Culture quotes
3.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside culture — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another."
"I think that's what made rap such a stable footprint in culture, that it's so honest."
"They're lacking culture in Hollywood. That gives me a big up, right? I know something about pop culture."
"Urban pop culture is its own phenomena that is for some reason is left out of Hollywood. It's the most mainstream thing there is."
"We tell ourselves that the more time we have at our disposal, the more opportunity we will have of finding greater happiness. But again we are looking to the future, to the times we will create. Again we miss the enjoyment of the present moment."
"From the moment we are born our culture encourages us to believe that outer well-being is the source of inner fulfillment ... Wherever we turn the principle is confirmed, encouraging us to become 'human havings' and 'human doings' rather than human beings."
"Hip-hop is such a wide statement of culture that everyone is not the same, and it's impossible to put it into one box."
"This is our most dangerous addiction - our addiction to things. For it is this addiction that underlies the materialism of our age. And nowhere is this addiction more apparent than in our addiction to money."
"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."
"Bloom never pissed me off because there are critics out there, and he's one of them, who take their ignorance about popular culture as a badge of intellectual prowess."
"This notion that it is up to each person to innovation in some way flies in the face of the industrial age, but you know what, the industrial age is over."
"American culture is often so self-consumed that we often think that our problems are just our problems."
"People who don't have stories in their cultures go nuts."
"The artist injects the spirit of life into a culture."
"A culture is as rich and capable of surviving as it has imaginative artists."
"Recovery culture teaches you that you have to repent. I don't think that's necessary."
"When I go to the movies, and I have to sit through ten previews of films that look [alike] and tell the whole story, you know that we've reached an age of consensus. And consensus is the worst thing for us. We all agree to agree. That's where we lose it as a culture. We have to move away from that."
"We're all human beings with bodily needs living within a system. We don't need to prove that we're not a part of the fabric of the culture in order to want to change it."
"The most distinctive and largest contribution of Hinduism to India's culture is the doctrine of ahimsa."
"The ideal is a synthesis of the different cultures that have come to stay in India, that have influenced Indian life, and that, in their turn, have themselves been influenced by the spirit of the soil."
