This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world as a fantastic impossibility spawned by a poet’s brain: it desires to be just the opposite, the unvarnished expression of the truth, and must precisely for that reason discard the mendacious finery of that alleged reality of the man of culture. The contrast between this real truth of nature and the lie of culture that poses as if it were the only reality is similar to that between the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the whole world of appearances." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality." - Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
"Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words." - Cynthia Ozick
"Though an inheritance of acres may be bequeathed, an inheritance of knowledge and wisdom cannot. The wealthy man may pay others for doing his work for him, but it is impossible to get his thinking done for him by another, or to purchase any kind of self-culture." - Samuel Smiles
"The diploma gives society a phantom guarantee and its holders phantom rights. The holder of a diploma passes officially for possessing knowledge... comes to believe tht society owes him something. Never has a convention been created which is more unfortunate, for every one - the state, the individual (and, in particular, culture)." - Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
"Men and women are biological facts. Ladies and gentleman - citizens - are social artifacts, works of political art. They carry the culture that is sustained by wise laws, and traditions of civility. A the end of the day we are right to judge a society by the character of the people it produces. That is why statecraft is, inevitably, soulcraft." - George Frederick Will
"Books of quotations are an elemental model of how culture is perpetuated, the wisdom of the tribe passed on to posterity, to be added to, edited, and modified by subsequent generations." - Robert Andrews
"Perhaps the biggest danger is the way a culture of self-help fosters both feelings of inadequacy and hopes for unattainable ideals… foolproof prescriptions for fulfillment and meaningful lives. The futile quest to become a complete all-round wonderful person, fully in control of our health, wealth and happiness." - Julian Baggini
"People in our culture have a morbid tendency to avoid blame, because they do not wish to take the trouble to change their conduct in any way: blame-avoidance and blame-transference are therefore endemic amongst us. These are substitutes for repentance and renewal." - Behavior Research Project NULL
"To lead, you have to make a declaration of independence against the estimation of others, the culture, the age. You have to decide to live in the world, but outside existing conceptions of it. Leaders do not merely do well by the terms of their culture they create new contexts, new things, new ways of doing and being." - Tom Butler-Bowdon
"What is wrong with our culture is that it often offers us an inaccurate conception of the self. It depicts the personal self as existing in competition with and in opposition with and in opposition to nature. We thereby fail to realize that if we destroy our environment, we are destroying what is in fact our larger self." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
"Let us be clear: censorship is cowardice… It masks corruption. It is a school of torture: its teaches, and accustoms one to the use of force against an idea, to submit thought to an alien “other.” But worst still, censorship destroys criticism, which is the essential ingredient of culture." - Pablo Antonio Cuadra
"The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts." - Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
"Lowering consumption need not deprive people of goods and services that really matter. To the contrary, life’ most meaningful and pleasant activities are often paragons of environmental virtue. The preponderance of things that people name as their most rewarding pastimes are infinitely sustainable. Religious practice, conversation, family and community gatherings, theater, music, dance, literature, sports, poetry, artistic and creative pursuits, education, and appreciation of nature all fit readily into a culture of permanence – a way of life that can endure through countless generations." - Alan Thein Durning
"Cultures can mix with one another. Explicit design is introduced to promote, improve, advance, and accelerate the evolutionary process of culture. A change brought about by a science and technology of behavior would correspond to a `biological mutation’ towards the better… Yet the final determining cause, whether genetic or cultural, is never an ethical or moral one, but always leads back to the environment. The world is a large-scale laboratory. Both the controller and the controlled are subject to conditioning. All life is conditioning." - L. Francis Edmunds
"Culture consists of socially established structures of meaning." - Clifford Geertz
"Piety is not an end, but a means: a means of attaining the highest culture through the purest tranquility of soul." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next it moved to Europe, where it became a culture, and, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise." - Richard Halverson, fully Richard Christian Halverson
"One must eat and breathe before concerning himself with politics, social affairs, and culture." - Park Chung-hee
"Rites [li] rest on three bases: heaven and earth, which are the source of all life; the ancestors, who are the source of the human race; [and] sovereigns and teachers, who are the source of government... Should any of the three be missing, either there would be no people or people would be without peace. Hence rites are to serve Heaven on high and earth below, and to honor the ancestors and elevate the sovereigns and teachers... Who holds to the rites is never confused in the midst of multifarious change; who deviates therefrom is lost. Rites - are they not the culmination of culture?" - Hsun-Tzu NULL
"We can flow along with the mainstream of a culture that does not serve us well – does not really make us comfortable, does not really make us safe; but only offers illusions of happiness, comfort, safety – or we can begin the oftentimes prickly work of searching our own hearts, of asking who and what we love, who and what we feel strongly enough about to change our lives for, to fight for, to live for." - Derrick Jensen
"Culture is but the fine flowering of real education, and it is the training of the feeling, the tastes, and the manners that make it so." - Minnie Kellogg, born Laura Miriam Cornelius
"Virtues transcend time and culture (although their cultural expression may vary); justice and kindness, for example, will always and everywhere be virtues, regardless of how many people exhibit them." - Thomas Lickona, fully Thomas Edward Lickona
"It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths." - Greil Marcus
"Being a Christian in American doesn’t require a great cost. You can be Christian and fully participate in the secular culture. I have a sense that, more and more, being a Christian in this country will require a choice. The Christian will have to be willing to make big sacrifices… Right now, in this culture, you can have your cake and eat it too. But that is an illusion. You cannot be a fat sprinter. If you want to spring to the Kingdom, you had better be lean." - Henri Nouwen, fully Henri Jozef Machiel Nouwen
"When organized religion is completely accepted by the mass as no more than a pleasing and fashionable facet of culture, then it falls prey to the mass-produced platitude." - Stanley Rowland Jr., fully Donald Stanley Rowland Jr.
