I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.
The American Dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism, and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. It's unequivocally absurd.
A fit, healthy body - that is the best fashion statement
V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.
My head’ll explode if I continue with this escapism.
Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.
I was flipping channels, watching this cheerleading program on MTV. They took a field hockey girl and “transformed” her into a cheerleader by the end of the show. I was just wondering: what if she liked field hockey better?
When I touched her body,
I believed she was God.
In the curves of her form
I found the birth of Man,
the creation of the world,
and the origin of all life.
The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.
Give a poet a pen
Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.
One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.
If we don't value the people who inspire us (and money is one mark of that) then what kind of culture are we building?
The financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession.
Society destroys your individuality, your soul.
To me, science is an expression of the human spirit, which reaches every sphere of human culture. It gives an aim and meaning to existence as well as a knowledge, understanding, love, and admiration for the world. It gives a deeper meaning to morality and another dimension to esthetics.
No matter what is happening in the world, I continue to believe in humanity. The power of positive thinking is always enough.
Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.
To some women, a job plays the role of a man. To most women, a man plays the role of a job.
Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily be plugged into any theory.
People from context cultures tend to view personal bonds and informal agreements as far more binding than any formal contract. People from content cultures don't believe the deal is finalized until everyone has signed on the dotted line. And therein lies the potential for conflict.
Our society needs to restablish a culture of swag.
Because the culture we breathe and work in rushes against rest. It equates our worth with production and wealth and fame. The more we work toward those goals, the more society assigns us worth.
The growth of the exploiters' revolution on this continent has been accompanied by the growth of the idea that work is beneath human dignity, particularly any form of hand work. We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from.
Culture is the sum of the values, beliefs and assumptions of human groups.
Art for Art’s Sake is for the well fed. The well fed are all the babies in cradles and my kitty along with them, and I am happy if my writings are for my kitty.
The world of most men is given to them by their culture..
We all know there is something wrong with our culture, the state of our world, and with ourselves.
The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.
Don't forget that we lawyers, we're a higher breed of intellect, and so it's our privilege to lie. It's as clear as day. Animals can't even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture.
Progress has always been achieved by probing well-entrenched and well-founded forms of life with unpopular and unfounded values. This is how man gradually freed himself from fear and from the tyranny of unexamined systems.
If you're a true student of the truth, you may easily get frustrated when people try to make points based on mysticism and cultural beliefs.
The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.
Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.
Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.
What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.
It is culture that is the bully."
Orn Ald yos'Senchul to Theo Waitley, Saltation
I’ve been working on something that merges rap with classical…. I call it Baby’s Got Bach.
We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering.
Pain, unless it is physical, was sold to you (by your culture).
Walking on the path I met my Master, known by a million names in different cultures and places yet people have forgotten the way to HIM.
Appreciation for cultural diversity is essential for our co-existence.
You can’t enjoy art or books in a hurry.
But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.
Many modern artists, philosophers, and theologians reject the knowledge of the past. Thus they must continually start over again from ground zero, their vision restricted to their own narrow perspectives, making themselves artificially primitive.
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.
One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.
we (modern society) make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
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.
You honor yourself by acting with dignity and composure.
If for us culture means museum and library and open house and art gallery, for them it meant the activities and amenities of everyday life... The rift is... between "folk" culture, where the unschooled can be wise, and print culture, which enslaved the other senses to the eye.
He wasn't sure he liked everything that was happening, but a lot of it was "cultural," apparently, and you couldn't object to that, so he didn't. "Cultural" sort of solved problems by explaining that they weren't really there.
Language is the key to the heart of people.
Yoga is the art work of awareness on the canvas of body, mind, and soul.
Culture is religion externalized.
Fundamentalism's strident denunciation of its opponents is a sign of its weakness, its dogmatic authoritarianism is a pathological mutation of faith.
A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
The process of secularisation arises not from the loss of faith but from the loss of social interest in the world of faith. It begins the moment men feel that religion is irrelevant to the common way of life and that society as such has nothing to do with the truths of faith.
There is no problem with the wider culture that you cannot see in the spades in the Christian Church. The rot is in us, and not simple out there. And Christians are making a great mistake by turning everything into culture wars. It's a much deeper crisis.
The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.
A culture which doesn't believe in region and religion is like a rock music, noise for old generation & nirvana for the young ones.
Many of the women in Los Angeles are part of the notorious gang culture, and they will forever have my gratitude for, you know, letting me live.
By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished?
Culture, like science, is no protection against demons.
The Bible is a book of Science. Secular Humanism is a religion of mythology.
Ultimately amorality is immorality.
As goes the family, so goes the faith; as goes the faith, so goes the culture.
How can we pick and choose which parts of the Bible to follow? One thing is God’s will and another is just cultural differences? What if it’s all cultural? What if homosexuality or saving yourself for marriage is as outdated as women staying silent in church or Leviticus forbidding tattoos?
Jesus was trying to present value of a life of vulnerability in which one would have practical and needed experience of the same. It would be a life without baggage, so one would learn to accept others and their culture instead of always carrying along our own country's assumptions and calling them the Gospel.
We want to make certain that we view culture through the eyes of faith, that we don't view our faith through the eyes of culture.
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[...].
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.
Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.
Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives."
[Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]
Your goodness must have some edge to it - else it is none.
Literature cannot be imposed; it must be discovered.
Cultura e un cimitir de cărți și de alte obiecte dispărute pentru vecie.
En tiempos de manipulación televisiva, leer es un acto revolucionario.
There’s plenty of emphasis on success in our culture, but we have to help people focus on significance as well.
Culture is a catalyst which expedites the reaction called success.
What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.
Despite 2000 years of evolution in modern times, we have still not managed to develop the intelligence to create a society that knows what love is. Our society is still not a civilization, it is still primitive and barbaric.
It is one of the benchmarks of a culture I always think – the page at which it operates. A good way to measure it is to order a taxi and see how irate local people get if it is late.
Change occurs slowly. Very often a legal change might take place but the cultural shift required to really accept its spirit lingers in the wings for decades.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
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.
Be out of the mainstream. I'm out of the mainstream. I enjoy it, who wants to be in the mainstream?
But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.
The '60s redefined narcissism as idealism.
Gay diversity is like the Village People. You can all wear different stupid outfits as long as you sing the same stupid song.
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.
When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.
...cultural barriers can be overcome relatively swiftly where there is the political will to do so.
Politics is downstream from culture and not the other way around.
Our political system is now run by the Big People for their own interests. If they ever deign to notice the Little People, it is with disdain and contempt.
The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own.
Somehow, we’ve managed to create a social, cultural and political environment in which even our youngest citizens have been so deeply indoctrinated to hate. Who else, I wonder, have we indoctrinated them against? Little Muslim kids against Hindus? Little Hindu kids against Muslims? Little Dalits against all Yadavs?
in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good, otherwise they can't do it.
Literalness, however, is not the substance from which human culture is made.