bad in the correct context.

JONAH GOLDBERG

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What if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK

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Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

SALMAN RUSHDIE

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No one is so savage that he cannot be civilized if he will lend a patient ear to culture.

HORACE

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The common culture of a tribe is a sign of its inner cohesion. But tribes are vanishing from the modern world, as are all forms of traditional society. Customs, practices, festivals, rituals and beliefs have acquired a fluid and half-hearted quality which reflects our nomadic and rootless existence, predicated as we are on the global air-waves.

ROGER SCRUTON

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The Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.

ALVIN TOFFLER

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No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

JAMES BALDWIN

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Narrowness of intellect and heart, this is the degradation from which all culture aims to rescue the human being.

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

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All cultures have been mingled forever.

V. S. NAIPAUL

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I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it.

KURT VONNEGUT

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Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.

THOMAS WOLFE

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