Culture Meaning Quotes

#1. Justice is only what a "culture," meaning a shifting majority of people, say it is, with a dollop of respect for "human rights" spread on top, without intellectual foundation, and without any connection with virtue and duty.

Anthony Esolen

#2. We live in sexually interesting times, meaning a culture which manages to be simultaneously hypersexualized and to retain its Puritan underpinnings, in precisely equal proportions.

Laura Kipnis

#3. Transparency once meant being able to "open the hood" to see how things worked. Now, with the Macintosh meaning of transparency dominant in the computer culture, it means quite the opposite: being able to use a program without knowing how it works.

Sherry Turkle

#4. I learned that it's okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys in Twue Wuv.

Jess C. Scott

#5. I'm an atheist swimming in a sea of superstition, surrounded by well-meaning, good people with whom I share a culture and similar concerns, and there's only one thing I can do. I have to laugh. Living

P.Z. Myers

#6. Everybody uses pop culture as a shorthand. You might make an obscure reference to Monty Python or Iron Eagle that only some people will get, but if they do it conveys a world of meaning.

Ernest Cline

#7. Selfless acts are a source of profound meaning for your self and your life.

Ron Kaufman

#8. The idea of the culture that you live in determining meaning in your art, though, is a very important aspect of what art would be about. But that had more to do with the kind of general understanding of what the hell you're doing, you know.

Robert Barry

#9. I have been contemplating the place and meaning of love in our lives and culture for years. When a subject attracts my intellectual and emotional imagination, I am long to observe it from all angles, to know it inside and out.

Bell Hooks

#10. An abyss seems to have opened between the intellectual cosmopolites of culture and the people, hungry for word and meaning.

Meridel Le Sueur

#11. This is a fast love culture, where people
fall in and out of something so sacred you wonder if it has the same meaning it did a hundred years ago.

Tarryn Fisher

#12. Death is inevitable. But the meaning people attach to death, its causes and aftermath, is culturally given. Without meaning, without culture making sense of things, life would be impossible.

Richard B. Lee

#13. The second way of finding a meaning in life is by experiencing something - such as goodness, truth and beauty - by experiencing nature and culture or, last but not least, by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness - by loving him.

Viktor E. Frankl

#14. I live a perfectly happy and comfortable life in Blair's Britain, but I can't work up much affection for the culture we've created for ourselves: it's too cynical, too knowing, too ironic, too empty of real value and meaning.

Jonathan Coe

#15. To me, science is an expression of the human spirit, which reaches every sphere of human culture. It gives an aim and meaning to existence as well as a knowledge, understanding, love, and admiration for the world. It gives a deeper meaning to morality and another dimension to esthetics.

Isidor Isaac Rabi

#16. Communion in faith, in the intimacy of meaning, cannot remain purely conceptual; it can maintain its vivifying energy only if it associates with communion in speech and action within a common space of social and cultural references. Faith needs culture.

Tariq Ramadan

#17. As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of a sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more than the cultivation of an ever-shrinking horizon of self-preservation and and self-expression.

Stanley Hauerwas

#18. To achieve a just society we have to reason together about the meaning of the good life, and to create a public culture hospitable to the disagreements that will inevitably arise.

Michael J. Sandel

#19. A mind virus is different in that there is no form to it; these are ideas placed in our heads when we are little. We get programmed by well-meaning people like our parents and their parents, our culture, religions and schools. We get conditioned to believe in our limitations and what's not possible.

Wayne Dyer

#20. Scientists are skeptics. It's unfortunate that the word 'skeptic' has taken on other connotations in the culture involving nihilism and cynicism. Really, in its pure and original meaning, it's just thoughtful inquiry.

Michael Shermer

#21. Culture primarily witnesses the absence of meaning, not it's presence.

Thomas McFarland

#22. Gangs have always existed - they are primarily a community a young men trying to find intensity, meaning, a path to the outer world (outside of home) that most tribal groupings addressed with rituals, rites of passage, initiation ceremonies. We've lost this knowledge as a culture.

Luis J. Rodriguez

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

Clare Chambers

#24. In Holland I have seen well-meaning, principled people blinded by multiculturalism, overwhelmed by the imperative to be sensitive and respectful of immigrant culture, while ignoring criminal abuse of women and girls.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#25. Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily be plugged into any theory.

Leo Tolstoy

#26. Art indeed may not change anything, and yet on some very basic level, life is insupportable without it.

