Hilversum Culture Quotes

To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were human, but with the sense that one is not. It is to find that one's language is hollow, and that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in one's favour. ~ Judith Butler

African-Americans are not a monolithic group. So, we tend to talk about the black community, the black culture, the African-American television viewing audience, but there are just as many facets of us as there are other cultures. ~ Malcolm-Jamal Warner

It is my ambition as a Dichter to maintain, for a small number of people who may happen to understand me and be accessible to my influence, a transcendent life, or at least the desire for it, in the midst of the money-and-war-culture which the world has become. ~ Hermann Hesse

It is implied in the New Testament vision that Christianity is not a culture-creating thing but rather a culture-influencing one... there can never be such a thing as a Christian culture; there can only be cultures in which the influence of Christianity is more or less apparent.The New Testament vision does not pit a "Christian culture" against a non-Christian culture; rather does it introduce a leavening into any existing culture into which it insinuates itself, a leaven whereby that already existing culture is then affected.... The New Testament's idea of societal compositism is the only real alternative to the stultifying ideologies that have given rise to the modern optionless and option forbidding totalitarian states. ~ Leonard Verduin

Literature is as old as human language, and as new as tomorrow's sunrise. And literature is everywhere, not only in books, but in videos, television, radio, CDs, computers, newspapers, in all the media of communication where a story is told or an image created.

It starts with words, and with speech. The first literature in any culture is oral. The classical Greek epics of Homer, the Asian narratives of Gilgamesh and the Bhagavad Gita, the earliest versions of the Bible and the Koran were all communicated orally, and passed on from generation to generation - with variations, additions, omissions and embellishments until they were set down in written form, in versions which have come down to us. In English, the first signs of oral literature tend to have three kinds of subject matter - religion, war, and the trials of daily life - all of which continue as themes of a great deal of writing. ~ Ronald Carter

As a general rule, man strives to avoid labor. Love for work is not at all an inborn characteristic: it is created by economic pressure and social education. One may even say that man is a fairly lazy animal. It is on this quality, in reality, that is founded to a considerable extent all human progress; because if man did not strive to expend his energy economically, did not seek to receive the largest possible quantity of products in return for a small quantity of energy, there would have been no technical development or social culture. ~ Leon Trotsky

Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Storytelling is the greatest activity of any culture. Storytelling is how you build a family, how you pass along identity. ~ Randall Wallace

No matter what is happening in the world, I continue to believe in humanity. The power of positive thinking is always enough. ~ Britt Skrabanek

It's trite to say that the world has gotten smaller in the age of globalization, but my travels have told me that it's wrong to think this means there is some kind of uniform world culture. ~ Norman Spinrad

As a culture, we've become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco. ~ Michael Moss

I see the true destiny of our people as lying not in time but in eternity. Political achievements, culture, struggles and national greatness are means, not ends in themselves. The ultimate goal is not life but resurrection. ~ Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

Houses are built brick-by-brick. HOMEs are built word-by-word. Houses don't build themselves. So YOU must build your home ~ Fela Durotoye

What we really want to do is to be left alone. We don't want Negroes around. We don't need Negroes around. We're not asking
you know, we don't want to have them, you know, for our culture. We simply want our own country and our own society. That's in no way exploitive at all. We want our own society, our own nation ... ~ David Duke

I'm grateful to be an American. I am grateful that we can be angry at the terrorist assault and at the same time be intelligent enough not to hold a grudge against every Arab and every Muslim. ~ Maya Angelou

Get out there and see your state. Go to museums and parks and historic sites. Get yourselves some culture so that when you do leave you can take it. ~ Jennifer Niven

We do not have a few "rotten apples"; we have a rotten-apple barrel and a pervasive culture of corruption. ~ Thomas J. Gradel

In America, the materio-economic conditions relate to a societal, multi-group existence in a way never before know in world history. American Negro nationalism can never create its own values, find its revolutionary significance, define its political and economic goals, until Negro intellectuals take up the cudgels against the cultural imperialism practiced in all of its manifold ramifications on the Negro within American culture. But this kind of revolution would have to be predicated on the recognition that the cultural and artistic originality of the American nation is founded, historically, on the ingredients of a black aesthetic and artistic base. ~ Harold Cruse

By 2007, we were finally living in a culture where people get what networks are and what technology can do to connect people. ~ Chris Hughes

Engineering -nature is engineering, so is culture, science is right behind, only chaos is not an engineer- and, along with it, the furious need to reproduce. ~ Elena Ferrante

I think it'd be useful for parents to know kind of what is the culture of an institution. ~ Margaret Spellings

Aesthetic culture is not the high-road to all the virtues, and, indeed, certain of the vices have been known to infest it. Neither, on the other hand, is there any special grace in ugliness. Art is only utterance. It must express something; and the vital question is, what does it express? ~ Lewis Foreman Day

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it. ~ Matthew Arnold

We are taking our culture and suturing it to America. Like gum on the bottom of a shoe, we are not going to disappear. Unlike other peoples who totally assimilated, we are more interested in co-assimilation. ~ John Leguizamo

