Culture Quotes - Page 64

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A lot of the commercial expression of hip-hop leaves a lot to be desired - but then, there's a lot of whack gospel music, but I'm not leading a crusade against it. Of course, the vices of hip-hop are far more influential, I understand. But the good that hip-hop transmits, the power of the culture to rally the best of our protest, and uplift, and resistance, traditions, is often unfairly overlooked.

Characters work really well when they're reflective of the times that they're operating in. To keep these characters static - like Superman was invented in the '30s, Wonder Woman in the '40s - if they were still operating under those kinds of constraints, they'd die. These pop cultures, just like Greek myths, they have to reflect the time their stories are being told. That's what makes them relevant.

The abbreviations (e.g. NATO, UN, USSR - E.W.) denote that and only that which is institutionalized in such a way that the transcending connotation is cut off. The meaning is fixed, doctored, loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general usage, "sanctioned" by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serves merely for recognition of an unquestionable fact.

There are millions of white Americans today who still can barely bring themselves to acknowledge that the Civil War, with its twin Americas locked in a death match, was about slavery. They'll argue it was about economics, and they're right only because one of those economies was a slave economy. They'll argue it was about culture, and they're right only because one of those cultures was a slave culture.

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.

Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. And if some of our institutions seem not to fit the template of the times, why it is they and not the template, that seem to us disordered and strange.

If I put myself on the side of those who see the world as warming up in a bad way, who see the general march of industrial culture as something undesirable, the one thing I must be beware of doing and which my colleagues on that side don't beware of doing, we must beware of saying we've got to stop changing the environment. There is no 'the' environment which we can change, the world is changing all the time.

An American has invented a remote control that will turn off any telly within a 20ft radius. What a marvellous device! What a splendid invention! What a really helpful and improving way of devoting your time to building something that turns off culture. Next week, I'm instigating Burn a Book Week, to encourage even more conversation. I've come up with a fantastic little device which I'll call a box of matches.

I'm not a person that really deal in color. I recognize the inequities that certain cultures have to go through. I understand the history of slavery and all those things. But I'm not a victim. I can vote, I can participant. I can invest my money. I can invest my time. And that's what I'm doing. I'm not working for anybody. I'm not making any money doing what I'm doing. I'm doing it because someone did it for me.

We live in this culture of endless extraction and disposal: extraction from the earth, extraction from people's bodies, from communities, as if there's no limit, as if there's no consequence to how we're taking and disposing, and as if it can go on endlessly. We are reaching the breaking point on multiple levels. Communities are breaking, the planet is breaking, people's bodies are breaking. We are taking too much.

For memetics to be a reasonable research programme, it should be the case that copying, and differential success in causing the multiplication of copies, overwhelmingly plays the major role in shaping all or at least most of the contents of culture. Evolved domain-specific psychological dispositions, if there are any, should be at most a relatively minor factor that could be considered part of background conditions.

I feel like there are moments where musicians may be more interested - or culture in general - to show roots and where one comes from. And later there comes a time where that has lesser importance for artists, and instead they become more interested in affiliating themselves with global or international trends. Fortunately, we were in the right place at the right time, and that allowed us to experiment, play and enjoy.

Now I've come to such a mixed culture: America, Europe, South America, Africa. And the politics are changing everywhere all the time and becoming even more unpredictable. There's no such thing as "fixed" culture. China is also becoming more global. Its problems are becoming international problems, becoming German problems, becoming American problems. Nothing is clear-cut. Perhaps I'll find my way - or get totally lost.

These days its not just that the line between right and wrong has been made unclear, today Christians are being asked by our culture today to erase the lines and move the fences, and if that were not bad enough, we are being asked to join in the celebration cry by those who have thrown off the restraints religion had imposed upon them. It is not just that they ask we accept, but they now demand of us to celebrate it too.

The improved American highway system isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway he had no contact with the towns which he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson's nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.

A change initiative can fail for multiple reasons - in fact, there are just too many things that can go wrong. The focus of the initiative might be wrong - too narrow or too broad. The initiative might be poorly executed or under-resourced. But most often, a change initiative fails because it hits a behavioral impasse. Something in the culture of the company is in conflict with the objective or execution of the initiative.

I think one of the reasons anti-immigration state laws start to happen is they happen in states where there is an enormous influx. In these places, the dominant culture, the Anglo culture has held sway for such a very, very long time. Now, they are living in another culture, another language. They fear losing dominance and control. It is sadly human nature to find a group to scapegoat. This happens throughout man's history.

Coming from a sort of very rigid European type of training to this culture which is just a little more open - a lot more open, and kind of curious, and asking different sorts of questions.Because the problem for me was that the European modernist movement in the '70s was all about right or wrong. Some things were right and you were dealing with the truth, as it were, and then some things were wrong and therefore not allowed.

