World Culture Quotes

Some of the mini-worlds that filmmakers have created are so ingrained in my love of culture. ~ Drew Barrymore

What does the blessing of heaven mean? We know the kirin is just an animal, not a mythical creature.
It has become a symbol now ... That is the way human beings deal with the world. ~ Lian Hearn

Any chemist reading this book can see, in some detail, how I have spent most of my mature life. They can become familiar with the quality of my mind and imagination. They can make judgements about my research abilities. They can tell how well I have documented my claims of experimental results. Any scientist can redo my experiments to see if they still work-and this has happened! I know of no other field in which contributions to world culture are so clearly on exhibit, so cumulative, and so subject to verification. ~ Donald Cram

I was very curious about the world even at a young age, and I don't know at what point I became aware that other cultures believed in different religions, and my question was, 'Well, why don't they get to go to Heaven then?' ~ Brad Pitt

The end of World War I also marked the end of bourgeois culture. An inner emptiness developed that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, paved the way for two ideologies that dragged Europe and the world into an abyss and plunged it into a catastrophe. ~ Walter Kasper

It takes 5 to 7 years to turn a novice into a case officer capable of working in the capitals of the world. ~ Tim Weiner

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

One potential remedy for human stupidity is a dose of humility. National, religious and cultural tensions are made worse by the grandiose feeling that my nation, my religion and my culture are the most important in the world – hence my interests should come before the interests of anyone else, or of humankind as a whole. How can we make nations, religions and cultures a bit more realistic and modest about their true place in the world? ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Modern Existentialism ... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe. ~ William Barrett

In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race, ... it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One's own products are likely to be personal or parochial. ~ Paul Goodman

Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world. ~ Paul Theroux

It doesn't matter whether a sequence of words is called a history or a story: that is, whether it is intended to follow a sequence of actual events or not. As far as its verbal shape is concerned, it will be equally mythical in either case. But we notice that any emphasis on shape or structure or pattern or form always throws a verbal narrative in the direction we call mythical rather than historical.(p.21) ~ Northrop Frye

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

Learning to communicate in and with a culture of science is a much broader undertaking than mastering a body of discrete conceptual or procedural knowledge. One observer, for example, describes the process of science education as one in which learners must engage in "border crossings" from their own everyday world culture into the subculture of science.1 The subculture of science is in part distinct from other cultural activities and in part a reflection of the cultural backgrounds of scientists themselves. ~ Heidi A. Schweingruber

Believe it or not, entertainment is part of our American diplomacy, it is part of what makes us exceptional, part of what makes us such a world power. Hundreds of millions of people may never set foot in the United States, but thanks to you, they've experienced a small part of what makes our country special. They've learned something about our values. We have shaped a world culture through you ... in a way that has made the world better. ~ Barack Obama

The spiral in a snail's shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way galaxy, and it's also the same mathematically as the spirals in our DNA. It's the same ratio that you'll find in very basic music that transcends cultures all over the world. ~ Joseph Gordon-Levitt

I may have destroyed world culture, but MTV wouldn't exist today if it wasn't for me. ~ George Lois

In the world of football and of sport in general there is still a taboo around homosexuality. Everyone ought to live freely with themselves, their desires and their sentiments. We must all work for a sporting culture that respects the individual in every manifestation of his truth and freedom. ~ Cesare Prandelli

An indigenous feminism has been present in every culture in the world and in every period of history since the suppression of women began. ~ Robin Morgan

Scripture is so counter culture. Christ was counter culture. It's not like we're supposed to be weird or anything, but as we grow closer to Christ, we won't care about the things of the world as much. As a believer, you're just going to be countercultural. That's the way its always been and it will always continue to be that way. That's why it's important for us as believers to encourage other believers that it's okay to be that way. ~ Alan Powell

St. Petersburg is a gem of world culture and Russia's most European city. ~ Valentina Matviyenko

