"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
— Ray Bradbury

"There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities."
— Roger Zelazny (The Great Book of Amber)

"I'd hoped the language might come on its own, the way it comes to babies, but people don't talk to foreigners the way they talk to babies. They don't hypnotize you with bright objects and repeat the same words over and over, handing out little treats when you finally say "potty" or "wawa." It got to the point where I'd see a baby in the bakery or grocery store and instinctively ball up my fists, jealous over how easy he had it. I wanted to lie in a French crib and start from scratch, learning the language from the ground floor up. I wanted to be a baby, but instead, I was an adult who talked like one, a spooky man-child demanding more than his fair share of attention.

Rather than admit defeat, I decided to change my goals. I told myself that I'd never really cared about learning the language. My main priority was to get the house in shape. The verbs would come in due time, but until then I needed a comfortable place to hide. "
— David Sedaris

"I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially."
— E.B. White

"Today I married myself and I became my own wife."
— Johnette Napolitano, Concrete Blonde

""It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.""
— Erich Fromm

"... songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with."
— Bob Dylan (Chronicles: Volume One)

"No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached."
— Amy Tan

"The only difference between man and man all the world over is one of degree, and not of kind, even as there is between trees of the same species.
Where in is the cause for anger, envy or discrimination?"
— Mahatma Gandhi

"We've finally given liberals a war against fundamentalism, and they don't want to fight it. They would, except it would put them on the same side as the United States."
— Ann Coulter

"The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her
culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died."
— Plato (The Republic of Plato)

"When there is no freedom, there is no creativity."
— Soud Qbeilat

"When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...]."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)

"A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself."
— Arthur Miller

"To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture."
— Oscar Wilde

"It was always so hot, and everyone was so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and secrets."
— James McBride (The Color of Water 10th Anniversary Edition)

"Be out of the mainstream. I'm out of the mainstream. I enjoy it, who wants to be in the mainstream?"
— Bill Maher

"We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal."
— Carl Bernstein

"
Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture? "
— David Bohm

"This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer. "
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable."
— Edward R. Murrow

"The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers."
— Joel Salatin (Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal)

"One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Gay diversity is like the Village People. You can all wear different stupid outfits as long as you sing the same stupid song."
— Jack Malebranch

"Give a poet a pen"
— A. Jarrell Hayes

"Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is."
— Clifford Geertz

"Cultural content has importance to society above and beyond its ability to generate a profit."
— Bjørn Erik Thon

"For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside."
— Jonathan Lethem

"The greatest discovery any alien anthropologist could make about our culture is our overriding response to failure: If it didn't work last year, do it AGAIN this year (and if possible do it MORE)"
— Daniel Quinn (Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure)

"In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant."
— David F. Wells (No Place for Truth or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?)

""...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 (The Harsh Cry of the Heron: The Last Tale of the Otori)

"Don't let the culture influence your message, let your message influence the culture."
— Mike Huckabee

"Ugster vinyl pumps, Partridge Family records, plastic daisy jewelry, old postcards. . . . It's a magpie Christmas market."
— Francesca Lia Block (Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books)

"Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate."
— Carlos Fuentes (Myself with Others: Selected Essays)

"Culture has lead us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption."
— John Zerzan (Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization)

"Culture primarily witnesses the absence of meaning, not it's presence."
— Thomas McFarland

"The Nazis are not justified by saying,

Don't you know that there is more than just the issue of the Jews? The issues are more complex than that! What of the poor in this country, who cannot afford housing? What about the sick and malnourished? Don't you care about these people? Don't you claim to be a follower of Jesus?!

Supporting a murderous political agenda with such an argument is tragic!

And what do we know about Obama? He is the single most anti-life proponent that has ever run for the office of president. "
— Joseph Bayly

"Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless."
— Sinclair Lewis

"I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on."
— Julia Glass

"The '60s redefined narcissism as idealism."
— Dennis Prager

"L'éducation est un processus culturel (...) par lequel chaque nouvel individu est transformé en membre à part entière d'une société humaine particulière, partageant avec les autres membres une culture particulière."
— Margaret Mead

"Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent. "
— Thomas Cahill (Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe)

"I went to watch the Buzkasgu game taking place on a series of fields - some fallow, some plowed and planted- just to the east of the empty Buddha niches. Buzkashi is a form of polo played with a dead goat instead of a ball."
— Rory Stewart

"Das Netz ist das Ende des Mainstreams [...]"
— Sascha Lobo

"It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found."
— Clifford Geertz