Human Culture Quotes

If we make one criterion for defining the artist the impulse to make something new, or to do something in a new way - a kind of divine discontent with all that has gone before, however good - then we can find such artists at every level of human culture, even when performing acts of great simplicity. ~ Margaret Mead

Nature is the realm of the unspeakable. It has no voice of its own, and nothing to say. We experience the unspeakability of nature as its utter indifference to human culture. ~ James P. Carse

One of its (civilisations) most powerful weapons has always been 'barbarity': 'we' know that 'we' are civilised by contrasting ourselves with those we deem to be uncivilised, with those who do not -or cannot be trusted to - share our values. Civilisation is a process of exclusion as well as inclusion. The boundary between 'us' and 'them' may be an internal one (for much of world history the idea of a 'civilised woman' has been a contradiction in terms), or an external one, as the word 'barbarian' suggests; it was originally a derogatory and ethnocentric ancient Greek term for foreigners you could not understand, because they spoke in an incomprehensible babble: 'bar-bar-bar ...' The inconvenient truth, of course, is that so-called 'barbarians' may be no more than those with a different view from ourselves of what it is to be civilised, and of what matters in human culture. In the end, one person's barbarity is another person's civilisation. ~ Mary Beard

Humanity may destroy the possibilities for life on earth unless the freedom and power that we have acquired are channeled in new creative directions by a spiritual awareness and moral commitment that transcend nationalism, racism, sexism, religious sectarianism, anthropocentrism, and the dualism between human culture and nature. This is the great issue for the 1990s and the twenty-first century. ~ Steven Clark Rockefeller

An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep. ~ Barry Lopez

Nationality is the creative power of human culture, culture is the creative power of nationality. ~ A. C. Cuza

So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism - a new dark ages. ~ Philip Longman

We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.
(pg. 73, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine") ~ Wendell Berry

But what is more, if we have succeeded in adding to the basic understanding of our universe and ourselves, we will have made a contribution to the totality of human culture. ~ Haldan Keffer Hartline

Asking men to cut away their "feminine" traits asks them to cut away half their humanity, just as asking women to suppress their "masculine" traits asks them to deny their full autonomy.
What makes us human is not one or the other - the fist or the open palm - it's our ability to embrace both, and choose the appropriate action for the situation we're in. Because to deny one half - to burn down the world or refuse to defend the world from those who would burn it - is to deny our humanity and become something less than human. ~ Kameron Hurley

Christians are called to be an alternate city within every earthly city, an alternate human culture within every human culture - to show how sex, money, and power can be used in nondestructive ways; to show how classes and races that cannot get along outside of Christ can get along in him; and to show how it is possible to cultivate by using the tools of art, education, government, and business to bring hope to people rather than despair or cynicism. ~ Timothy Keller

Chauvet Cave is rather like the awakening of the modern human soul or I would say the awakening of modern human culture. Because Neanderthal men who still rode the landscape parallel to the people who did these paintings didn't have culture. There's no evidence of culture, no symbolic depiction, no evidence of music, no evidence of sculptures, no evidence of religious beliefs. ~ Werner Herzog

Human life has always been lived on the edge of precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would have never begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life." Life has never been normal. ~ C.S. Lewis

There is a lot of talking in human culture," Venomous told the other male in a low aside. "They debate everything and need words to calm them. I wager there is much talking during this custom. Watch me as I make our mate happy with words. ~ Penelope Fletcher

Spaceflight isn't just about doing experiments, it's about an extension of human culture. ~ Chris Hadfield

Many of us will also find it hard to abandon our belief that in man himself there dwells an impulse towards perfection, which has brought him to his present heights of intellectual prowess and ethical sublimation, and from which it might be expected that his development into superman will be ensured. But I do not believe in the existence of such an inner impulse, and I see no way of preserving this pleasing illusion. The development of man up to now does not seem to me to need any explanation differing from that of animal development, and the restless striving towards further perfection which may be observed in a minority of human beings is easily explicable as the result of that repression of instinct upon which what is most valuable in human culture is built. ~ Sigmund Freud

