Top 100 Human Culture Quotes
#1. How do the alchemies of the kitchen transform the raw stuffs of nature into some of the great delights of human culture?
Michael Pollan
#2. The idea is that human culture as broadly defined
art, politics, technology, religion, and so on
evolves in much the way biological species evolve: new cultural traits arise and may flourish or perish, and as a result whole institutions can belief systems form and change.
Robert Wright
#3. I plead for conservation of human culture, which is much more fragile than nature herself. We needn't destroy other cultures with the force of our own.
Arthur Erickson
#4. I'm getting used to this planet and to this curious human culture which is as cheerfully enthusiastic as it is cheerfully crue
Annie Dillard
#5. I think with world building, it's important to create a sense of culture even if it is just a fantasy, and the best way to do that is to look at a real human culture and see what makes it cohesive.
Laini Taylor
#6. Simply put, here amid the kingdoms of this world we have no continuing city. That's why we dare not become attached to the passing values of any human culture.
Harold L. Senkbeil
#7. Spaceflight isn't just about doing experiments, it's about an extension of human culture.
Chris Hadfield
#8. Private communication systems have been around since the beginning of human culture.
John McAfee
#9. Wherever learning breeds specialists, the sum of human culture is enhanced thereby. That is the illusion and consolation of specialists.
Antonio Machado
#10. relationships are the real, evolving, living systems of human culture.
Steve McIntosh
#11. Character is the backbone of our human culture. Music is the flowering of character.
Confucius
#12. [Bruno] Latour argues that one of the foundational gestures of western modernity has been the effort to formulate and police a heightened antimony between nonhuman nature and human culture.
-- Randall Styers, Making Magic, p. 17
Randall Styers
#13. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
Richard Dawkins
#14. For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.
William Irwin Thompson
#15. Because Christians are never as good as their right beliefs should make them and non-Christians are never as bad as their wrong beliefs should make them, we will adopt a stance of critical enjoyment of human culture and its expressions in every field of work.
Timothy Keller
#16. If history tells us anything, it is that human culture and knowledge are constantly evolving.
James Redfield
#17. Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it's produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.
Ken Robinson
#18. Bankers cannot afford to be concerned with only the economic aspects of projects. There may be serious implications on the natural environment, the urban environment, on human culture.
Arthur Erickson
#19. Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture - one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce - rather than an articulated body of thought.
Thomas Ligotti
#20. Human culture, in evolutionary terms, moves from episodic, to mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic - that made all kinds of sense. To some extent, ontogeny repeats phylogeny, because children go through something like the same thing.
Robert Neelly Bellah
#21. You shouldn't do science just to improve wealth - do science for the sake of human culture and
knowledge.
There must be some purpose in life that is higher than just surviving.
Gerhard
#22. But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.
E. O. Wilson
#23. You're constantly, in human culture, trying to balance between uplifting, heartfelt, sincere, earnestness that empowers and enlightens people, and the sarcastic cynicism that comes from just people's acquired bitterness over experiences.
Seth Green
#24. There is a lot of talking in human culture," Venomous told the other male in a low aside. "They debate everything and need words to calm them. I wager there is much talking during this custom. Watch me as I make our mate happy with words.
Penelope Fletcher
#25. Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
Erich Fromm
#26. The superior person tries to promote music as a means to the perfection of human culture. When such music prevails, and people's minds are led towards the right ideals and aspirations, we may see the appearance of a great nation.
Confucius
#27. The differences between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature.
Margaret Mead
#28. I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.
Terence McKenna
#29. From the point of view of political geography we are standing on one of the frontiers of human culture; for the man inside the rubber sack it was land's end, the shore of the world.
Edward Abbey
#30. On a surface level, regionalism is gone, if we define regionalism as human culture. But, what if we define regionalism as something older than human culture?
Cynthia Daignault
#31. Christianity brings to fulfilment and completion imperfect and partial insights about reality, scattered abroad in human culture. Tolkien gave Lewis a lens, a way of seeing things, which
Alister E. McGrath
#32. The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making maps is to find your way to your destination ... In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture.
Daniel Dennett
#33. In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.
Gregory Bateson
#34. Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!
Daniel Dennett
#35. It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends.
Christopher Dawson
#37. Nature doesn't need people - people need nature; nature would survive the extinction of the human being and go on just fine, but human culture, human beings, cannot survive without nature.
