3,162 Quotes About Culture

Without the painter, there is no painting.

We are dangerously short of culture. Because culture is the antidote to propaganda and consumption.

Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the "truth" is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant.

Society without culture might as well be dead.

Every letter written," said a medieval abbot, "is a wound inflicted on the devil.

If you are serious about having a virtual company with excellent culture, you must have the discipline to develop a hiring process that screens for culture matches and for the attributes of successful virtual workers. You can’t just hire for skills—that never translates to great culture.

Human diversity may be great when it comes to cuisine and poetry, but few would see witch-burning, infanticide or slavery as fascinating human idiosyncrasies that should be protected against the encroachments of global capitalism and coca-colonialism.

We Homo sapiens are the only species (so far) with richly cumulative culture, and the key ingredient of culture that makes this possible is language.

Perhaps we are just apes with brains being manipulated by memes in much the way we are manipulated by the cold virus. Instead of looking only at the prerequisite competences our ancestors needed to have in order for language to get under way, perhaps we should also consider unusual vulnerabilities that might make our ancestors the ideal hosts for infectious but nonvirulent habits (memes) that allowed us to live and stay mobile long enough for them to replicate through our populations.