I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own right - either to criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack. ~ Richard Dawkins

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

Science works because the phenomenon being described can be relied on to remain the same. Even in quantum physics, where phenomena are changed by observation, the way in which observation interferes is regular and falls within a limited range of possibilities. Human culture, however, has the nasty habit of never staying the same for very long. ~ Julian Baggini

No human culture is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to understand, to learn, to inhabit another world. ~ Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion! ~ Daniel Dennett

Human culture is early human cooperation writ large. ~ Michael Tomasello

If I worried about that, I wouldn't have made a single record in my whole career. I think more and more, audiences appreciate something that is distinctive and different. Everyone always throws out this figure, 'Jazz is now down to three percent of the total record sales.' So does that mean it is not important? I think if we agree that human culture itself is important, then I think those three percent take on a greater significance. ~ Dave Douglas

Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture - one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce - rather than an articulated body of thought. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Sport is a product of human culture. America seems to need football at this state of our social development. When you get ninety million people watching a single game on television, it ... shows you that people need something to identify with. ~ Joe Paterno

From the point of view of political geography we are standing on one of the frontiers of human culture; for the man inside the rubber sack it was land's end, the shore of the world. ~ Edward Abbey

The bourgeoisie ... by its imperialist methods of appropriation is destroying the economic structure of the world and human culture generally. Nevertheless, the historical persistence of the bourgeoisie is colossal. It holds power, and does not wish to abandon it ... The red terror is a weapon utilised against a class, doomed to destruction which does not wish to perish. ~ Leon Trotsky

The idea is that human culture as broadly defined
art, politics, technology, religion, and so on
evolves in much the way biological species evolve: new cultural traits arise and may flourish or perish, and as a result whole institutions can belief systems form and change. ~ Robert Wright

We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature's most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation
the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered
is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture. ~ Marjorie Garber

Simply put, here amid the kingdoms of this world we have no continuing city. That's why we dare not become attached to the passing values of any human culture. ~ Harold L. Senkbeil

Religions, creeds, drama, poetry, games, folklore, folk tales, mythology, moral and aesthetic codes' elements of the political and juridical life affirming a personality's value , freedom and tolerance ; philosophy, theater, galleries , museums, libraries-this is the unbroken line of human culture, the first act of which has been played in heaven between God and man. That is climbing the holy mountain , the top of which remains unreachable' marching through darkness by means of the blazing candle carried by man.
Civilization is the continuation of technical rather than spiritual progress in the same way that Darwinian evolution is the continuation of biological rather than human progress. Civilization represents the development of the potential forces that existed in our less developed ancestors. It is a continuation of the natural , mechanical elements-that is, of the unconscious, senseless elements of our existence. Therefore, civilization is neither good nor bad in itself. Man must create civilization , just as he must breathe or eat. It is an expression of necessity and of our lack of freedom. Culture ,on the contrary, is the ever-present feeling of choice and expression of human freedom. ~ Alija Izetbegovic

On a surface level, regionalism is gone, if we define regionalism as human culture. But, what if we define regionalism as something older than human culture? ~ Cynthia Daignault

Does that mean that religious texts are worthless as guides to ethics? Of course not. They are magnificent sources of insight into human nature, and into the possibilities of ethical codes. Just as we should not be surprised to discover that ancient folk medicine has a great deal to teach modern hightech medicine, we should not be surprised if we find that these great religious texts hold versions of the very best ethical systems any human culture will ever devise. But, like folk medicine, we should test it all carefully, and take nothing whatever on faith. ~ Daniel C. Dennett

We contrast the urban and the natural, but that's a contemporary myth. We're animals, after all; our cities are organic products, fully as "natural" (whatever that word really means) as a termite hill or a rabbit warren. But how much more interesting: how much more complex, dressed in the intricacies and exfoliations of human culture, simple patterns iterated into infinite variation. And full of secrets, beyond counting. ~ Robert Charles Wilson

