This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"American cultural traditions define personality, achievement, and the purpose of human life in ways that leave the individual suspended in glorious, but terrifying, isolation. These are limitations of our culture, of the categories and ways of thinking we have inherited, not limitations of individuals... who inhabit this culture." - Robert Bellah, fully Robert Neelly Bellah
"The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities... There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand that this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible." - Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
"There has never been a time when civilization stood more in need of individuals who are genuinely culture conscious, who can see objectively the social behaviors of other peoples without fear and recrimination." - Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
"No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual." - Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
"Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"Culture is not just an ornament; it is the expression of a nation's character, and at the same time it is a powerful instrument to mold character. The end of culture is right living." - W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham
"The value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness." - W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham
"Information is not culture. In the mind of a truly educated person, facts are organized, and they make up a living world in the image of the world of reality." - André Maurois, born born Emile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog
"But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: 'Of course I know nothing about German literature.' It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French." - Doris Lessing, fully Doris May Lessing, born Doris May Tayler
"How can man be intelligent, happy, or useful, without the culture and discipline of education? It is this that unlocks the prison-house of his mind, and releases the captive." - Edward Porter Humphrey
"What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal. " - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"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." - Ervin László
"The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes." - Freda Adler
"There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness. " - George Steiner, fully Francis George Steiner
"The welfare culture tells the man he is not a necessary part of the family; he feels dispensable, his wife knows he is dispensable, his children sense it." - George F Gilder
"Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. " - Marshall McLuhan, fully Herbert Marshall McLuhan
"There is the past and its continuing horrors: violence, war, prejudices against those who are different, outrageous monopolization of the good earth's wealth by a few, political power in the hands of liars and murderers, the building of prisons instead of schools, the poisoning of the press and the entire culture by money. It is easy to become discouraged observing this, especially since this is what the press and television insist that we look at, and nothing more. But there is also the bubbling of change under the surface of obedience: the growing revulsion against endless wars, the insistence of women all over the world that they will no longer tolerate abuse and subordination… There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color." - Howard Zinn
"Physical revolution has no meaning; there is only one revolution, psychological, inward revolution because the human being - you - is the society. You have built this society and in that society, in that culture you're caught; therefore, you are the world and the world is you, not verbally, theoretically or intellectually, but actually. You are the world and the world is you and if you are confused, if you are disturbed, if you are neurotic, unbalanced, whatever structure you create as social morality, as law, as ethics or as religion must equally be confused." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"The collective mind is your mind, you are part of the culture in which you have been brought up, in which you have been educated, you're not separate from the society, from the world, so, unless you as a human being radically change there is very little hope for a peaceful, religious society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"The general notions about human understanding… which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of or new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find [in modern physics] is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom." - Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
"I want to understand what, precisely, it is in ourselves that prevents great truth from penetrating into our lives and therefore which prevents us from acting ethically in the only real sense of the word. Ethically means acting and being in the service of what is the true greatness of oneself as Man. I've studied many aspects of our culture from this perspective - science, education, medicine, religion. But now I see that in our society, in our world, it is our relation to money that needs to be understood. If great truth does not enter into our relation to money, it cannot enter our lives." - Jacob Needleman
"No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it. " - James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
"The culture is going into a psychological depression. We are concerned about our place in the world, about being competitive: Will my children have as much as I have? Will I ever own my own home? How can I pay for a new car? Are immigrants taking away my white world? " - James Hillman
"The hardest part of returning to a truly healthy environment may be changing the current totally unsustainable heavy-meat-eating culture of increasing numbers of people around the world. But we must try. We must make a start, one by one." - Jane Goodall, fully Dame Jane Morris Goodall, born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall
"You have the need and the right to spend part of your life caring for your soul. It is not easy. You have to resist the demands of the work-oriented, often defensive, element in your psyche that measures life only in terms of output -- how much you produce -- not in terms of the quality of your life experiences. To be a soulful person means to go against all the pervasive, prove-yourself values of our culture and instead treasure what is unique and internal and valuable in yourself and your own personal evolution." - Jean Shinoda Bolen
"To be a soulful person means to go against all the pervasive, prove-yourself values of our culture and instead treasure what is unique and internal and valuable in yourself and your own personal evolution." - Jean Shinoda Bolen
"To sneer at the power of culture to shape man’s mind and to abandon our efforts to bring this power under human control is to commit moral suicide." - Jerome Bruner, fully Jerome Seymour Bruner
"Writing is employing the chief tool of culture to add to the global chatter as stylishly as possible with the moral imperative of underscoring the absurdity of culture." - Jill Johnston
"Seven Point Program for Management by Leadership: 1. Develop a vision for the business. 2. Change the culture to achieve the vision. 3. Flatten the organization. 4. Eliminate bureaucracy. 5. Empower individuals. 6. Raise quality and efficiency. 7. Eliminate boundaries. " - Jack Welch, fully John Francis "Jack" Welch, Jr.