Perhaps because our culture and politics have gone so off course, with values so contrary to those of Jesus, more and more people intuitively recognize that His vision of God's kingdom-a new world of compassion, justice, integrity and peace- is the Good News they've been searching and waiting for. ~ Tony Campolo

He considered China's interference in Korea to be an intolerable attempt to prevent the spread of enlightenment, and the war itself not merely a struggle between two countries but a "battle for the sake of world culture."49 ~ Donald Keene

He [The Dalai Lama] has made it his mission to say, "We can't afford to squabble over minor differences, we have to concentrate on what we have in common, our common mission, our common culture - and indeed what we have in common with the rest of the world." ~ Pico Iyer

The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250] ~ Northrop Frye

Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life. ~ Hannah Arendt

Obama sees the world in two ways: from the black perspective and from the white perspective. He was raised as a black man, whose culture he has self-consciously adopted. But he was reared largely by his white grandparents. He lived a kind of racially bipartisan experience, and he will be able to speak a language that resonates with both communities. ~ Michael Eric Dyson

One thing that is not to be underestimated is American culture's influence on the rest of the world. ~ Yael Stone

Iran, in its former incarnation as Persia, created the world's first empire, produced titanic figures like Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, and is one of the great fonts of world culture. ~ Stephen Kinzer

The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they're charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don't even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world. ~ Meghan Daum

The formal definition of impact is a forcible contact between two things, and God has designed our lives for a collision course with the world. ~ David Platt

The transcendent experience is common to every culture in the world. ~ Edgar Mitchell

I don't see why, if you look at how the Australian culture and psyche is, that we can't be amongst the most generous, from the grassroots up, nations in the world. ~ Andrew Forrest

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

At some point I started getting published, and experienced a meager knock-kneed standing in the literary world, and I started to get almost everything that many of you graduates are hoping for
except for the money. I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled
all the things that the culture tells you, from preschool on, will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you. I got some stature, the respect of other writers, even a low-grade fame. The culture says these things will save you, as long as you also manage to keep your weight down. But the culture lies. ~ Anne Lamott

We want our children to know and believe the one good story. Every other story is a copy or shadow of this one. Some copies of it are quite good and shout the Truth. Others see only the faintest whisper of it, or, in its absence remind us of the Truth. We want our kids to know the one good story so well that when they see Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Frodo, Anne of Green Gables, Arielle, or Sleeping Beauty, they can recognize the strands of Truth and deception in them. Saturating our children in the one good story will enable them to discern Truth and error as it comes to them from the world. ~ Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

In many other cultures, and certainly in the Eastern world, there's great value put on being, contemplating, and even withdrawing from the world at certain times or for certain periods of time. But we don't really have that in our culture, so it's difficult for many Westerners to learn how to sit down or lie down and just be quiet without going to sleep. We're just not trained to do it. ~ Shakti Gawain

Judaism is one of the last of the world's matrilineal philosophies. Matriarchies are always the cultures that patriarchy attacks and decimates, because they don't spend all their money on the military like patriarchy does. They are easy prey. ~ Roseanne Barr

In the whole world no poor devil is lynched, no wretch is tortured, in whom I too am not degraded and murdered. ~ Aime Cesaire

Culture carries no privilege to exist. Cultures do not have value simply because they are. Some cultures, the world is better off without. ~ Terry Goodkind

What we men share is the experience of having been raised by women in a culture that stopped our fathers from being close enough to teach us how to be men, in a world in which men were discouraged from talking about our masculinity and questioning its roots and its mystique, in a world that glorified masculinity and gave us impossibly unachievable myths of masculine heroics, but no domestic models to teach us how to do it. ~ Frank Pittman

Asked to make a list of the men who have most dominated the thinking of the modern world, many educated people would name Freud, Einstein, Marx and Darwin. Of these four, only Darwin was not Jewish. In a world where Jews are only a tiny percentage of the population, what is the secret of the disproportionate importance the Jews have had in the history of Western culture? ~ Ernest Van Den Haag

Photography has fooled the world. There's no more convincing fraud. Its images are nothing but the expression of the invisible man working behind the camera. They are not reality, they form part of the language of culture. ~ Edmundo Desnoes

