3,162 Quotes About Culture

[C]ulture, for all its importance, is not some miasma that seeps into people through their skin. Culture relies on neural circuitry that accomplishes the feat we call learning. Those circuits do not make us indiscriminate mimics but have to work in surprisingly subtle ways to make the transmission of culture possible. That is why it is not an alternative to a focus on learning, culture and socialization, but rather an attempt to explain how they work.

Preserving cultural diversity is considered a supreme virtue today, but the members of the diverse subcultures don't always see it that way. People have wants and needs, and when cultures rub shoulders, people in one culture are bound to notice when their neighbors are satisfying those those desires better than they are. When they do notice, history tells us, they shamelessly borrow wherever works best.

The starting point to freedom is to begin questioning the cultural narrative you have been sold.

Practices are cultural: they do not submit to the meanings that an individual wants them to have, either for herself or for others.

To knock today's prestige dialects off their pedestals, it helps to realize that they are really foul perversions of yesterday's prestige dialects.

The farm work they hated was the only work they knew. Often, even the basic skills of plumbing or electricity or mechanical work were mysteries to them – as were the job discipline and the subtleties that children raised in the industrial world learn without thinking about them; starting work on time, working set hours, taking orders from strangers instead of their father, playing office politics.

Music is the one place in mass media where kids editorialize to kids.

The mother was conflicted between what she knows that what's possible.

If arts and music, precious gifts in themselves, were akin to memory, literature was the self-knowing of the species; the human mind accumulated, a manifest of wisdom and knowledge, self-doubt and awareness, folly and foible, all transmitted through the generations. Books amplified the light of mind, reinforced the soul.