Cultural Quotes

“We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“I should emphasize this, to keep well-meaning but misguided multiculturalists at bay: the theoretical entities in which these tribal people frankly believe — the gods and other spirits — don't exist. These people are mistaken, and you know it as well as I do. It is possible for highly intelligent people to have a very useful but mistaken theory, and we don't have to pretend otherwise in order to show respect for these people and their ways.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

“Pride! In English it is a Deadly Sin. But in Urdu it is fakhr and nazish - both names that you can find more than once on our family tree.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Salt and Saffron

“In Italia la linea più breve fra due punti è l’arabesco.”
― Ennio Flaiano

“there is no problems, only solutions".”
― Vesa Peltonen

“We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across.”
― Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves

“We, the Hawaiian people, who are born from the union of Papahanaumoku and Wakea, earth mother and sky father, and who have lived in these islands for over 100 generations, will always have the moral right to the lands of Hawai'i now and forever, no matter what any court says.”
― Lilikalā K. Kame'eleihiwa

“By leaving, we are not necessarily disobeying the men according to the Bible, because we, the women, do not know exactly what is in the Bible, being unable to read it. Furthermore, the only reason why we feel we need to submit to our husbands is because our husbands have told us that the Bible decrees it.”
― Miriam Toews, Women Talking

“Cultural and religious traditions that forbid cross-cultural unions prevent peace on earth. Instead of rejoicing that our sons and daughters are heart-driven and love other humans outside of their familiar religious, social or cultural domains, we punish and insult them. This is wrong. Honor killings are not honorable by God. They are driven by ignorance and ego and nothing more. The Creator favors the man who loves over the man who hates. If you think God will punish you or your child for allowing them to marry outside of your tribe or faith, then you do not know God. Love is his religion and the light of love sees no walls. Anybody who unconditionally loves another human being for the goodness of their heart and nothing more is already on the right side of God.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“In Japan, first names are only for who you're married to, or if you're being rude,' the watchmaker explained.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Is not the semblance of guilt, however slight the tinge, already a corruption?”
― Oakley Hall, Warlock

“We are not members, . . . we are commodities. . . . When our men have used us up so that we look sixty when we’re thirty and our wombs have literally dropped out of our bodies onto our spotless kitchen floors, finished, they turn to our daughters.”
― Miriam Toews, Women Talking

“The Americans have no sense of doom, none whatever. They do not recognize doom when they see it.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Millions of sane people would each be sexually attracted to their own parent or child if they were not related to them.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“My father insisted I eat red meat. 'You'll lose your brain without food,' he said. A meal to him without beef was starvation.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“But as the good-hearted young man discovers, a hero is not merely born, he is honed in the moments when his love and loyalty are the most sorely tested.”

― Jin Yong”
― Jin Yong, A Hero Born

“Perché nell’intimo del suo significato coltura (e così cultura) è cosa fa crescere, cosa eleva, cosa onora, cosa è profondamente legato al culto, allora quell’attività che si esercita sulle pianure del mondo, che sfigura la terra e la porta verso il deserto, che mortifica la diversità, che produce cibo corrotto, che intossica chi lo consuma e chi quella terra lavora, non può propriamente essere chiamata agricoltura. Si tratta, infatti, di un’attività erosiva, estrattiva, tesa al profitto, a volte speculativa, che sarebbe più chiaro e, per il valore delle parole, più rispettoso chiamare agriusura e pensarla semplicemente - così è oggi - come un’appendice dell’agrindustria.”
― Massimo Angelini, Minima ruralia

“Postmodern critics argue, with some justification, that travel and tourism often have the exact opposite effect, transforming the experience into an exploitative commercial affair - a kind of voyeuristic form of entertainment in which the native population and their culture becomes a purchasable commodity to satisfy hedonistic pursuits. The relationship between tourist and native is reduced to a kind of neocolonial "experiential commerce." [...]”
― Jermy Rifkin

“Some people don't want to take time to differentiate between what is mystical and the truth; and what is cultural and biblical. Don't be lazy!”
― Assegid Habtewold

“Here, indeed, we encounter a curious phenomenon: the relevant mental processes, when seen in the mass, are more familiar, more accessible to our consciousness than they can ever be in the individual. In the individual only the aggression of the super-ego makes itself clearly heard, when tension arises, in the form of reproaches, while the demands themselves often remain unconscious in the background. When brought fully into consciousness, they are seen to coincide with the precepts of the current cultural super-ego. At this point there seems to be a regular cohesion, as it were, between the cultural development of the mass and the personal development of the individual. Some manifestations and properties of the super-ego can thus be recognized more easily by its behaviour in the cultural community than by its behaviour in the individual.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“I see a church that desperately needs to learn the lessons that the people of God have to RELEARN in each generation: We have to be a church that is, in some ways, repulsive to the world because of our authentic holiness and yet very attractive to the world because of our love & care. We need to be a courageous church at the time of weak knees and carnal living. In short, we have to live lives that are a credit to the gospel we preach and the Savior we worship. God has humbled us, and we must enter into our cultural decline not with a swagger but with humility and brokenness. And transparency”
― Erwin W. Lutzer, The Church in Babylon: Heeding the Call to Be a Light in the Darkness

“The question is,' John added, 'if a person inside a culture has no knowledge of his place in the unfolding of that culture, or in the history of any other people, and if no one else among either the oppressors or the oppressed has that knowledge, can that person be said to be alive? Indeed on what plane could he possibly exist except as chattel where he is a slave or not?”
― Walter Mosley, John Woman

“MPD [Dissociative Identity Disorder] is one of the oldest Western psychiatric diagnoses. We have clearly described cases dating back two or more centuries. In addition to the contributions of Pierre Janet, Monon Prince, and others, we have descriptions of early MPD cases by such important historical figures as Benjamin Rush, father of U.S. psychiatry (Carlson, 1981). Thus MPD is consistent across time and cultures; such a claim can be documented for few other psychiatric disorders. And, as this book demonstrates, MPD and other forms of pathological dissociation are found in children and have features that fit with developmental data and theories.

Criticisms of the existence of MPD often appear to be directed more at the mass media stereotype described earlier than at the actual condition.”
― Frank W. Putnam, Dissociation in Children and Adolescents: A Developmental Perspective

“The honeybee, Apis mellifera, is a species on the cusp of culture and nature … If we’re to seriously improve honeybee health and with it our own wellbeing, we need to make the most of this timely opportunity to realise a more interconnected approach to agriculture and ecology.”
― Sarah Waring, Farming for the Landless: New perspectives on the cultivation of our honeybee

“The environments that affect the employee experience are the technological, physical, and cultural.”
― Jacob Morgan

“El problema de no advertir la cultura propia es uno de los grandes placeres de viajar al extranjero: descubrir lo que uno no ha visto en el propio país y advertir lo que los demás no conocen acerca de ellos mismos.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries

“It takes a long time for the spiritual and cultural knowledge to sink in our subconscious mind and become a belief. Our beliefs also change with time, but the change is quite slow like the changes in the body of a person. Even the most progressive person doesn’t want to change his beliefs though he may always be ready to acquire new knowledge.”
― Awdhesh Singh, Myths are Real, Reality is a Myth

“But as the good-hearted young man discovers, a hero is not merely born, he is honed in the moments when his love and loyalty are the most sorely tested.”
― Jin Young

“You could see writer's block as mental constipation but I like to think of it as cultural anaemia.”
― Stewart Stafford