Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.
The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. (42)
Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
Man is quite sufficiently saddened by his own passions and destiny, and need not make himself more so by the darkness of a barbaric past. He needs enlightening and cheering influences, and should therefore turn to those eras in art and literature during which remarkable men obtained perfect culture.
Naturlicher Verstand kann fast jeden Grad von Bildung ersetzen, aber keine Bildung den naturlichen Verstand=--Natural intelligence may make up almost every step in culture, but no culture make up for natural intelligence.
The spirit world shuts not its gates, Your heart is dead, your senses sleep,’ says the Earth Spirit to Faust. And the senses sleep when there is not enough energy to run them efficiently. On the other hand, when the level of will and determination is high, the senses wake up. (Maslow was not particularly literary, or he might have been amused to think that Faust is suffering from exactly the same problem as the girl in the chewing gum factory (described earlier), and that he had, incidentally, solved a problem that had troubled European culture for nearly two centuries). Peak experiences are a by-product of this higher energy-drive. The alcoholic drinks because he is seeking peak experiences; (the same, of course, goes for all addicts, whether of drugs or tobacco.) In fact, he is moving away from them, like a lost traveller walking away from the inn in which he hopes to spend the night. The moment he sees with clarity what he needs to do to regain the peak experience, he does an about-face and ceases to be an alcoholic.
An irreverent knowledge is no knowledge; it may be a development of the logical or other handicraft faculty, but is no culture of the soul of a man.
The great failure of the critic of culture, even when his intentions are benign, lies in his inability to recognize that the perfect world of peace, justice, equality, and environmental harmony of which he dreams — a utopia run by enlightened, sensitive, progressive (and preferably multi-degree) philosopher-kings — is a tyranny pure and simple. Philosopher-kings soon must discover a need for bureaucrats and policemen to administer and enforce their notion of the public good. They must also discover, to their chagrin, that the bureaucrats and policemen quickly will become the real power in such a society. This is precisely what happened to communism in its evolution from an intellectual, Marxist, social philosophy to a brutally anti-intellectual, Leninist, political system. [“Critics of Culture” (commentary), Fidelity Magazine, March 1995, p. 14.]
Invidus, iracundus, iners, vinosus, amator, / Nemo adeo ferus est, ut non mitescere possit, / Si modo cultur? patientem commodet aurem=--The envious, the passionate, the indolent, the drunken, the lewd--none is so savage that he cannot be tamed, if he only lend a patient ear to culture.
These two visions of Christianity—one emphasizing the next world and what we must believe and do in order to get there, the other emphasizing God’s passion for the transformation of this world—are very different. Yet they use the same language and share the same sacred scripture, the same Bible. What separates them is how the shared language is understood—whether within the framework of heaven-and-hell Christianity or within the framework of God’s passion for transformation in this world. The latter framework, I am convinced, is more biblical, ancient, and traditional (even as it is not conventional, but subversive). It takes seriously the ancient meanings of Christian language in ancient context. The former is the product of a process that began when Christianity became allied with dominant culture, initially in the Roman Empire in the fourth century and then gradually in all of Europe and parts of the Middle East. The result was that Christianity became largely a religion of the afterlife and the postmortem fate of us as individuals. It was no longer about changing the way the world is, for the world was now ruled by Christian authorities. Heaven-and-hell Christianity domesticates—indeed, commonly eliminates—the political passion of the Bible.
A nation's culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.
The history of the human race has generated several papers articulating basic moral imperatives, or fundamental principles, of human coexistence that… substantially influenced the fate of humanity on this planet. Among these historic documents, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights … holds a very special, indeed, unique position. It is the first code of ethical conduct that was not a product of one culture, or one sphere of civilization only, but a universal creation, shaped and subscribed to by representatives of all humankind. Since its very inception, the Declaration has thus represented a planetary, or global commitment, a global intention, a global guideline. For this reason alone, this exceptional document — conceived as a result of a profound human self-reflection in the wake of the horrors of World War II, and retaining its relevance ever since — deserves to be remembered today.
There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions and social structure are changing in consequence. It promises a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. Its ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty — a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land. This is the revolution of the new generation.
Piety is only a means whereby, through purest inward peace, we may attain to highest culture.
When strategy, culture, and brand harmonize, they amplify one another and resonate loud and clear.
All the arts affecting culture= (_i.e._, =the fine arts=) =have a certain common bond, and are connected by a certain blood relationship with each other.
No man needs to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.
The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. [ The Soul of Man Under Socialism .]
Halb sind sie kalt, Halb sind sie roh=--Half of them are without heart, half without culture.
The gospel is capable and designed to strike home in every culture, in every age, and in every language.
Auch die Kultur, die alle Welt beleckt, / Hat auf den Teufel sich erstreckt=--Culture, which has licked all the world into shape, has reached even the devil.
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force; that thoughts rule the world.
