Quotes on Culture

Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.

Our culture needs to find a robust image of female success that is first, not male, and second, not a white woman on the phone, holding a crying baby.

I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

By turning our culture over to the spectacle of child stars and their growing pains, we simply wind up taking their childishness seriously and ensuring that they don't grow up at all. And neither do we.

A lot of guys are very intimidated by an attractive woman, and they dehumanise her because our culture perceives beautiful women as commodities. But I think if you're able walk up to a person and get to know them, and you see their flaws and their impurities, and realise that they're like you, then you can humanise them again.

I want to be honest about the world that we live in, and sometimes my political persuasions come through in my work. Fashion can be really racist, looking at the clothes of other cultures as costumes. . . . That’s mundane and it’s old hat. Let’s break down some barriers.

In response to our fast-food culture, a 'slow food' movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.

The time has come to educate people, to cease all quarrels in the name of religion, culture, countries, different political or economic systems. Fighting is useless. Suicide.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviors; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why the Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching.

Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

A proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us, in all times, places, and cultures. It has been the means for our survival. It is our birthright. When, through indifference, inattention, incompetence, or fear of skepticism, we discourage children from science, we are disenfranchisin g them, taking from them the tools needed to manage their future.

There is a real connection between culture and climate change. We all have a part to play and if you engage with life, you will get a new set of values, get off the consumer treadmill, and start to think, and it is these great thinkers who will rescue the planet.

People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.

The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?

A resilient culture has a certain amount of resistance embedded in it. Not so much to capsize it, but enough so that it doesn't atrophy.

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.

The first thing to look for when searching for a great employee is somebody with a personality that fits with your company culture. Most skills can be learned, but it is difficult to train people on their personality.