Richard Matturro

#27. Culture is public, because meaning is

Clifford Geertz

#28. For any culture which is primarily concerned with meaning, the study of death - the only certainty that life holds for us - must be central, for an understanding of death is the key to liberation in life.

Stanislav Grof

#29. Refuse any image that could have a rational meaning or any memory or culture

Luis Bunuel

#30. Magical realism allows an artist like myself to inject layers of meaning without being obvious. In American culture, where there is freedom of expression, this approach may seem forced, unnecessary and misunderstood. But this system of communication has become very Iranian.

Shirin Neshat

#31. I give culture this meaning: exercise of thought, acquisition of general ideas, habit of connecting causes and effects ... I believe that it means thinking well, whatever one thinks, and therefore acting well, whatever one does.

Antonio Gramsci

#32. Russia has to have a technology company of global meaning sooner or later. We should take the depth of technical culture we have here and make it available worldwide.

Arkady Volozh

#33. Twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning.

Jean Baudrillard

#34. Our best moral stories don't tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We're not supposed to have it handed to us.

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

#35. It is not merely the feeling that something is familiar. It is one step beyond that. It is something new, challenging, or surprising that opens a door into a feeling of comfort, meaning, or familiarity. It is called an aesthetic aha.

Derek Thompson

#36. The more we retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world.

Chris Hedges

#37. The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition ... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

Roland Barthes

#38. The truth is the Super Bowl long ago became more than just a football game. It's part of our culture like turkey at Thanksgiving and lights at Christmas, and like those holidays beyond their meaning, a factor in our economy.

Bob Schieffer

#39. Lives with no more sense of spiritual meaning than that provided by shopping malls, ordinary television, and stagnant workplaces are barren lives indeed. Spirituality enriches culture.

Marianne Williamson

#40. We are monumentally distracted by a pervasive technological culture that appears to have a life of its own, one that insists on our full attention, continually seducing us and pulling us away from the opportunity to experience directly the true meaning of our own lives.

Al Gore

#41. When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.

Twyla Tharp

#42. What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself

Lewis Mumford

#43. I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

#44. What Alpha offers, and what is attracting thousands of people, is permission, rare in secular culture, to discuss the big questions - life and death and their meaning.

Madeleine Bunting

#45. How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.

Adrienne Rich

#46. A frame of references consisting of learning patterns of behaviours, values, assumptions and meaning which are shared to varying degrees of interest, importance and awareness with members of one group.

H. Ned Seelye

#47. There is even rhythm in being empty.

Miyamoto Musashi

#48. Dr. Timothy Shutt, in the context of the Illiad, explains the larger meaning of armor in Greek culture. It is the visible reputation of the warrior -- his gravitas, his wake. This allows another warrior to go out and win victories in the armor of Achilles.

Timothy B. Shutt

#49. The thing itself is never just out there in the world waiting to be framed by the photographer's Leica; rather, it is something dynamically produced in the act of representation and reception and already subject to the grids of meaning imposed on it by culture, history, language, and so forth.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau

#50. Without meaning, without substance, without aim: a mere 'public opinion'.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#51. The meaning of culture is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art.

John Cowper Powys

#52. You don't have to spend much time in Shanghai before you start to get all existential about the meaning of authenticity. Did you know that Shanghai is building nine satellite towns, each designed to mimic the architecture and culture of a different country?

Patricia Marx

#53. In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.

Anthony Storr

#54. 'Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.

Max Weber

#55. No wonder modern humanity, even as it loudly proclaims its freedom and power to choose, is really an impotent herd drive this way and that, paralyzed by the disconnectedness of it all. It's just one damn thing after another.

Stanley Hauerwas

#56. The Ancient Games are relatively obscure to most Olympians, but to understand just what the Games are about, it is really necessary to investigate the roots and the meaning that has transformed culture and society for so many years.

Bill Toomey

#57. The only Sundance [2011] film about cults that could actually have life as a cult film, THE WOODS has the greatest comic insight into why our current culture might inspire a search for meaning in the first place.

Karina Longworth

#58. Culture derives its meaning from man's faith in God; it is never an end in itself, but always a means of expressing one's religious faith.

Henry R. Van Til

#59. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

Clifford Geertz

#60. A foolish mind would not raise an eyebrow when things are done diff erently in a foreign culture. An educated mind would try to understand the meaning of it all.

Gloria D. Gonsalves

#61. Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.

Peter Kreeft

#62. The sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of 'Fuck You', so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response. We've long ago reached that level.

Noam Chomsky

#63. Transported to a different culture, thought often loses its subtlety and can even rampage like a wild beast.

Minae Mizumura