"The more decadent a culture gets, the more they have a need for what they don't have at all, which is innocence, so you end up with kiddie porn and a perverse obsession with youth." - Joni Mitchell, born Roberta Joan Anderson
"It is the earnest wish of my heart, that your minds may be well established in the sound principles of religious knowledge, because I am fully persuaded, that nothing else can be a sufficient foundation of a virtuous and truly respectable conduct in life, or of good hope in death. A mind destitute of knowledge (and, comparatively speaking, no kind of knowledge, besides that of religion, deserves the name) is like a field on which no culture has been bestowed, which, the richer it is, the ranker weeds it will produce, If nothing good be sown in it, it will be dccupied by plants that are useless or noxious." - Joseph Priestley
"School is an institution for drilling children in cultural orientation. ...American classrooms, like educational institutions anywhere, express the values, preoccupations,and fears found in the culture as a whole. School has no choice; it must train the children to fit the culture as it is. ...Since education is always against some things and for others, it bears the burden of the cultural obessions. ...It thus comes about that most educational systems are imbued with anxiety and hostility, that they are against as many things as they are for. ... The function of education has never been to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind them...acquiescence, not originality. ...Schools are the central conserving force of the culture. " - Jules Henry
"In the life of the mass-order, the culture of the generality tends to conform to the demands of the average human being. Spirituality decays through being diffused among the masses when knowledge is impoverished in every possible way by rationalisation until it becomes accessible to the crude understanding of all." - Karl Jaspers, fully Karl Theodor Jaspers
"The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span." - Karl Kraus
"Meditation, then, is not so much a part of this or that particular religion, but rather part of the universal spiritual culture of all humankind--an effort to bring awareness to bear on all aspects of life. It is, in other words, part of what has been called the perennial philosophy." - Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
"It may seem sometimes as if a culture of peace does not stand a chance against the culture of war, the culture of violence and the cultures of impunity and intolerance. Peace may indeed be a complex challenge, dependent on action in many fields and even a bit of luck from time to time. It may be a painfully slow process, and fragile and imperfect when it is achieved. But peace is in our hands. We can do it." - Kofi Annan, fully Kofi Atta Annan
"Africa is one continent, one people, and one nation. The notion that in order to have a nation it is necessary for there to be a common language, a common territory and common culture has failed to stand the test of time or the scrutiny of scientific definition of objective reality... The community of economic life is the major feature within a nation, and it is the economy which holds together the people living in a territory. It is on this basis that the new Africans recognise themselves as potentially one nation, whose dominion is the entire African continent." - Kwame Nkrumah
"There is a close connection between socio-political development, the struggle between social classes and the history of ideologies. In general, intellectual movements closely reflect the trends of economic developments. In communal society, where there are virtually no class divisions, man's productive activities on outlook and culture is less discernible. Account must be taken of the psychology of conflicting classes." - Kwame Nkrumah
"Art has a prophetic role, denouncing the culture it lays bare. " - Langdon Gilkey, fully Langdon Brown Gilkey
"Patriotism is the more or less conscious conviction of a person that his own welfare and that of the significant groups to which he belongs are dependent upon the preservation or expansion (or both) of the power and culture of his society." - Leonard W. Doob, fully Leonard William Doob
"Good culture is born of a good disposition; and since the cause is more to be praised than the effect, I will rather praise a good disposition without culture, than good culture without the disposition." - Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
"The search for the ultimate foundation is as much an unremovable part of human culture as it is the denial of the legitimacy of this search." - Leszek Kolakowski
"Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect." - Lionel Trilling
"A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment." - Lionel Trilling
"Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing -- he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him." - Lionel Trilling
"The doctrine of foods is of great ethical and political significance. Food becomes blood, blood becomes heart and brain, thoughts and mind stuff. Human fare is the foundation of human culture and thought. Would you improve a nation? Give it, instead of declamations against sin, better food. Man is what he eats." - Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach
"The confusion of spirit and body is quite understandable in a culture where spirit is concretized in magnificent skyscrapers, where cathedrals have become museums for tourists, where woman-flesh-devil are associated, and nature is raped for any deplorable excuse." - Marion Woodman
"In a culture whose media extols thinness as the great panacea that will bring happiness, sexuality, self-respect and social acceptance, they are blind to the insidious lies of the false goddess. Possessed by their own damaged instincts, and ironically driven by the same desire for power that their parents used in raising them, some children wolf down food, or reject it, or vomit it out. Whether that rejection of life is concretized in 200 pounds of armor, or 90 pounds of bone, or vomit in the toilet, the surest way out of the neurosis is to try to understand what food symbolizes in the individual psyche and why the energy is pulled in that direction." - Marion Woodman
"Girls developed eating disorders when our culture developed a standard of beauty that they couldn't obtain by being healthy. When unnatural thinness became attractive, girls did unnatural things to be thin." - Mary Pipher, aka Mary Elizabeth Pipher or Mary Bray Pipher