3rd Culture Quotes

Maybe the hardest thing about moving over seas was being in a place where no one but your own family had any memory of you. It was like putting yourself back together in little pieces. ~ Naomi Shibab Nye

I look around and see that many - not all, but many - problems we've got could be solved if our culture simply fostered the habit of reading. Reading books of science, philosophy, history. Reading literature of quality, the sort that touches us because of a more profound reason, such as, for instance, because it's got something to say beyond all the futilities and trifles of life, even while depicting the ordinary in life, at the same time that it says it with style, in a unique, admirable manner. An original one.


We are not a county of readers, notwithstanding. We are the country of football turned into a cult, of guile being ranked high as a cardinal virtue, of Carnival made for exportation. A country where there are more letters in political party acronyms than in all many of our politicians have written in a lifetime. A country where ethics has become a joke theme. Where democracy is but a ridiculous puppet theatre.

Yes, I look around and see that many problems could be solved if we had the habit of reading. But I am not even sure whether there is someone reading these words. ~ Camilo Gomes Jr.

The PBSI (Indonesian Badminton Association) have to work harder to widen the pool and find quality players. The present indifferent culture has to change. ~ Taufik Hidayat

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I'd become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong. ~ Lily King

Culture is Anarchistic if it is alive at all. ~ Siva Vaidhyanathan

The multiculturalism movement must be unmasked for the fraud that it is. There are superior cultures, and ours is one of them. ~ Mitt Romney

The main shortcoming of humanistic scholarship is its extreme anthropocentrism. Nothing, it seems, matters in the creative arts and critical humanistic analyses except as it can be expressed as a perspective of present-day literate culture. Everything tends to be weighed by its immediate impact on people. Meaning is drawn from that which is valued exclusively in human terms. The most important consequence is that we are left with very little to compare with the rest of life. The deficit shrinks the ground on which we can understand and judge ourselves. ~ Edward O. Wilson

Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires. ~ Bell Hooks

After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture. ~ Jeffrey Deitch

Christianity is facing something of an identity crisis. Who are we to be to the twenty-first-century world? How should the church position itself in the postmodern culture? Through what cultural languages will the gospel be best communicated in this turbulent time? ~ Brett McCracken

The Crippled God scattered some seeds onto the brazier's coals. Popping sounds, then more smoke. 'Peace. Warm yourself, warrior, while I tell you of peace. History is unerring, and even the least observant mortal can be made to understand, through innumerable repetition. Do you see peace as little more than the absence of war? Perhaps, on a surface level, it is just that. But let me describe the characteristics of peace, my young friend. A pervasive dulling of the senses, a decadence afflicting the culture, evinced by a growing obsession with low entertainment. The virtues of extremity - honour, loyalty, sacrifice - are lifted high as shoddy icons, currency for the cheapest of labours. The longer peace lasts, the more those words are used, and the weaker they become. Sentimentality pervades daily life. All becomes a mockery of itself, and the spirit grows…restless. ~ Steven Erikson

The final end of abortion in America will come when every human being begins to appreciate his own life as a gift from God and the lives of those entrusted to his care as the true blessings they are. A culture that affirms life will not practice contraception nor will it murder its progeny. ~ Judie Brown

There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place. ~ C.S. Lewis

As Indigenous peoples, we know there is more to the world. We know spirits exist. We know as women, because we're especially attuned to this kind of knowledge, that spirits exist and have a presence in our lives. Some of us are gifted and can communicate with the spirit world. Not everyone has that gift and can perceive the borders between the living and the dead and our society actively discourages us of exploring the knowledge of what many of us have already always known in our cultures. ~ Sandra Cisneros

Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even. ~ Daniel Berrigan

You know, my dad was a lieutenant colonel at Ft. Lewis on the 3rd of March, 1941. Fifteen months later, he was commanding a theater of war. ~ John Eisenhower

We place such crazy importance on physical appearance in our image-obsessed culture, on youth and beauty to define our sense of self-worth, that aging, by default, becomes a kind of defect, something secret and corrosive and shameful. ~ Ruth Ozeki

It shouldn't surprise us that members of the same culture that gave us capitalism as the dominant economic model - based as it is on the insane notion that selfish individuals all attempting to maximally exploit each other will somehow create stable and healthy human communities (never mind that it never has and functionally cannot) - would give us variants of the selfish gene theory as the dominant biological model - based as it is on the equally insane notion that selfish individuals all attempting to maximally exploit each other will somehow create stable and healthy natural communities (never mind that it never has and functionally cannot). Both are justifications for what the dominant culture does: steal from everyone else. Absent ~ Derrick Jensen

The trend in modern American culture is toward ever more individualized eating ... and with every food added to the list of things one does not eat, the shorter becomes the list of people with whom one can enjoy table fellowship ... for those of us whose health permits, partaking readily of whatever is offered can be a way of affirming that eating together is at least as important as whatever it is that is eaten. ~ Margaret Kim Peterson

I think we've built a bit of a culture and a market around people who are open and seek out that social interaction. ~ Logan Green

The quotation-business is booming. No subdivision of the culture seems too narrow to have a quotation book of its own ... It would be an understatement to say that these books lean on one another. To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism. ~ James Gleick

I knew that Sundays in England aren't just ordinary dull Sundays, the same the world over, which demand that one simply tiptoe through without disturbing them or paying them the least attention, they are vaster and slower and more burdensome than anywhere else I know. ~ Javier Marias

