Culture Quotes - Page 30

Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living.

In fact, Western culture has spent decades drawing lines and boxes around interconnected phenomena. We've chunked the world into pieces rather than explored its webby nature.

Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.

If right now, culture's so divisive, it just leaves these millions of people like me out.

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed 'Wisdom.' And then I know exactly what is going to follow: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'

I've always had an affinity and a passion for cars and that whole car culture.

I was taught in my Introduction to Anthropology [course in college], it is not just the great works of [hu]mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.

One of the things I recognized early on, doing whatever studies of black history I have, is that even though black folks were transported as slaves, into servitude, when they were carried out of Africa they left empty-handed, but they didn't leave empty-headed. They carried with them the culture they knew, the culture they had, and that culture reconstituted itself in all the places they went.

The tendency in today's culture is to want to be a 'star', but I want to be a servant.

The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.

The E.U. imports more agricultural goods from developing countries around the world than does the U.S., Canada and Japan, combined.

Culture requires in the first place a certain balance of material and spiritual values.

Libraries are a hallmark of a civilized culture, and librarians represent that culture to all facets of society.

I can't wait for the next fad though, and I predict it's going to be Pennsylvania dutch culture, very Amish. It's going to be bonnets and butter churns.

We're supposed to be the people who make culture, not decorate culture.

The one album I can't live without is called 'Cumbolo' by a band called Culture. Every song on their album is deep, but there's one in particular called 'This Train.' I have a tattoo of the lyrics on my left arm.

In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave.

The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor

Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state.

Without meaning, without substance, without aim: a mere 'public opinion'.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

The universalist approach is roughly: 'What is good and right can be defined and always applies.' In particularist cultures far greater attention is given to the obligations of relationships and unique circumstances.

I spent a lot of time on farms when I was young. My uncle and my dad owned a big farm.

We live in a culture where the one who shouts the loudest gets the most attention. It's not in the vulgar, it's not in the shock that one finds art. And it's not the excessively beautiful. It's in between; it's in nuance.

High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.