3,162 Quotes About 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.

[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.

The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.

Ignorance binds people tighter than culture.

Social conditioning, accompanied by moral and mental constraints, now serve to render the mediocre mind nearly incapable of unbiased assessment.

Modern culture anesthetizes the mind while mainlining the soul with emotional experiences that keep the worldling believing he is really living.

deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.

I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must try to learn from history.

الامم يعتريها الوجود والفناء، والتاريخ يحدثنا عن أعمار الأمم، فمنها من بقي عشرات السنين ثم اندثر وباد، فمثلا اليونان امتد عمرها قرابة 500 عام ثم فقدت وجودها الثقافي فابتلعتها ثقافات أخرى، أما الثقافة الإسلامية فقد مضى عليها قرابة 15 قرناً وما زالت قائمة شامخة، وهي التحدي الوحيد لزعماء الغرب، فهي كالشجرة الطيبة أصلها ثابت وجذورها ضاربة في أعماق الأرض، إن الشعوب لا تُفنى جسديا ومادياً ولكنها تفنى ثقافياً.