One of the popular views in the liberal circles of the West is that we are actually 'all victims of capitalism'. I disagree. This savage global capitalism is only one of the most terrible bi-products of the dominant Western culture of racism, greed, brutality and unbridled desire to control the world. ~ Andre Vltchek

I put so much pop culture in my movies because we speak about pop culture all the time. But, for some reason, movies exist in a world where there's no pop culture. ~ Will Gluck

Each of us has a mission ... each of us is called to change the world, to work for a culture of life, a culture forged by love and respect for the dignity of each human person. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

We grew up creating this whole world view for ourselves because it's not there in the culture. What am I? And I have to build this world view in the absence of books, radio and television, anything, even conversation, Mom or Dad or brother or sister or friends. I have to build a world view of who I am or I go stark, raving mad. Every transsexual in the past has had to do this. ~ Kate Bornstein

Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world. ~ Helder Camara

The scene is France. The theater is the world. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Everything that feminism stands for is everything American, white, red and blue democratic. It is all the same stuff. So, I am boggled that I should have to give up this term that encapsulates what I want for my children, for my world, culture, brothers and sister because someone else thinks it means I don't shave my armpits. ~ Kelly Sue DeConnick

Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, culture corrects the theory of success. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imagine
the whole world wired to Harry Cohn's ass! ~ Herman J. Mankiewicz

People carry around with them internalization's fixed-feature space learned early in life. Man is like other members of the animal kingdom , first, last and always a prisoner of his biological organism. No matter how hard he tries, it is impossible for him to the best himself of his own culture, where it has penetrated to the roots of his nervous system and determines how he perceives the world. ~ Edward T. Hall

This is what the Apologists can teach us about the world, culture, and philosophy. The pendulum steadily swings between contempt and wonder. The aim is not compromise between these stances, rather we need both the extremes of the swing simultaneously. Each extreme taken on its own is too confined for Christian teaching, and so: neither unconditional rejection, nor unconditional embrace. ~ Dariusz Karlowicz

Well, if you look at all of the cultures in America, this is a great opportunity for us to really get acquainted with the rest of the world. America is the only place you can do that, but we don't have sense enough to take advantage of that. ~ Erykah Badu

We live today in a world in which nobody believes choices should have consequences. But may I tell you the great secret that our culture seeks to deny? You cannot escape the consequences of your choices. Time runs in only one direction. ~ Stephen L. Carter

No race has the last word on culture and on civilization. You do not know what the black man is capable of; you do not know what he is thinking and therefore you do not know what the oppressed and suppressed Negro, by virtue of his condition and circumstance, may give to the world as a surprise. ~ Marcus Garvey

Our culture encourages us to plan every moment and fill our schedules with one activity and obligation after the next, with no time to just be. But the human body and mind require downtime to rejuvenate. I have found my greatest moments of joy and peace just sitting in silence, and then I take that joy and peace with me out into the world. ~ Holly Mosier

The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system. ~ Salman Rushdie

A society or culture which is disposed to view the world in Manichean terms will be more vulnerable to control by propaganda. ~ Alex Carey

Hollywood, America's greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind. ~ Camille Paglia

Despite the fact we give hurricanes names like Katrina and Rita, a hurricane isn't a self-contained unit. A hurricane is an impermanent, ever-changing phenomenon arising out of a particular set of interacting conditions - air pressure, ground temperature, humidity, wind and so on. The same applies to us: we aren't self-contained units either. Like weather patterns, we are also an impermanent, ever-changing phenomenon arising out of a particular set of interacting conditions. Without food, water, air and shelter, we'd be dead. Without our genes, family, friends, social history, and culture, wouldn't act or feel as we do. ~ Kristin Neff

If you have millions of dollars you are not going to get to continue doing what you want. You are into a world of commitment to that money and all the people that helped you get that money. ~ Jonathan Frid

