Culture

Culture is a term commonly used to indicate the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group, an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning, or an excellence of aesthetic taste in the arts and humanities, (also known as high culture).

Sourced

• In 16th-century Italy there lived Lodovico Gonzaga, a 16-year old seminarist who was very fond of playing ball. Once a certain priest passing by wondered if for a future priest the youth was too keen on his pursuit and asked him: "What would you do if you learned that in half an hour the end of the world was coming?" To which Lodovico replied: "I'd play on." According to the Russian thinker Georgy Fedotov, the importance of culture lies in precisely that: we go on playing ball on the verge of Doomsday....
  • Vladimir Barsky, Chromaticism (1996), ISBN 371865704X

• Whoever controls the media — the images — controls the culture.
  • Allen Ginsberg, as quoted in Brain Power : Learn to Improve Your Thinking Skills‎ (1980) by Karl Albrecht, p. 6

• When two cultures collide is the only time when true suffering exists
  • Hermann Hesse, as quoted in Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time‎ (1977) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 456

• Each form of the sacrosanct was regarded by members of the culture which gave rise to it as a revelation of the Truth.
  • André Malraux, in Voices of Silence [Les voix du silence] (1951), Pt. IV, Ch. V

• Our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact.
  • André Malraux, in Voices of Silence [Les voix du silence] (1951), Pt. IV, Ch. VII

• Culture would seem … first and foremost, to be the knowledge of what makes man something other than and accident of the universe be it by deepening his harmony with the world, or by the lucid consciousness of his revolt from it. … Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love and of thought, which, in the course of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved.
  • André Malraux, quoted in Malraux : An essay in Political Criticism‎ (1967) by David O. Wilkinson, p. 153

• One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
  • Wallace Stevens, in a journal entry (20 June 1899); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 3

Unsourced

• It's because we're so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the same two arms and legs everybody has. We're so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we're trained to want.
  • Chuck Palahniuk

• Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
  • Thomas Wolfe

• Never judge a culture by one man and never judge a man by popular culture.
  • Unknown

• 'Culture' is to make a nice drinking bowl from one's enemy's skull. 'Civilisation' is to go to prison for that
  • Anonymous

• When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver
  • Attributed to a minister in the Nazi Kulturkammer