Something I always wanted to do, to capture that later half of the '70s. It's like the early half of the '70s is still the '60s, in that there's still kind of a playfulness and inventiveness in terms of design and the things that were going on in the culture. The second half, it got much more commodified. It's possibly the ugliest era of architecture and clothes and design in the entire 20th century, from 1975 to '81 or '82.

There is something about the light, the heat (physical and perhaps metaphysical), the vibrancy of street life, and the rawness and disjointedness of much of the tropical world that has moved and disturbed me - in places where the indigenous culture is often transformed by an external northern culture (sometimes my own... I suspect that one has a few serious creative obsessions in life. I certainly cannot seem to escape this one.

I like to work with people of different cultures, different points of view. But yeah, I feel much more comfortable. That's the problem I sometimes have with going to Hollywood. I feel like they don't share the same values as I do. They aren't interested in the same things. It's not always true, but sometimes, I feel it deeply, because as an industry, they celebrate things that I'm less interested in, and it's all about the business.

The 1970s was the decade of liberation, of anger at injustice and demands for recognition and rights. But over time, the demand for specific rights degraded into a generalized sense of entitlement, the demand for specific recognition into a generalized demand for attention and the anger at specific injustice into a generalized feeling of grievance and resentment. The result is a culture of entitlement, attention-seeking and complaint.

You can hear a real shift. You listen to the late 80s recordings, you'll hear us engaging with the audience, dealing with the issues surrounding punk shows at the time. Back then, people thought you had to be a skinhead and beat the crap out of everybody when you went to a punk show. Come the early 90s, when you had this so-called grunge stuff and when videos became so dominant, you had this totally huge shift in the culture of shows.

I think the culture of the feminine needs to be reinvigorated and women need to build a culture that is connected all over the globe to reinforce this new-found power in the body. Women have been divided to be conquered. No one person did this. It's been a cultural evolution. The masculine nature is very out there and vocal and very much espousing their point of view, and God bless them. The female culture needs to learn to do the same.

As we look at the chapters of Daniel, we recognize that the words of Daniel 1:21 ring true today: "Thus Daniel continued...." Daniel continued through a culture unlike his own; one that lost its way. Today, you and I are living in a culture that's losing its way. It's good to know that just as in Daniel's day, God is looking for men and women of integrity to help confront in love a culture that's losing its way and to point it back to him.

There are many similarities between India and America. If you look at the last few centuries, two things come to light. America has absorbed people from around the world and there is an Indian in every part of the world. This characterizes both the societies. Indians and Americans have coexistence in their natural temperament. India and the United States of America are bound together, by history and by culture. These ties will deepen further.

The point about sales is relevant because it suggests there are cultures out there that are supporting and consuming, on a vast scale, challenging works of literature. Works of literature that in the United States would sell only a few thousand copies, if they managed to find a publisher at all. The success of these texts in Spain or Italy or wherever contributes to a kind of national conversation that we're perhaps not having here in the U.S.

I'm also looking for the psychological elements that fuel commodity culture. For example, if we imbue girls with deep insecurity about their bodies through images of an impossible ideal, we create a really vulnerable and avid consumer. If somebody feels that they're not OK without a certain product, you have a very deep and loyal market that will come back to the product again and again. Sometimes, this process is both rational and irrational.

On the Bigotry of Culture: : it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing.

Suppose a student of mine writes in her exam that "morality is completely relative to culture, so nothing is absolutely right or wrong. Because of that, it is absolutely wrong to be culturally intolerant". This student, if she believes what she writes, believes a contradiction. She ought not to believe the contradiction - it's a basic epistemic norm. This is true even if she can't avoid believing it - no amount of studying will show her the light.

The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were, to the place, and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling.

A few hundred years ago, perhaps 85 or even 90 percent of humanity lived below a standard of living that today only 40 or 45 percent fail to reach. But at that earlier time only part of this poverty could have been eradicated, and this at substantial cost not only to the pleasures of the affluent, but also to their well-being and to human culture. In our time, nearly all severe poverty could be eradicated at a cost to the affluent that is truly trivial.

I am afraid of what is happening in the West. In a way, the link between art and politics is about to snap. Music and politics, it seems, are increasingly considered to be separate domains. Music is about making peace, not conflict, they say. And, therefore, it is best to do what is considered normal and uncontroversial. Increasingly, accepting the status quo is a precondition for being considered entertainment, while protest culture is grouped alongside politics.

Seine et Danube was launched in 2003 with the help of Romanian authorities who had finally realized the necessity of promoting literature and Romanian culture in general. Along with focusing on the literature of the countries the Danube traversed (with an emphasis on Romania), we printed work that interested us from the banks of the Seine: French and French-Romanian authors like Cioran and Fondane. We dedicated our last edition to surrealism and Esthetic Onirisme.