[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

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture. ~ Erich Fromm

I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally. ~ Terence McKenna

The state is the nursing mother of human culture. ~ Joseph Alexander Leighton

Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christian morality. Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause. ~ Frans De Waal

Trees are extraordinary revelations of the spirit in nature. And, given the multitude of ways that trees and their products benefit and enrich human culture, they are an especially appropriate symbol of the interdependence of spirit and nature. ~ Steven Clark Rockefeller

Private communication systems have been around since the beginning of human culture. ~ John McAfee

There are schools of thought and political movements that seek to purge human culture of imperialism, leaving behind what they claim is a pure, authentic civilisation, untainted by sin. These ideologies are at best naive; at worst they serve as disingenuous window-dressing for crude nationalism and bigotry. Perhaps ~ Yuval Noah Harari

As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today`s shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift. ~ Gabor Mate

Bankers cannot afford to be concerned with only the economic aspects of projects. There may be serious implications on the natural environment, the urban environment, on human culture. ~ Arthur Erickson

There were things of the times, and a few things that were timeless. The times came as a result of a particular human culture. The timeless came as a result of any human culture at all. And Cultural Man was a showman. He created display windows of culture for an audience of men, and paraded his aspirations and ideals and purposes thereon, and the displays were necessary to the continuity of the culture, to the purposeful orientation of the species.

Beyond one such window, he erected an altar, and placed a priest before it to chant a liturgical description of the heart-reasoning of his times. And beyond another window, he built a stage and set his talking dolls upon it to live a dramaturgical sequence of wishes and woes of his times.

True, the priests would change, the liturgy would change, and the dolls, the dramas, the displays--but the windows would never--no never--be closed as long as Man outlived his members, for only through such windows could transient men see themselves against the background of a broader sweep, see man encompassed by Man. A perspective not possible without the windows. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

Wherever learning breeds specialists, the sum of human culture is enhanced thereby. That is the illusion and consolation of specialists. ~ Antonio Machado

Christianity brings to fulfilment and completion imperfect and partial insights about reality, scattered abroad in human culture. Tolkien gave Lewis a lens, a way of seeing things, which ~ Alister E. McGrath

Imagine the kind of quantum leap that human culture would undertake if we were all suddenly given a direct link to the knowledge and experience of everyone else on the planet - if, when we made a decision, we were drawing from not just our own limited experience and expertise but from that of billions of other people. Big data has enabled this quantum leap for the cognitive development of robots. ~ Alec J. Ross

Nature doesn't need people - people need nature; nature would survive the extinction of the human being and go on just fine, but human culture, human beings, cannot survive without nature. ~ Harrison Ford

Idealism does not represent a superfluous expression of emotion, but in truth it has been, is, and will be, the premise for what we designate as human culture ... Without his idealistic attitude all, even the most dazzling faculties of the intellect, would remain mere intellect just like outward appearance without inner value, and never creative force ... The purest idealism is unconsciously equivalent to the deepest knowledge ... ~ Adolf Hitler

You shouldn't do science just to improve wealth - do science for the sake of human culture and
knowledge.
There must be some purpose in life that is higher than just surviving. ~ Gerhard

Because Christians are never as good as their right beliefs should make them and non-Christians are never as bad as their wrong beliefs should make them, we will adopt a stance of critical enjoyment of human culture and its expressions in every field of work. ~ Timothy Keller

