Culture Quotes
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Clearly there are some things about WikiLeaks... the material is in part very interesting although none of it is a real game-changer. I think if I was an American I'd be rather proud that American diplomats are quite assiduous in the way that they chronicle issues. Of course the impact has been that the whole culture of sharing is going down the tube.
Misha Glenny
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When you read a book, you generate beta waves irrespective of the book's content. But if you look up from it, and start watching TV - it doesn't matter what the content of the program is - the beta waves disappear and you start processing alpha and theta waves. These are the same waves that you generate during meditation. Reading is primarily left hemisphere and watching television is primarily right hemisphere. Now how could that not have a major effect on our culture?
Leonard Shlain
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We would never consider for a moment paying the team members equally. In the Olympics we usually have some of the world’s fastest runners yet have lost some of the relay races because we could not pass the baton without dropping it! We take it for granted that accountability must be individual; there must be someone to praise for victory and someone to blame for defeat, the individual where “the buck stops.” In fact, instead of admiring relationships, we value and admire individual competitiveness, winning out over each other, outdoing each other conversationally, pulling the clever con game, and selling stuff that the customer does not need. We believe in caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), and we justify exploitation with “There’s a sucker born every minute.” We breed mistrust of strangers, but we don’t have any formulas for how to test or build trust. We value our freedom without realizing that this breeds caution and mistrust of each other. When we are taken in by a Ponzi scheme and lose all our money, we don’t blame our culture or our own greed—we blame the regulators who should have caught it and kick ourselves for not getting in on it earlier.
Edgar Schein
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True flexibility is a symbiotic partnership between employer and employee and between technology and culture.
Jean-Philippe Courtois
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We have equality of men and women in western society, whereas in Islamic culture, women are inferior to men.
Pim Fortuyn
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Pop culture and entertainment can be dismissed as surface, but it's not. It's the language we all speak, and it's the connection point between people all over the world.
Bozoma Saint John
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Racism always exists cheek by jowl with, inside, and alongside culture and class. As a rule, it is inseparable from them. That is why, for example, food, language and names assume such importance in racial prejudice.
Martin Jacques
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Our modern Western culture only recognises the first of these, freedom of desires. It then worships such a freedom by enshrining it at the forefront of national constituitions and bills of human rights. One can say that the underlying creed of most Western democracies is to protect their people's freedom to realise their desires, as far as this is possible. It is remarkable that in such countries people do not feel very free. The second kind of freedom, freedom from desires, is celebrated only in some religious communities. It celebrates contentment, peace that is free from desires.
Ajahn Brahm
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I'm sad to say that stardom is a commodity in our culture.
Christine Baranski
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The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.
Marshall McLuhan
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The vitality of a culture is in its capacity to assimilate foreign influences. The culture that's defensive and closed condemns itself to decadence.
Juan Goytisolo
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A good culture in a hospital can absorb and manage a few bad nurses, but once the culture becomes bad in itself, bad nursing practice is much harder to hide.
Jo Brand
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Well, I think, you know, the arts are really what - one of the things that make this country strong. We always think it's our economy or our military power, but in fact, I think it's our culture, our civilization, our ideas, our creativity.
Caroline Kennedy
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Who is left in the ghetto is the one man in a thousand in any age, in any culture, who through some mysterious workings of force within his soul will stand in defiance against any master. He is that one human in a thousand whose indomitable spirit will not bow. He is the one man in a thousand whose indomitable spirit cannot bow. He is the one man in a thousand who will not walk quietly to Umschlagplatz. Watch out for him, Alfred Funk, we have pushed him to the wall.
Leon Uris
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Islamization of Europe is an unavoidable consequence, indeed, an inevitability, once Europe ceased to reproduce itself. The descendants of the men who went out from Europe to conquer and Christianize the world have decided to leave the world. The culture of death triumphs, as the poor but fecund Muslims, expelled centuries ago, return to inherit the estate.
Pat Buchanan
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The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.
Freda Adler
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The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.
Lewis Mumford
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I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'
John Cleese