It seems that the Internet is setting the standard for almost everything. I can't imagine having something like punk rock happen where an entire culture is doing one thing. It's not like all the kids in England are discovering the Stooges and the Ramones at the same time. All the kids in England are discovering every band that has ever existed. I can't imagine there being one huge cultural moment like there was in the past. Everything ends up being kind of postmodern.

In the Germany of the l920s, the Weimar Republic, both orga­nismic biology and Gestalt psychology were part of a larger intellectual trend that saw itself as a protest movement against the increasing fragmentation and alienation of human nature. The entire Weimar culture was characterized by an antimechanistic outlook, a "hunger for wholeness". Organismic biology, Gestalt psychology, ecology, and, later on, general systems theory all grew out of this holistic zeitgeist.

The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities.

In the Depression, besides everybody being poor, our entertainment was much more primitive and innocent. The comic strip, which I so venerated, was still a very new form. Movies had just become talkies. Radio had just gone coast to coast for the first time. Network radio had just begun when I was a kid. So all of these forms were more or less in their infancy, and feeling their oats. Comics were fresh and funny and nervy, and in a sense, defiant of the prevailing culture.

I think that we as a culture, not just in entertainment journalism, but in general the boundaries have become extreme. You know, all bets are off and it seems that there's not much that we consider off limits. I'm just glad that I was in it at the time when I was, which just seemed like - maybe everybody feels that way then they do a look back on their life and career. And I always think for me, my motto is 'ever forward' and I think that's the best way to live your life.

You look at the Koran or the Bible, they all tell the same stories. You see them as the stories of the Middle East. The stories reflect who these people were in the Middle East, and this is where Western culture came from. All our literature is basically influenced by these great myths. So I'm fascinated by it. You could almost say I'm obsessed with it. But if you're asking about the effect of religion on my life - almost everything I do is opposed to the practice of religion.

You cannot have your news instantly and have it done well. You cannot have your news reduced to 140 characters or less without losing large parts of it. You cannot manipulate the news but not expect it to be manipulated against you. You cannot have your news for free; you can only obscure the costs. If as a culture we can learn this lesson, and if we can learn to love the hard work, we will save ourselves much trouble and collateral damage. We must remember: There is no easy way.

We do objectify women in our culture. We're starting to objectify men a little bit more. And there is nothing wrong with that. Objectify maybe is the wrong word. Celebrate their bodies and use beautiful men, beautiful women as a tool to get your attention and to sell things. But no-one - we're very, very uncomfortable in our culture with looking at a naked man. You know, naked women are everywhere, selling everything. And again, this is quite sexist. But naked men make us nervous.

That argument doesn’t make any sense to me. So we want to advance as a society and as a culture, but, say, if something happens to an African-American, we immediately come to his defense? Yet you want to talk about how far we’ve progressed as a society? Well, if we’ve progressed as a society, then you don’t jump to somebody’s defense just because they’re African-American. You sit and you listen to the facts just like you would in any other situation, right? So I won’t assert myself.

I visit T-Mobile call centers. We've got about 18 major call centers in the US, and before I was CEO, I heard that no CEO had gone to physically visit them. I go in, they meet me outside, we take selfies as I stand like a piece of furniture, I tell them about how things are going - but most importantly, I say thank you and help them see that their behavior and their work has driven the culture of the company that's changed the industry and the whole world. It's a bit of a love affair.

As Indigenous peoples, we know there is more to the world. We know spirits exist. We know as women, because we're especially attuned to this kind of knowledge, that spirits exist and have a presence in our lives. Some of us are gifted and can communicate with the spirit world. Not everyone has that gift and can perceive the borders between the living and the dead and our society actively discourages us of exploring the knowledge of what many of us have already always known in our cultures.

Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because no one can ever be efficient enough, just as no one can ever be virtuous enough. And this new sense of sin only contributes further to the enervation of leisure, for the rich as well as the poor. The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved.

If you look at the works psychologists have done about individual reports of wellbeing, what happens is that if you're poor, you are not happy. But once you achieve a certain level of material satisfaction then income has very little correlation with people's reported states of happiness, things like climate matter more, things like the culture of the country in which you're raised matter more and so the things really, let's face it, like individual temperament matter more than these things.

When women hear those words, an old, old memory is stirred and brought back to life. The memory is of our absolute, undeniable, and irrevocable kinship with the wild feminine, a relationship which may have become ghostly from neglect, buried by over-domestication, outlawed by the surrounding culture, or no longer understood anymore. We may have forgotten her names, we may not answer when she calls ours, but in our bones we know her, we yearn toward her, we know she belongs to us and we to her.

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.' Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

The Kurds know that they won't achieve their own state by force of arms but through international recognition. And they have certainly heard what the German foreign minister said in connection with the arms deliveries: There is no Kurdish state. But that shouldn't prevent the Kurds from continuing to develop their own institutions. Still, the best thing for them would be to remain a part of Iraq, but in return we must treat them with respect - their nationality, their language and their culture.

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