What on earth have you packed in here? Bricks?" asked Mo as he carried Meggie's book-box out of the house.
You're the one who says books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them," said Meggie. ~ Cornelia Funke

The world, it treats you kind enough so long as you're not fightin against it. ~ Alden Bell

Children of those ancient Aryans, through the grace of the Lord may you have the same pride, may that faith in your ancestors come into your blood, may it become a part and parcel of your lives, may it work towards the salvation of the world! ~ Swami Vivekananda

Everything that ever gets done in this world is done by madmen, ~ Aldous Huxley

I just try to get people to laugh - I'm not trying to change the world or anything. ~ Drew Carey

The song was the late Ishihara Yujiro's "Rusty Knife," and Sakaguchi's singing was so bad that it
gave the lyric a strange new pathos and poignancy. Listening to his version, Suzuki Midori was
reminded that no one ever said it would be easy to go on living in this world; Takeuchi Midori
pondered the noble truth that nobody's life consists exclusively of happy times; Henmi Midori
vowed to remember that it's best to keep an open heart and forgive even those who've
trespassed against us; and Tomiyama Midori had to keep telling herself that hitting rock bottom
is in fact the first step to a hopeful new future. ~ Ryu Murakami

Modern techniques have torn down state frontiers, both economical and intellectual. The growth of means of transport has created a world market and an opportunity for division of labor embracing all the developed and most of the undeveloped states. ~ Christian Lous Lange

The Federal Reserve is one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this nation is run by the international bankers. ~ Louis Thomas McFadden

Dalai Lama was leading his country during the rigors of World War II, he was in Beijing for a year in 1954; he was up against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai from the time that he was fifteen. So he's no newcomer or naive when it comes to politics. ~ Pico Iyer

The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Culture is the intersection between people and dealing with the journey of life itself. How to deal with life, how a people deals with life is literally manifested in its culture, in its food, in its music, in its art, in the way you dance, the way you communicate. ~ Wendell Pierce

And how sweet that would have been: the two of them back by the milk shed, squatting by the churn, smashing cold, lumpy butter into their faces with not a care in the world. ~ Toni Morrison

The freedom to be someone else entirely and be different versions of something. That's what I loved and I loved watching movies and I loved watching television, I loved reading books. That kind of escapism into another world was my favorite thing. ~ Gwendoline Christie

Aleksia laughed at her, putting a world of scorn and withering contempt into her voice
just as Kay would probably do in a temper. In fact, everything that she was doing now was to test her to see if her own self-worth was strong enough to stand up to the worst the one she loved could deliver. It is so much harder to take a hint of scorn from the beloved than a verbal battering from an enemy ... Kay would always be more intelligent, more clever than Gerda was. She had to know, deep inside her, that what she offered was just as important and just as valuable as wit and intelligence. ~ Mercedes Lackey

He was ready to embrace a radiant new world. She was ready to snap his head off. ~ Anna Campbell

I am President of the UN created University for Peace, which has a strong commitment to the relationship between peace, security and the environment. I meet with young people around the world and I always come away enthused and encouraged. ~ Maurice Strong

We live in secret cities
And we travel unmapped roads.

We speak words between us that we recognize
But which cannot be looked up.

They are our words.
They come from very far inside our mouths.

You and I, we are the secret citizens of the city
Inside us, and inside us

There go all the cars we have driven
And seen, there are all the people

We know and have known, there
Are all the places that are

But which used to be as well. This is where
They went. They did not disappear.

We each take a piece
Through the eye and through the ear.

