Culture Critique Quotes

Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness. ~ Theodor W. Adorno

What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork. ~ Irene Nemirovsky

It is more satisfying to sacrifice oneself for the poor victim than to enable the other to overcome their victim status and perhaps become even more succesfull than ourselves ~ Slavoj Zizek

After college I got a job and started working. This new career had absolutely nothing to do with my degree. ~ Jason Najum

The God of revealed religions - and by this I mean religions like yours - is a profoundly inarticulate God. No matter how many times he tries, he can't make himself clearly or completely understood. He speaks for centuries to the Jews, but fails to make himself understood. At last he sends his only-begotten son, and his son can't seem to do any better. ~ Daniel Quinn

Countless others, however, failed to escape the relentless pursuit of the auditors, who assured society that law would prevail. They hunted those who tried to circumvent their rules, which were harsh to prevent the city's power supply from failing. The rules had to be harsh to avoid bad precedents.
Nobody had the freedom to spontaneously use their imagination. This was the order of things. ~ Alexandre A. Loch

Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation? ~ Barry Lopez

The Swiss will never be the wild child of Europe; you only have to look at their lovingly tended vegetable patches to see that. But whether they are boring or not most likely depends on the eye of the beholder. ~ Clare O'Dea

You were born in a culture and you are given many information about many things; unless you yourself investigate the truth of all these information, do not consider them as true information! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Because we imagine that we are what humanity was divinely destined to become, we assume that our prehistoric ancestors were trying to be us, but just lacked the tools and techniques to succeed. We invest our ancestors with our own predelictions in what seem to us primitive and unevolved forms. As an example of all this, we take it for granted that our religions represent humanity's ultimate and highest spiritual development and expect to find among our ancestors only crude, fumbling harbingers of these religions. We certainly don't expect to find robust, fully developed religions whose expressions are entirely different from ours. ~ Daniel Quinn

In WASP families, if you don't get along with someone, you have as little to do with them as possible. In Jewish families, you move next door, to make them as miserable as possible. ~ Doreen Orion

We live in the world with you. We do not forsake forum or bath or workshop, or inn, or market, or any other place of commerce. We sail with you, fight with you, farm with you. ~ Tertullian

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes. ~ Peter Kreeft

It's the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim ~ Jason Najum

Mollycoddling was the mother's duty; the father's lay elsewhere. As a consequence, his four older children feared and respected him, as they had been taught to do, and the love the professed to feel, had they been asked and had they answered truthfully or even had access to the truth, was of a duty-bound, obligatory kind too, a love issuing from commandment and tradition and the notion of family, not one from the tides of the heart or the unbridled, inexplicable pull of feelings. If painted, that love would take the form of a polite and manicured wash of pleasant colours, not the hurl-and-splatter of impastoed reds. ~ Neel Mukherjee

I don't really like organizations where people are "deemed" things. ~ Mindy Kaling

He found it puzzling that so many rural people were hostile to, even terrified of, the place where they lived. It wasn't just that hard-working country folk had no time for the precious concerns of the effete urban environmentalists, what amazed Rice was how you could spend your whole life physically immersed in a particular ecological system and yet remain blinded to it by superstition, tradition, prejudice. Out west, it was ranchers' holy war on predators and their veneration of Indo-European domestic animals they husbanded on land too dry to support them. Here in the Appalachians, you saw rugged country men who refused to walk in the woods all summer because they were scared of snakes. ~ James A. McLaughlin

I'm old enough to have lived in a country where, if you were willing to work hard, you could have a fairly nice life. You could support your family, and even get a shot at owning your own home. But you never thought you'd get a swimming pool. Now culture has hypnotised people into thinking they're really nothing if they're not wealthy and a Kardashian. ~ Tom Petty

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire said that the following five attributes marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor (this could be among countries in the family of nations as well as in a single nation); third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state. It all sounds so familiar. We have come a long road since our first chapter, and we are back in Rome. ~ Francis A. Schaeffer

When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture. ~ Bell Hooks

A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death. Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death will be no small task, but we shouldn't forget how quickly other cultural prejudices--racism, sexism, homophobia--have begun to topple in the recent past. It is high time death had its own moment of truth. ~ Caitlin Doughty

Many people are caught up with the toys of contemporary society. Because of great advancements in our culture, some have cultivated an attitude of "comfortability." They may be going to hell, but it is going to be a comfortable ride for them. ~ A.W. Tozer

We've always believed that popular culture and populist politics go hand in hand. It's an honor to be working with so many respected and influential artists, and we're indebted to them for having the courage to speak out at a time when our country so desperately needs change. For our 2.5 million members and far beyond, the Vote for Change tour will have a seismic cultural impact. ~ Eli Pariser

The kind of people who can assemble huge crowds into one spot will be the major influences on mass culture in the next decade. The rock enthusiasts have created some of the most exciting theatrical events on the planet. ~ Jim Morrison

There's never been a culture that wasn't obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The unity and congruity of culture and nature, work and love, morality and sexuality, longed for from time immemorial, will remain a dream as long as man continues to condemn the biological demand for natural sexual gratification. ~ Wilhelm Reich

The world's culture is changing, adapting. People are keeping what's good in a culture, and sweeping out the rest. ~ Georgie Anne Geyer

William Carey chides his countrymen for deciding it would be impossible for the Gospel to travel over great distances and to penetrate varied cultures when they are willing to face the same trials for the sake of commerce. ~ William Carey

Culture is coded wisdom ~ Wangari Maathai

Here is the mistake of the cut-and-dried man of culture. He goes about with the secret of having learned to appreciate the "grandstyle." He has lived in Homer till he can recall the roll of that many-sounding sea. He has pored over the lofty and pictorial thought of Plato till he begins to pique himself upon its grandeur. His fancy has been fed on the quaint old-world genius of Herodotus, his judgment on the melancholy wisdom of Tacitus and the complacent cynicism of Gibbon
and of all this he is conscious and proud. ~ Richard Holt Hutton

Vietnam is still, as it was thirty years ago, a poor country of rice paddy farms and sandy harbors, where fishermen cast nets from boats with eyes painted on the bows. It is overcrowded, prey to floods and sweatshops, dotted by modern cities and tiny hamlets of thatched huts with TV antennae. It is not a great capital of industry, or an international oil field or bread basket. There is nothing in Vietnam, now, that America truly needs. And there was even less thirty years ago. This country, these people, posed no real threat to us. It was a strange place to send our youth - not to learn a new culture or to enjoy the beaches, but to kill and be killed, to be maimed and to patch up the maimed. I am convinced that, to our government, Vietnam really, truly Didn't Mean Nothing. ~ Susan O'Neill

In a real sense, all of us are "the parents" of all young children - because we help shape the culture and determine its values. ~ Sydney J. Harris

Conventional, organized religion, in its most decadent form, is an inert parody of the genuine religious experience as much as modern occult organizations are degenerate parodies of forgotten religions. ~ Zeena Schreck

We realized that the world of popular culture had been creating the perfect candidate for many years: the female champion of the universe. ~ Nick Offerman

Sanity is a matter of culture and convention. If it's a crazy culture you live in, then you have to be irrational to want to conform. A completely rational person would recognize that the culture was crazy and refuse to conform. But by not conforming, he is the one who would be judged crazy by that particular society. ~ Margaret Millar

But people are not butterflies, right.
People are, well, more important than butterflies.
We have opposable thumbs, hello.
You can't possibly compare the sanctity of a human's life with that of a butterfly. In our culture you can and, indeed, must quantify sanctity, and butterflies have less than people. ~ Inga Muscio

[Bruno] Latour argues that one of the foundational gestures of western modernity has been the effort to formulate and police a heightened antimony between nonhuman nature and human culture.

-- Randall Styers, Making Magic, p. 17 ~ Randall Styers

Before anyone learns my last name, they always assume I have some type of Latin background in me somewhere. I love it! I think the Latin culture is sexy. It's one of my goals to learn to speak Spanish one day; then I will really be able to fool people! ~ Torrey DeVitto

The sociology of knowledge has taught us to recognize the fact, which is obvious once it is stated, that in every human society there is what Peter Berger calls a "plausibility structure," a structure of assumptions and practices which determine what beliefs are plausible and what are not. It is easier to see the working of the plausibility structure in a culture of a different time or place than it is to recognize it in one's own. ~ Lesslie Newbigin

On school culture: It's hard to eat something you've had a relationship with. ~ Andy Hargreaves

It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends. ~ Christopher Dawson

There is no alternative. A Democrat is a Republican is a big businessman, and we're all consumers instead of citizens. It just manifests in the culture, in the music, in the art. I feel a little panicky about it. ~ Ani DiFranco

In American culture you leave home at 18. In the Asian culture, your parents don't really want you to leave home. So my parents just thought I was going to be one of those kids. I was like, "I'm never going to make a living at whatever I do." I just liked pretty things. ~ Jason Wu

People in the U.S. are more cranked up on pharmaceutical drugs than any other culture in the world today. I want people using safer medicine. And that means plant medicine. ~ Chris Kilham

'Muslim' is not a political party. 'Muslim' is not a single culture. Muslims go to war with each other. There are more Muslims in India, Russia and China than in most Muslim-majority nations. 'Muslim' is not a homogenous entity. ~ Maajid Nawaz

In general, I feel so much of pop culture is set in the generic big city, particularly comics. I feel like there are so many other stories to tell. ~ Jeff Lemire

The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture. ~ Robert McAfee Brown

Some readers were aware that the novels they loved amounted to a propaganda campaign, that the love stories had a particular agenda that might or might not have anything at all to do with reality. But then as now, being a canny and independent-minded consumer of popular media did not bar one from also enjoying being manipulated by it. ~ Hanne Blank

Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can't bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.

As American universities, British playwrights, and Australian judges once understood, the 'safe space' is where cultures go to die. ~ Mark Steyn

For the multiculturist/diversity crowd, culture, ideas, customs, arts and skills are a matter of racial membership where one has no more control over his culture than his race. That's a racist idea, but it's politically correct racism. It says that one's convictions, character and values are not determined by personal judgment and choices but genetically determined. In other words, as yesteryear's racists held: race determines identity. ~ Walter E. Williams

Man is a culture, nothing but a culture! Question your culture! Just like monkeys picking lice from their skin, get rid of the stupidities in your culture! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

It is difficult for my fellow countrymen who have never lived abroad to understand that until a foreign man is about sixty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he'd like to punch an American in the face. Even people like the Chinese, who mostly like us, think of us
at least partly
as loud, fat, poorly dressed, overprivileged, hectoring, naive, arrogant, self-righteous bullies with little knowledge and no interest in any culture other than our own. I once had a conversation with a Japanese journalist who said to me, "You don't seem like an American." When I asked him, slightly hurt, why he said that, he replied, "Because you listen. ~ Matthew Polly

Corporate strategy is usually only useful if you get people engaged with helping you to make it work. ~ Max McKeown

The law exists for a reason. There is a dominant American culture that people used to want to preserve. That's going by the wayside, too. But if it's now okay for an illegal alien to practice law in California, then can anybody else who's broken the law get a law license? And if not, why not? ~ Rush Limbaugh