Harrison Ford
#38. Dreams carry us back to the earlier stages of human culture and afford us a means of understanding it more clearly.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#39. How is it [, then] that the leaders of our society have seen fit to try to eliminate this one very important means of learning and self-discovery, this means which has been used, respected, and honored for thousands of years, in every human culture of which we have a record?
Alexander Shulgin
#40. 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
#41. Trees are extraordinary revelations of the spirit in nature. And, given the multitude of ways that trees and their products benefit and enrich human culture, they are an especially appropriate symbol of the interdependence of spirit and nature.
Steven Clark Rockefeller
#42. As the ongoing industrial crusade to turn all earthly life to commercial purpose relentlessly impoverishes the biosphere and human culture, our living images of graceful possibility dwindle.
Stephanie Mills
#43. Myth and nature are the two great garments of the world, with nature being the living green garment that covers the planet and myth being the multidimensional, many-colored fabric that continually weaves human culture.
Michael Meade
#45. Nationality is the creative power of human culture, culture is the creative power of nationality.
A. C. Cuza
#46. But what is more, if we have succeeded in adding to the basic understanding of our universe and ourselves, we will have made a contribution to the totality of human culture.
Haldan Keffer Hartline
#47. Every artifact of human culture is a positive response to God's general revelation and simultaneously a rebellious assertion against His sovereign rule over us.
Timothy Keller
#48. Sport is a product of human culture. America seems to need football at this state of our social development. When you get ninety million people watching a single game on television, it ... shows you that people need something to identify with.
Joe Paterno
#49. It is said culture requires slaves. I say that no cultured society can be built with slaves. This terrible Twentieth Century has made all cultural theories from Plato down seem ridiculous. Little man, there has never been a human culture.
Wilhelm Reich
#50. We reject certain food because it is rotten. Certain food we can see is fresh. But there is this creative space between fresh food and rotten food where most of human culture's most prized delicacies and culinary achievements exist.
Sandor Katz
#51. Literalness, however, is not the substance from which human culture is made.
Begona Aretxaga
#52. No human culture is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to understand, to learn, to inhabit another world.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
#53. God's revelation does not need the light of human genius, the polish and strength of human culture, the brilliancy of human thought, the force of human brains to adorn or enforce it; but it does demand the simplicity, the docility, humility, and faith of a child's heart.
E. M. Bounds
#54. Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
Johan Huizinga
#55. All human activity takes place within a culture and interacts with culture.
Pope John Paul II
#56. Some Christians see the biblical teaching on homosexuality as reflecting the culture and times in which the Bible was written and not reflecting God's eternal perspective on homosexual people. Others believe these scriptures represent God's timeless will for how human beings practice intimacy.
Adam Hamilton
#57. Human nature is deeper and broader than the artificial contrivance of any existing culture.
Edward O. Wilson
#58. The reduction of the earth to an object simply for human's use/ possession is unthinkable in most traditional cultures ... the earth belongs to itself and to all the component members of the community.
Thomas Berry
#59. Compassion can be put into practice if one recognizes the fact that every human being is a member of humanity and the human family regardless of differences in religion, culture, color and creed. Deep down there is no difference.
Dalai Lama
#60. Music speaks directly to the heart. This response, this echo within the heart, is proof that human hearts can transcend the barriers of time and space and nationality. Exchanges in the field of culture can play an important role in enabling people to overcome mistrust and prejudice and build peace.
Daisaku Ikeda
#61. The company culture is about being human, being good to other people. We recently did a survey with our drivers. 48 out of 50 said that they preferred driving with Lyft because they said that passengers were friendlier.
Logan Green
#62. The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.
Theodor Adorno
#63. In India, it is religion that forms the very core of the national heart. It is the backbone - the bed-rock - the foundation upon which the national edifice has been built.
Abhijit Naskar
#64. That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplification of our culture.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#65. The fundamental task of the evangelization of culture is the challenge to make God visible in the human face of Jesus.
Pope Benedict XVI
#66. The true aim of female education should be, not a development of one or two, but all the faculties of the human soul, because no perfect womanhood is developed by imperfect culture.
Frances Harper
#67. We owe the origin and development of human society and, consequently, of culture and civilization, to the fact that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than when performed in isolation.
Ludwig Von Mises
#68. Digital books are in some ways hastening the lazy, solipsistic narcissism of our culture. We use our gadgets as proxies for other people and genuine human interaction. And yes, I think that's bad.
Jason Merkoski
#69. Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it's seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don't share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit.
