People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them - that does not occur to them.
Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course a kiss is a ritual too and it isn't rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as genuine as a kiss.
The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.
Drifting away from one’s culture leaves one stranded in the middle of nowhere till the time his suffocation strangles him.
To be an ethical leader is indeed to be different. This kind of leader acknowledges the complexity of running a responsible business, yet tries to do it anyway.
The Christian experience is not primarily formed by our liturgy, doctrine, or ecclesiology, as important as those might be. We are formed by the dangerous stories of our great hero.
From imperial, economic and ideological causes, many cultures are the inheritors, and hence the prisoners, of attitudes of scorn and disdain for other faiths – outlooks which are not ennobling to anyone.
Someone has said that culture is what remains with you after you have forgotten all you have read, and I believe there is much truth in that.
I believe Innovation is more likely to emerge from a culture of encouragement.
The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
American culture enforces such rigid gender roles for male friendships that they are gay unless they materially resemble a beer commercial.
It seems you can’t go anywhere today without seeing some popular culture rendition of Vampyres. I went into a bookstore a few weeks ago and there was an entire section devoted to . Can you imagine?
Recently I've been dreaming of cursing old people with little provocation, because their culture has a long history of enslaving, raping, and segregating, and they have special lights which prevent us from dancing.
Male experience is what patriarchal culture uses to represent human experience, even when it is women who most often live it.
In a dazzling vote of confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being “in love” while discounting the importance of loving. (206)
It is perfectly acceptable to have a physical problem in our culture, but people tend to shy away from anything that has to do with the emotions.
During the first millennium BCE, even the beer-loving Mesopotamians turned their backs on beer, which was dethroned as the most cultured and civilized of drinks, and the age of wine began.
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
The greatest discovery any alien anthropologist could make about our culture is our overriding response to failure:
Modern materialists and religious extremists alike lack the spiritual animistic reverence for non-human beings that every culture once understood as a given.
Leadership doesn't occur in a vacuum, it manifests in a context. These contexts are as dynamic as the personalities, stakes, culture and information available.