It's loud inside us, in there, and when we speak
In the outside world

We have to hope that some of that sound
Does not come out, that an arm

Not reach out
In place of the tongue. ~ Alberto Alvaro Rios

But no life was without it's strain & strife, not if it was fully lived. Opening up to experience, even the good ones like trust & love, was to open yourself up to the pain. I suppose the key was to not compound matters by making the rest of it unnecessarily hard. My need for control had certainly done that in the past. So I made a promise to myself in that moment.
I would make a concerted effort to reach for what was soft & good in this world. I'd find a place to settle into, and hold still so that this world's good and soft could reach back & touch me as well. ~ Vicki Pettersson

David: And you think it can just evaporate? Even if at one time they loved one another?
Marx: That's one of the sad truths of existence. Nothing in this world is permanent. Even the characters created by the great Shakespeare will, in millions of years, cease to exist - when the universe runs its course and the lights go out. ~ Woody Allen

...and as she stood on the Ashford platform waiting for the small train to come in, she seemed already separated from the people around her. Tomorrow I shall not be among you anymore; not of you but mysteriously still with you, thought Philippa. As Lady Abbess of Brede had said, "People think we renounce the world. We don't. We renounce its ways but we are still very much in it and it is very much in us. ~ Rumer Godden

May the ears of Canada never grow deaf to the plea of widows and orphans and our crippled men for care and support. May the eyes of Canada never be blind to that glorious light which shines upon our young national life from the deeds of those "who counted not their lives dear unto themselves," and may the lips of Canada never be dumb to tell to future generations the tales of heroism which will kindle the imagination and fire the patriotism of children that are yet unborn. ~ Frederick George Scott

In his (Christ's) surrender on the cross all the pain and agony of mankind was concentrated at a single point, and passed through from death to immortality, There is no pain of any creature from the beginning to the end of time which was not 'known' at this point and thus transmuted. To know all things in the Word is thus to know all the suffering of the world transfigured by the resurrection, somehow reconciled and atoned in eternal life. It was God's purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things on heaven and things on earth'. ~ Bede Griffiths

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanour, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve in it. Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing. The strain and drain of composition often force me, alas, to swallow a strong pill that gives me an hour or two of frightful nightmares or even to accept the comic relief of a midday snooze, the way a senile rake might totter to the nearest euthanasium; but I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

If you understand the great plan of happiness and follow it, what goes on in the world will not determine your happiness. ~ Boyd K. Packer

Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music. We ~ John Green

I just took the idea that King Kong was too big for everything and reversed it and put George in a land of giants, which is basically what every kid goes through anyway - that, you know, the world is made for grownups, for tall people, for the giants. ~ William Joyce

And as I fall to fuddled sleep I hear youth crying, as Harry Kemp heard it: "I heard Youth calling in the night: 'Gone is my former world-delight; For there is naught my feet may stay; The morn suffuses into day, It dare not stand a moment still But must the world with light fulfil. More evanescent than the rose My sudden rainbow comes and goes, Plunging bright ends across the sky - Yea, I am Youth because I die! ~ Jack London

There's a flame of magic inside every stone & every flower, every bird that sings & every frog that croaks. There's magic in the trees & the hills & the river & the rocks, in the sea & the stars & the wind, a deep, wild magic that's as old as the world itself. It's in you too, my darling girl, and in me, and in every living creature, be it ever so small. Even the dirt I'm sweeping up now is stardust. In fact, all of us are made from the stuff of stars. ~ Kate Forsyth

What does it mean to die when you can live until the end of the world? ~ Anne Rice

Spectrums (...) One of the reasons Im so fond of spectrums is because I believe, with fearce tenacity, that *nothing* in this world is black and white.
Spectrums embrace gray spaces, ambiguity, and fluidity. Since these are all concepts which are integral to the human experience, I find spectrums particularly helpfull in understanding and describing identity.
(...) as we learn about various identities, it's important we recognize they are not "all or nothing" concepts. Many identities can exist in various degrees and come in a range of possibilities. Remembering this is incredibly crucial as we progress. ~ Ashley Mardell

The world behind my brow, that makes me what I am and no one else. ~ Peer Gynt

Books aren't just books
they're a completely different world
in the palm of your hands ~ Charlotte

As I see it, the aims of education are to enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens. ~ Ken Robinson

I was told to challenge every spiritual teacher, every world leader to utter the one sentence that no religion, no political party, and no nation on the face of the earth will dare utter: 'Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way. ~ Neale Donald Walsch