As long as they are carnivorous and/or humanoid, the monster's form matters little. Whether it is Tyrannosaurus rex, saber toothed tiger, grizzly bear, werewolf, bogeyman, vampire, Wendigo, Rangda, Grendel, Moby-Dick, Joseph Stalin, the Devil, or any other manifestation of the Beast, all are objects of dark fascination, in large part because of their capacity to consciously, willfully destroy us. What unites these creatures--ancient or modern, real or imagined, beautiful or repulsive, animal, human, or god--is their superhuman strength, malevolent cunning, and, above all, their capricious, often vengeful appetite--for us. This, in fact, is our expectation of them; it's a kind of contract we have. In this capacity, the seemingly inexhaustible power of predators to fascinate us--to "capture attention"--fulfills a need far beyond morbid titillation. It has a practical application. Over time, these creatures or, more specifically, the dangers they represent, have found their way into our consciousness and taken up permanent residence there. In return, we have shown extraordinary loyalty to them--to the point that we re-create them over and over in every medium, through every era and culture, tuning and adapting them to suit changing times and needs. It seems they are a key ingredient in the glue that binds us to ourselves and to each other. ~ John Vaillant

If human culture continues on its present course and allows ten to one hundred species to go extinct every day,22 not only do we lose the beauty achieved by the individuals that perish, but, by weakening the harmony of the whole, we diminish the depth of intensity possible for every individual within that system. ~ Brian Henning

Only those who leave home ever really find it. ~ Gene Ruyle

And on the night before he suffers the worst that wayward human culture can do, this is what he does: he takes bread and wine into his hands, lifts them up, and blesses them. Bread and wine, not wheat and grapes. Bread and wine are culture, not just nature. They are good for food and a delight to the eyes. Jesus takes culture, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to his friends. Taken, broken, blessed, and given, these cultural goods, these "creatures of bread and wine" as the old prayer book had it, become sign and presence of God in the world. ~ W. David O. Taylor

Hegel claimed that the 'world spirit' is developing toward an ever-expanding knowledge of itself. It's the same with rivers
they become broader and broader as they get nearer to the sea. According to Hegel, history is the story of the 'world spirit' gradually coming to consciousness of itself. Although the world has always existed, human culture and human development have made the world spirit increasingly conscious of its intrinsic value. ~ Jostein Gaarder

For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture. ~ William Irwin Thompson

As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world. ~ Lev Manovich

God's revelation does not need the light of human genius, the polish and strength of human culture, the brilliancy of human thought, the force of human brains to adorn or enforce it; but it does demand the simplicity, the docility, humility, and faith of a child's heart. ~ E. M. Bounds

The paradox of the human condition is expressed more in education than elsewhere in human culture, because learning to learn has been and continues to be Homo Sapiens' most formidable evolutionary task ... It must also be clear that we will never quite learn how to learn, for since Homo Sapiens is self-changing, and since the more culture changes the faster it changes, man's methods and rate of learning will never quite keep pace with his need to learn. ~ Jules Henry

I think with world building, it's important to create a sense of culture even if it is just a fantasy, and the best way to do that is to look at a real human culture and see what makes it cohesive. ~ Laini Taylor

To me, science is an expression of the human spirit, which reaches every sphere of human culture. It gives an aim and meaning to existence as well as a knowledge, understanding, love, and admiration for the world. It gives a deeper meaning to morality and another dimension to esthetics. ~ Isidor Isaac Rabi

The doctrine of foods is of great ethical and political significance. Food becomes blood, blood becomes heart and brain, thoughts and mind stuff. Human fare is the foundation of human culture and thought. Would you improve a nation? Give it, instead of declamations against sin, better food. Man is what he eats [Der Mensch ist, was er isst]. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach

Myth and nature are the two great garments of the world, with nature being the living green garment that covers the planet and myth being the multidimensional, many-colored fabric that continually weaves human culture. ~ Michael Meade

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add - until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use. ~ Annie Dillard

Every artifact of human culture is a positive response to God's general revelation and simultaneously a rebellious assertion against His sovereign rule over us. ~ Timothy Keller