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Man is the measurer of all things; and what is Science but the reflection of the outer world on the mirror of the mind, growing more perfect, more orderly, more definite, more great, with every generation? To attempt to study nature without studying man is as impossible as to study light without studying the eye. I have no misgivings, therefore, that the lines on which this College (Mason Science College) is founded will ever become so narrow as to exclude the science of man, and the science of that which makes man, the science of language, and, what is really the same, the science of thought. And where can we study the science of thought, that most wonderful instance of development, except in the languages and literatures of the past? How are we to do justice to our ancestors except by letting them plead their own case in their own language? Literary culture can far better dispense with physical science than physical science with literary culture, though nothing is more satisfactory than a perfect combination of the two.
To adhere to what is set down in them, and appropriate to one's self what one can for moral strengthening and culture, is the only edifying purpose to which we can turn the Gospels.
Partial culture runs to the ornate; extreme culture to simplicity.
If a man cannot get literary culture of the highest kind out of his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes, and Bishop Berkeley, to mention only a few of our illustrious writers--I say, if he cannot get it out of those writers, he cannot get it out of anything; and I would assuredly devote a very large portion of the time of every English child to the careful study of the models of English writing of such varied and wonderful kind as we possess, and, what is still more important and still more neglected, the habit of using that language with precision, with force, and with art.
Frommigkeit ist kein Zweck, sondern ein Mittel, um durch die reinste Gemuthsruhe zur hochsten Cultur zu gelangen=--Piety is not an end, but a means to attain the highest culture through the purest peace of mind.
A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science, with modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search.
Reason requires culture to expand it. It resembles the fire concealed in the flint, which only shows itself when struck with the steel.
What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly reducing the productivity and profitability of slave labor. Living within this African American culture, sustained by strong community ties, many slaves were able to maintain a certain sense of apartness, of pride, and of independent identity.
It is proof of a high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.
A noble man cannot be indebted for his culture to a narrow circle. The world and his native land must act on him.
Grief is the culture of the soul; it is the true fertiliser.
We've moved away from being a culture of people who think about movies to one made up of people who believe that spouting a list of preferences is the same as registering an opinion.
Ut ager, quamvis fertilis, sine cultura fructuosus esse non potest, sic sine doctrina animus=--As a field, however fertile, can yield no fruit without culture, so neither can the mind of man without education.
One should never risk a joke, even of the mildest and most unexceptionable character, except among people of culture and wit.
The Christian religion is especially remarkable, as it so decidedly lays claim to mere goodwill in man, to his essential temper, and values this independently of all culture and manifestation. It stands in opposition to science and art, and properly to enjoyment.
I do not consider that men of coarse and boorish habits and of slender parts deserve so fine an instrument nor such a complicated mechanism as men of contemplation and high culture. They merely need a sack in which their food may be held and whence it may issue, since verily they cannot be considered otherwise than as vehicles for food, for they seem to me to have nothing in common with the human race save the shape and the voice; as far as the rest is concerned they are lower than the beasts.
Historically the great movements for human liberation have always been movements to change institutions and not to preserve them intact. It follows from what has been said that there have been movements to bring about a changed distribution of power to do — and power to think and to express thought is a power to do— so that there would be a more balanced, a more equal, even, and equitable system of human liberties. [ Freedom and Culture, Putnam, 1939.]
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.
<...> tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.
Proof-texting did not cause great damage so long as the culture as a whole held to general Christian values, but when those general Christian values began to weaken, the weakness in evangelical theologizing — even more, in thinking like a Christian about the world in general — became all too evident.
We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.
This is the great problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together, black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who because we can never live apart, must live with each other in peace. However deeply American Negroes are caught in the struggle to be at last home in our homeland of the U.S., we cannot ignore the larger world house in which we are also dwellers. Equality with whites will not solve the problems of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a world society stricken by poverty, and in a universe doomed to extinction by war.” [From Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (p. 167). Quoted in In Love We Trust , by Virgil A. Wood, 2004.]
They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture’.
Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.
~Knowledge.~--The sure foundations of the state are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin.--_G. W. Curtis._
With the meal there was karaoke. As the Chinese waiters brought the food, everyone at the restaurant sang “shanson,” the gravelly, syrupy gangster ballads that have become some of Russia’s favorite pop music. Shanson reflect the gangsters’ journeys to the center of Russian culture. These used to be underground, prison songs, full of gangster slang, tales of Siberian labor camps and missing your mother. Now every taxi driver and grocery plays them. “Vladimirsky Tsentral” is a wedding classic. Tipsy brides across the country in cream-puff wedding dresses and high, thin heels slow-dance with their drunker grooms: “The thaw is thinning underneath the bars of my cell / but the Spring of my life has passed so fast.” At the Chinese restaurant Miami Stas sang along too, but he seemed too meek, too obliging to be a gangster.
A civilization is only a way of life. A culture is the way of making that way of life beautiful. So culture is your office here in America, and as no stream can rise higher than its source, so you can give no more or better to architecture than you are. So why not go to work on yourselves, to make yourselves, in quality, what you would have your buildings be?