Richard Flanagan
#70. As a human body it is an extraordinary piece of creation. But as a human being he is rotten because of the culture.
U.G. Krishnamurti
#71. Stories, as we're taught in journalism school early on, are told through people. Those stories make our documentaries powerful. You can explore someone's culture, you can explore their experience, you can explore an issue through human beings who are going through it.
Soledad O'Brien
#72. Sanity, soundness, and sincerity, of which gleams and strains can still be found in the human brain under powerful microscopes, flourish only in a culture of clarification, which is now becoming harder and harder to detect with the naked eye.
James Thurber
#73. The traditional Indian mind has been for centuries, and still is, first religious, and then everything else.
Abhijit Naskar
#74. A culture that values production over life values the wrong things, because it will produce things at the expense of living beings, human or otherwise.
Derrick Jensen
#75. We have developed a culture of self-interest, self-gratification, self-aggrandizement, and utter selfishness. We have institutionalized and disseminated these values as never before in human history.
Michael C. Hill
#76. Nationalism is fraught with dangers, of course, but so is the blind refusal to recognize that attachment to one's own culture, traditions, and history is a creative, normal, and healthy part of human experience.
Anthony Daniels
#77. Much of what we think of as human evolved long after the use of tools. It is probably more correct to think of much of our structure as the result of culture than it is to think of men anatomically like ourselves slowly developing culture.
Sherwood L. Washburn
#78. In terms of organisational models and human relationship models, humankind has not evolved much over the last millennia.
Miguel Reynolds Brandao
#79. In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane.
Yukichi Fukuzawa
#80. We should be working to live, not living to work. We have created this "individualistic culture" were living to work has been centered around material gains. Working to live is a better approach because it emphasis on the human experiences and the condition of living.
Henry Johnson Jr
#81. The test of our social commitment and humanity is how we treat the most powerless of our fellow citizens, the respect we accord to our fellow human beings. That is what reveals our true culture.
Azim Premji
#82. War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene.
Wilhelm Von Humboldt
#83. The rapprochement of peoples is only possible when differences of culture and outlook are respected and appreciated rather than feared and condemned, when the common bond of human dignity is recognized as the essential bond for a peaceful world.
J. William Fulbright
#84. For most of human civilization, the pace of innovation has been so slow that a generation might pass before a discovery would influence your life, culture or the conduct of nations.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#85. Today's children are taught by our culture that we are a cosmic accident. Something slithered out of the primal slime and over billions of years evolved into a human being. We are cousins, ten times removed, to the ape at the zoo eating his own excrement.
Gary Bauer
#86. In all cultures, the midwife's place is on the threshold of life, where intense human emotions, fear, hope, longing, triumph, and incredible physical power-enable a new human being to emerge. Her vocation is unique.
Sheila Kitzinger
#87. A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There could be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress.
John Stuart Mill
#88. A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society.
Robert McKee
#89. The crucial differences which distinguish human societies and human beings are not biological. They are cultural.
Ruth Benedict
#90. An ideal culture is one that makes a place for every human gift
Margaret Mead
#91. To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place. By comparison, human nature-the psychologist's domain-is infinitely more daunting.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#92. 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
#93. Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.
David Mamet
#94. The human impulse behind the isolation of class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk.
Charles Murray
#95. I had rather that the human race, having a certain quality in their lives, should continue for only a few centuries than that, losing freedom, friendship, dignity, and mercy, and learning to be quite content without them, they should continue for millions of millennia.
C.S. Lewis
#96. Afghans think the burqa is a permanent part of culture. But, if you bring it to Europe, how would people react? Afghanistan doesn't want to change its culture, but it can change, all the time. So why are Afghans giving so much value to it? The burqa is not natural. It's not human nature.
Malina Suliman
#97. My soul is in a reckless way, it's seeking culture untouched by greed, it's seeking places untouched by human spirit, it's seeking places that need love, because my soul is here for love and I feel everywhere I've already been has suffocated every inch of beauty out of me.
Nikki Rowe
#98. In every human society of which we know - prehistoric, ancient or modern, whether hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural or industrial - at least some form of art is displayed, and not only displayed, but highly regarded and willingly engaged in.
Ellen Dissanayake
#99. I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.
Albert Einstein
#100. There do remain dispersed in the soil of human nature divers seeds of goodness, of benignity, of ingenuity, which, being cherished, excited, and quickened by good culture, do, by common experience, thrust out flowers very lovely, and yield fruits very pleasant of virtue and goodness.
Isaac Barrow