I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I must say that the Katrina response does help me better understand the situation in Iraq, ... The best bet is that the president doesn't actually know what's happening there, is cocooned from reality, has no one in his high-level staff able to tell him what's actually happening, and has created a culture of denial and loyalty that makes fixing mistakes or holding people accountable all but impossible. ~ Andrew Sullivan

Drinking wine was not historically limited to people who could afford it. Western and European culture turned it into an elite thing. Winemakers were farmers and field workers. Everyday people. And that's who should enjoy and have access to wine. ~ Andre Hueston Mack

Youth culture is constantly evolving and Gen Z in particular is disrupting industries, says Witt. Gen Z represents an unprecedented group of innovation and entrepreneurship. This group is focused on niche interests and if brands don't recognize this now and get on board, they are going to be left behind. It's also important for brands to adopt a global mindset, as some of the most significant growth is taking place in countries that are either developing or underdeveloped. ~ Gregg L. Witt

In our generation there is no agreed-upon framework. All issues are up for grabs. Morality no longer has any broad-based theology upon which to rest its case. We are no longer a 'Christian nation,' not even a 'Judeo-Christian culture.' ~ F. LaGard Smith

True law necessarily is rooted in ethical assumptions or norms; and those ethical principles are derived, in the beginning at least, from religious convictions. When the religious understanding, from which a concept of law arose in a culture, has been discarded or denied, the laws may endure for some time, through what sociologists call "cultural lag"; but in the long run, the laws also will be discarded or denied.

With this hard truth in mind, I venture to suggest that the corpus of English and American laws--for the two arise for the most part from a common root of belief and experience--cannot endure forever unless it is animated by the spirit that moved it in the beginning: that is, by religion, and specifically by the Christian people. Certain moral postulates of Christian teaching have been taken for granted, in the past, as the ground of justice. When courts of law ignore those postulates, we grope in judicial darkness. . . .

We suffer from a strong movement to exclude such religious beliefs from the operation of courts of law, and to discriminate against those unenlightened who cling fondly to the superstitions of the childhood of the race.

Many moral beliefs, however, though sustained by religious convictions, may not be readily susceptible of "scientific" demonstration. After all, our abhorrence of murder, rape, and other crimes may be traced back to the Decalogue and other religious injunctions. If it can be shown that our oppositio ~ Russell Kirk

The nation will benefit in the long term if it continues to be open to foreign expertise. This will help the country to establish its business culture and environment faster, based on international best practice. ~ Hassanal Bolkiah

I think we've become a TV culture where we forget the live performer in front of us can see us. I think there is a self-centeredness that happens. There's nothing more important than what you are doing in that moment. So, unless it's an emergency, put your phone away. ~ Laura Benanti

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

॥दोहा॥
श्रीगुरु चरन सरोज रज, निज मनु मुकुरु सुधारि।
बरनउँ रघुबर बिमल जसु, जो दायकु फल चारि॥

Doha
With the dust of guru's lotus feet having,
I cleanse the mirror of my soul sparkling,
Raghuvar's spotless glory I be singing,
The four fruits of life it ever is giving.
- 303 - ~ Munindra Misra

Thus wuwei manifests itself in the adaptive integration of the interacting parts of units of a complex system. The tendency of wuwei is to lead a system toward a state of fractal congruence, a close fitting together, a coalescing, of its significant components. The cooperation of those components facilitates the functioning of the system on its new holistic level. At the highest levels of complexity, wuwei integrates human beings into the systems of the world. This process of integration represents a synergistic enhancement of Dao by empathic human participants in cooperation with nature and with the outgrowths of human nature that have emerged from our evolutionary history and constitute culture. Thus, a fractal self is such a human being who is a participant with others, open to various worlds within nature and culture, and this person becomes a potential facilitator of emergence. ~ David Jones

When it comes to branding and the ever-changing social media phenomenon, you're not a mushroom. In other words, you shouldn't be kept in the dark and fed a pile of...well, you get the idea. ~ David Brier

All higher education belongs only to the exception: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege. All great, all beautiful things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum. What contributes to the decline of German culture? That "higher education" is no longer a privilege - the democratism of Bildung, which has become "common" - too common. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

We make our own criminals, and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share. It has been said that a people get the kind of political leadership they deserve. I think they also get the kinds of crime and criminals they themselves bring into being. ~ Margaret Mead

The days became for Christina endless preparation. Ceaseless winds tore through her massing battle ranks, the grey cold sun above marking the timeless date. With skies of blue and cloud overhead, driving, uncompromising time stood still, lingering, as if giving Christina precious eons to perfect her shaving straight razor cuts of mind and sword. She worked alone now, forging the essence of herself in the policies and ways of hammer and anvil, pounding away with the classic, living Japanese blade. Her deft hands spun dervishly, wroughting out the iron of her will, fashioning a blade-mind remade unto her. --Brickley, The Lady and the Samurai ~ Douglas Laurent

My experiences have been, from the very beginning, cultural and creative. And my business has been a way of exposing the culture, exposing the artists so that the world could hear and see them. ~ Russell Simmons

We can schedule for it. Thursday, April 3rd, 3:05 ... start something. We can train for it, plan for it, announce it, and even hire for it. If initiating is as essential to the modern organization as it appears, we better be doing all of that and more. ~ Seth Godin

The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we, too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture! ~ Carl Bernstein