There is for the soul a spontaneous culture, on which depends all its real progress in perfection.
Education is only like good culture; it changes the size, but not the sort.
It might be crazy to expect a high government official to speak the truth. It might be crazy to believe that government policy will be something more than the handmaiden of the most powerful interests. It might be crazy to argue that we should preserve a tradition that has been part of our tradition for most of our history — free culture. If this is crazy, then let there be more crazies. Soon.
artisan miners whose culture shaped the childhood and family life of several of the thirty-three men.
We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you. For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
Shakespeare is one of the best means of culture the world possesses. Whoever is at home in his pages is at home everywhere.--_H. N. Hudson._
Multi mortales, dediti ventri atque somno, indocti incultique vitam sicuti peregrinantes transiere; quibus profecto contra naturam corpus voluptati, anima oneri=--Many men bave passed through life like travellers in a strange land, without spiritual or moral culture, and given up to the lusts of appetite and indolence, whose bodies, contrary to their nature, were enslaved to indulgence, and their souls a burden.
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 relativism 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.
Therapy isn't curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human. Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, "This is me and the world be damned!" Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society — Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.
There is a conspicuous void in the arguments and the programs of the counter-culture groups of this country, in that they have produced no well-formulated economic theories…. Unfortunately and ironically, Lou Kelso, who has some very imaginative economic proposals, has been offering them for many years to the establishment, the dinosaur culture….”Two-Factor” economics or “universal capitalism” recognizes the emerging importance of technology, and accepts the diminishing necessity of human labor; it is an economic theory that is beautifully tailored to the values and beliefs of most Catalog readers and those seeking alternatives to dinosaur existence…. These proposals have been laid on presidential candidates, congressmen, newspaper publishers, leading economists, and nearly all key decision makers of the establishment over and over again…. My advice to Lou is: “Come on, Lou, grow long hair, drop all that establishment costumery, immerse yourself in the now generation, and start to work with a constituency that wants you and needs you. [ The Whole Earth Catalog , Spring 1970.]
A society of people will cursorily represent a certain culture, though there is not a gentleman or a lady in the group.
Moral culture must begin with a change= (_Umwandlung_) =in the way of thinking, and with the founding of a character.
Sich mitzutheilen ist Natur; Mitgetheiltes aufnehmen, wie es gegeben wird, ist Bildung=--It is characteristic to Nature to impart itself; to take up what is imparted as it is given is culture.
Past the bouncers outside and the girls smoking long, skinny cigarettes, past the tinted glass doors and the jade stone Novikov has put in near the entrance for good luck. Inside, Novikov opens up so anyone can see everyone in almost every corner at any moment, the same theatrical seating as in his Moscow places. But the London Novikov is so much bigger. There are three floors. One floor is “Asian,” all black walls and plates. Another floor is “Italian,” with off-white tiled floors and trees and classic paintings. Downstairs is the bar-cum-club, in the style of a library in an English country house, with wooden bookshelves and rows of hardcover books. It’s a Moscow Novikov restaurant cubed: a series of quotes, of references wrapped in a tinted window void, shorn of their original memories and meanings (but so much colder and more distant than the accessible, colorful pastiche of somewhere like Las Vegas). This had always been the style and mood in the “elite,” “VIP” places in Moscow, all along the Rublevka and in the Garden Ring, where the just-made rich exist in a great void where they can buy anything, but nothing means anything because all the old orders of meaning are gone. Here objects become unconnected to any binding force. Old Masters and English boarding schools and Fabergé eggs all floating, suspended in a culture of zero gravity.
Two thousand five hundred years ago the value of civilization was as apparent as it is now; then, as now, it was obvious that only in the garden of an orderly polity can the finest fruits humanity is capable of bearing be produced. But it had also become evident that the blessings of culture were not unmixed. The garden was apt to turn into a hothouse. The stimulation of the senses, the pampering of the emotions, endlessly multiplied the sources of pleasure. The constant widening of the intellectual field indefinitely extended the range of that especially human faculty of looking before and after, which adds to the fleeting present those old and new worlds of the past and the future, wherein men dwell the more the higher their culture. But that very sharpening of the sense and that subtle refinement of emotion, which brought such a wealth of pleasures, were fatally attended by a proportional enlargement of the capacity for suffering; and the divine faculty of imagination, while it created new heavens and new earths, provided them with the corresponding hells of futile regret for the past and morbid anxiety for the future.
I have three," he said briskly. "First, get rid of the term 'compliance.' It's a lousy term. It implies moral hegemony. You don't want a command from a general, you want a colloquy. Second, instead of looking at a model of coercion, look at a model of mediation. Go find a member of the Hmong Community, or go find a medical anthropologist, who can help you negotiate. Remember that a stance of mediation, like a divorce proceeding, requires compromise on both sides. Decide what's critical and be willing to compromise on everything else. Third, you need to understand that as powerful an influence of the culture of the Hmong patient and her family is on this case, the culture of biomedicine is equally powerful. If you can't see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else's culture?