But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture. ~ E. O. Wilson

Mature development - does not come from severing the early infantile sense of unity with the Mother, but from reestablishing it. The holistic point of ancient women's religion was that the Mother is not one's personal maternal parent solely, but the entire community of women, the entire living earth, and beyond this the entire surrounding and ongoing cosmic process. One could not be alienated because one is always within this process, as it is always within the self. Unless, of course, such knowledge is suppressed from the outside, by patriarchal conditioning.
Truly, our very sanity is at stake with continuing patriarchy and the denial of the cosmic self - the Goddess - within us all, and within her.
The Great Mother was the projection of the self-experience of groups of highly aware and productive women who were the founders of much of human culture. In this sense the Great Mother is not simply a mental archetype, but a historical fact. ~ Monica Sjoo Barbara Mor

The differences between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature. ~ Margaret Mead

In the area of linguistics, there are major language
groups: Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, English, Portuguese,
Greek, German, French, and so on. Most of us grow up
learning the language of our parents and siblings, which
becomes our primary or native tongue. Later, we may learn
additional languages but usually with much more effort.
These become our secondary languages. We speak and
understand best our native language. We feel most
comfortable speaking that language. The more we use a
secondary language, the more comfortable we become
conversing in it. If we speak only our primary language and
encounter someone else who speaks only his or her
primary language, which is different from ours, our
communication will be limited. We must rely on pointing,
grunting, drawing pictures, or acting out our ideas. We can
communicate, but it is awkward. Language differences are
part and parcel of human culture. If we are to communicate
effectively across cultural lines, we must learn the language
of those with whom we wish to communicate.
In the area of love, it is similar. Your emotional love
language and the language of your spouse may be as
different as Chinese from English. No matter how hard you
try to express love in English, if your spouse understands
only Chinese, you will never understand how to love each
other. My friend on the plane was speaking the language of< ~ Gary Chapman

This two-kingdoms doctrine strongly affirms that God has made all things, that sin corrupts all aspects of life, that Christians should be active in human culture, that all lawful cultural vocations are honorable, that all people are accountable to God in every activity, and that Christians should seek to live out the implications of their faith in their daily vocations. A Christian, however, does not have to adopt a redemptive vision of culture in order to affirm these important truths. ~ David VanDrunen

In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition. ~ Margaret Mead

The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. ~ C.S. Lewis

I have the shape of a human being and organs equivalent to those of a human being. My organs, in fact, are identical to some of those in a prosthetized human being. I have contributed artistically, literally, and scientifically to human culture as much as any human being now alive. What more can one ask? ~ Isaac Asimov

As soon as we have the power to release our minds from the immediate here and now, in a sense we are free. We are free to revisit the past, free to reframe the present, and free to anticipate a whole range of possible futures. Imagination is the foundation of everything that is uniquely and distinctively human. It is the basis of language, the arts, the sciences, systems of philosophy, and the all the vast intricacies of human culture. ~ Ken Robinson

Culture is not made up but something that evolves which is human. ~ Edward T. Hall

I plead for conservation of human culture, which is much more fragile than nature herself. We needn't destroy other cultures with the force of our own. ~ Arthur Erickson

Orphan Wisdom is a teaching house and a learning house for the skills of making human culture.

Knowledge, in an information-drunk, competence addicted culture like our own, must be the life-tested skill of gathering what is needed to make life without killing life in the gathering.

Wisdom is the place where knowledge is fired, forged, and annealed to become something of great beauty, useful to the world.

Human Culture is made when that beauty swells into life and dies to nourish a time we won't live to see.

Knowledge gathers wood and flint and gut. Wisdom conjures a cranky, playable fiddle from the gatherings. People who have been bathed in the grief and love for life play some small magnificence on those fiddles together, and sing their unknown songs, and make human culture. ~ Stephen Jenkinson

How is it [, then] that the leaders of our society have seen fit to try to eliminate this one very important means of learning and self-discovery, this means which has been used, respected, and honored for thousands of years, in every human culture of which we have a record? ~ Alexander Shulgin

Take mankind in general, they are vicious-their passions may be operated upon. ~ Alexander Hamilton

I like the idea of not everything happening between two human beings to be everyone's property. ~ Martin Freeman