All the screen cowboys behaved like real gentlemen. They didn't drink, they didn't smoke. When they knocked the bad guy down, they always stood with their fists up, waiting for the heavy to get back on his feet. I decided I was going to drag the bad guy to his feet and keep hitting him. ~ John Wayne

Without culture there can be no growth; without exertion, no acquisition; without friction, no polish; without labor, no knowledge; without action, no progress; and without conflict, no victory. The man who lies down a fool at night, hoping that he will waken wise in the morning, will rise up in the morning as he laid down in the evening. ~ Frederick Douglass

A Culture of clear consistent communication and connection is the foundation of a high performance team that thrives and flourishes. ~ Tony Dovale

A lot of the exercise of embracing identity as a political affirmation is not just simply parked in the question of skin color or culture, but more it is a political affirmation with all these implications and more. ~ Bocafloja

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries. ~ Carl Sagan

What can we say about a marketing culture that so openly feeds and colludes with obsession? The Disney empire has developed this to an unprecedented degree of professionalism. ~ Rowan Williams

The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one's thoughts even any crowded concert or art museum. ~ Joseph Epstein

Had my father loved my mother? He never spoke of her. I always imagined a traditional marriage between them--one built with the strong bones of respect, but stripped of the soft skin of love. ~ Kay Honeyman

The communists and fascists in politics are the analogues of the modernists in the fine arts. Both groups are in rebellion against the dominant sensate politico-economic and art systems; but both are essentially sensate. Accordingly, neither group can consitute the politico-economic or art system of the future. They are mainly destroyers and rebels – not constructive builders. They flourish only under the conditions peculiar to a period of transition. Being charged with destructive force, the modernists are too chaotic and distorted to serve as the bearers of a permanent art culture. ~ Pitirim Sorokin

I feel like a failure." The expression comes so naturally that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul. ~ Scott A. Sandage

If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival. ~ N. Katherine Hayles

Every new generation of women, it seems, feminist and housewife alike, is encouraged by popular culture to disavow its forebears and rebrand itself as an all-new, never-before-seen generational phenomenon, completely different in every way from what came before. The 'housewives' of the 1970s gave way to the Martha Stewart 'homemakers' of the 1980s, then the 'soccer moms' of the 1990s, then the stay-at-home moms of the 2000s. Next may come the homeschooling homesteaders of the impending post-apocalypse - who knows? What's significant is that the cycle of idealization, devaluation, and revision gives an appearance of progress, of superficial change, that distracts us from the big picture. ~ Carina Chocano

There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here, making ours not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality. Corporate decision makers, and even some two-bit entrepreneurs like my boss at The Maids, occupy an economic position miles above that of the underpaid people whose labor they depend on. For reasons that have more to do with class - and often racial - prejudice than with actual experience, they tend to fear and distrust the category of people from which they recruit their workers. Hence the perceived need for repressive management and intrusive measures like drug and personality testing. But these things cost money - $20,000 or more a year for a manager, $100 a pop for a drug test, and so on - and the high cost of repression results in ever more pressure to hold wages down. The larger society seems to be caught up in a similar cycle: cutting public services for the poor, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the 'social wage,' while investing ever more heavily in prisons and cops. And in the larger society, too, the cost of repression becomes another factor weighing against the expansion or restoration of needed services. It is a tragic cycle, condemning us to ever deeper inequality, and in the long run, almost no one benefits but the agents of repression themselves. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

They have, to be sure, their proportion of ne'er-do-weels, their pedants and lettered fools, but they have a surprisingly small proportion of them; they have not that culture of manner which we instinctively associate with university men, forgetting that in reality it is the heritage from cultured homes, and that no people a generation removed from slavery can escape a certain unpleasant rawness and gaucherie, despite the best of ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

The paradigm that is now receding has dominated our culture for several hundred years, during which it has shaped our modern Western society and has significantly influenced the rest of the world. This paradigm consists of a number of entrenched ideas and values, among them the view of the universe as a mechanical system composed of elementary building-blocks, the view of the human body as a machine, the view of life in society as a competitive struggle for existence, the belief in unlimited material progress to be achieved through economic and technological growth, and - last, not least - the belief that a society in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male is one that follows a basic law of nature. ~ Fritjof Capra

Pragmatism ... reflects with almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business culture, the very same attitude of 'being practical' as counter to which philosophical meditation as such was conceived. ~ Max Horkheimer

If I must choose, I'd rather be tuned in than 'turnt up'. ~ T.F. Hodge

Presence is a noun, not a verb; it is a state of being, not doing. States of being are not highly valued in a culture that places a high priority on doing. Yet, true presence or "being with" another person carries with it a silent power. ~ Jay Allison

Communion in faith, in the intimacy of meaning, cannot remain purely conceptual; it can maintain its vivifying energy only if it associates with communion in speech and action within a common space of social and cultural references. Faith needs culture. ~ Tariq Ramadan

The first thing Islam does is to destroy the self image of the believers. It convinces them that without Islam they are worthless creatures only fit for hellfire. It tells them that their culture is jahelyyah (ignorance) and their ancestral religion was taaghoti (satanic). They are made to despise their identity and selfhood and seek their glory in their submission to Islam and slavery to its deity who was Muhammad's own alter ego. ~ Ali Sina