"The world has the wealth and resources to provide everyone the opportunity to live a decent life. We consume too much when market relationships displace the bonds of community, compassion, culture, and place. We consume too much when consumption becomes an end in itself and makes us lose affection and reverence for the natural world." - Mark Sagoff
"If there is any purpose or direction in the evolution of culture, it has to do with bringing people under the control of more and more of the consequences of behavior." - B. F. Skinner, fully Burrhus Frederic "B.F." Skinner
"Culture is created by the communal mind, and each mind in turn is the product of the genetically structured human brain. Genes and culture are therefore inseverably linked. But the linkage is flexible, to a degree still mostly unmeasured. The linkage is also tortuous: Genes prescribe epigenetic rules, which are the neural pathways and regularities in cognitive development by which the individual mind assembles itself." -
"Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived." -
"The brain constantly searches for meaning, for connections between objects and qualities that cross-cut the senses and provide information about external existence… In order to grasp the human condition, both the genes and culture must be understood, not separately in the traditional manner of science and the humanities, but together, in recognition of the realities of human evolution." -
"The most distinctive qualities of the human species are extremely high intelligence, language, culture, and reliance on long-term social contracts. In combination they gave early Homo sapiens a decisive edge of all competing animal species, but they also exacted a price we continue to pay, composed of the shocking recognition of the self, of the finiteness of personal existence, and the chaos of the environment." -
"What is human nature? It is not the genes, which prescribe it, or culture, its ultimate product. Rather, human nature is something else for which we have only begun to find expression. It is the epigenetic rules, the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to another, and thus connect the genes to culture." -
"Many Americans draw the boundaries of their self-interest very narrowly. Our culture's emphasis on individualism and competition reinforces an attitude of isolation and impotence toward global problems." - Betsy Taylor
"Many of our culture's most important achievements in the arts, science, and technology were made by people who had breakthrough insights in dreams, visions, intuitive flashbacks, and altered states of consciousness. And yet our society generally discounts such experiences, sometimes even treating them as grounds for a diagnosis of mental illness." - Richard Heinberg
"Humans have the ability to act consciously, and collectively, [exercising foresight to] choose their own evolutionary path. In our crucial epoch we cannot leave the selection of the next step in the evolution of human society and culture to chance. We must plan for it, consciously and purposefully." -
"Psychological maturation can continue far beyond our arbitrary, culture-bound definitions of normality." - Frances Vaughan & Roger Walsh
"Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love and of thought, which, in the course of the centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved." - André Malraux
"Wherever learning breeds specialists, the sum of human culture is enhanced thereby. That is the illusion and consolation of specialists." - Antonio Machado, fully Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz
"Every historic culture-pattern is an organic whole in which all the parts are interdependent." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"The most potent force in the world is an idea which, when organized into a body of concepts, becomes a culture and way of life. Concepts are psychological lenses focusing our experiences. Our physical eyes bring their reports but our conceptual lenses interpret them. If we would “know ourselves” it is a paramount necessity that we should examine critically and impartially our conceptual heritage and endeavor to discover why we accept or reject it." - Arthur W Osborn
"Politeness is the chief sign of culture." - Baltasar Gracián