In hunting and agriculture work had been a sacred function, one of collaborating with the forces of nature, and invoking the gods of fertility and organic abundance to countenance with their favor the efforts of the human community: pious exaltation and cosmic wonder mingled with strenuous muscular exercise and meticulous ritual. But for those who were drafted into the megamachine, work ceased to be a sacred function, willingly performed, with many pleasurable rewards in both the act and its fruition: it became a curse. ~ Lewis Mumford

How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated. ~ Annie Dillard

Via the squares on the chessboard, the Indians explain the movement of time and the age, the higher influences which control the world and the ties which link Chess with the human soul ~ Al-Masudi

But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair. ~ Haruki Murakami

Radical Islam and fundamental Christianity have one goal, and that goal is total world domination. Radical Islam would accomplish this by killing all the infidels and apostates. Fundamental Christianity would accomplish this by dumbing down the entire human race via inaccurate understandings of history and science. ~ Al Stefanelli

Although we are necessarily concerned, in a chronicle of events, with physical action by the light of day, history suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours between midnight and dawn. Those dark fruitful hours, seldom recorded, whose secret flowerings breed peace and war, loves and hates, the crowning or uncrowning of heads. ~ Joan Lindsay

We're all black, and we all love to be black, and we all sing from our own hymn sheet. We're all surely black people, but we may be finally approaching a point of human history where you can't talk up or down to us anymore, but only to us. He's talking down to white people - how curious it sounds the other way round! In order to say such a thing, one would have to think collectively of white people, as a people of one mind who speak with one voice - a thought experiment in which we have no practice. But it's worth trying. It's only when you play the record backward that you hear the secret message. 3 ~ Zadie Smith

I think human beings matter more than stones. (Signor Richetti) ~ Agatha Christie

If Mr. [V.S.] Naipaul takes no pleasure in the happy delineation of the varieties of human nature, then he must be intolerably stupid. ~ Rosanne Cash

I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture till I feel - till I am - nothing. As it happens, I like it that way. ~ Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Dr. Luce introduced the concept of "periphescence". The word itself means nothing; Luce made it up to avoid any etymological associations. The state of periphescence, however, is well known. It denotes the first fever of human pair bonding. It causes giddiness, elation, a tickling on the chest wall, the urge to climb a balcony on the rope of the beloved's hair. Periphescence denotes the inital drugged and happy bedtime where you sniff your lover like a scented poppy for hours running. (It lasts, Luce explained, up to two years
tops.) ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

his refusal to be seduced by new ideas or faraway places, but walking through the tiny twisting streets of New Delhi, Annie understood that Desmond's world was limited by fear. He couldn't bear to step out of the known, the familiar. In Europe he could understand the rudiments of language, the coordinates of the culture, but elsewhere he was flummoxed. The same went, she began to understand, for his absolute reliance on order and routine. ~ Hannah Mary Rothschild

Because animals seem to dwell in the present moment,
because their own presence is so instinctive,
their attention so unwavering, the offer us
a different kind of compassion than humans do.
Anyone is lucky to have both human and
animal comfort in their lives. ~ Brenda Peterson

The older I get the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first. A process which often reduces the most complex human problem to a manageable proportion. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

And right then, I come the closest I think I ever will to understanding why Knight left. He left because the world is not made to accommodate people like him. He was never happy in his youth -- not in high school, not with a job, not being around other people. It made him feel constantly nervous. There was no place for him, and instead of suffering further, he escaped. It wasn't so much a protest as a quest; he was like a refugee from the human race. The forest offered him shelter (p 182) ~ Michael Finkel

He got right down in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn't going to come. That's it. That's the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being. ~ Denis Johnson

Sometimes I am happy and sometimes not. I am, after all, a human being, you know. And I am glad that we are sometimes happy and sometimes not. You get your wisdom working by having different emotions. ~ Yoko Ono

There is no human relationship that is not based on self-interest ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana