Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.

The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth.

The history of ideas is littered with the corpses of those who have tried to define culture.

So we have to be careful because if you don't protect your culture you won't have it for very long.

People tend to believe that to be modern you have to disengage from your heritage, but it's not true.

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.

In a kind of a way there's a bit of that happening now so we have to be careful to preserve our culture.

There are lots of stories about my culture that I think bring a whole other perspective to who we are and where we have been and how we got here that I think need to be done.

If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.

We must preserve our cultural identity.

Culture is a part of basic human nature, of deep humanity.

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.

Over an extended period of time, if a culture does not entail any traditions...if there are no values or if there is no awareness or social consciousness...a heritage tradition can never be developed.

We should see to it that our people are steeped in a real knowledge and understanding of our national culture.

Experience supplies painful proof that traditions once called into being are first called useful, then they become necessary. At last they are too often made idols, and all must bow down to them or be punished.

The basis of national identity is to say, "This is authentic to me or my forebears," and is there even such a thing? How authentic is it to your life? Just because your grandfather did it, what does that have to do with you? If I say I'm working in the style of Rembrandt, so what? You can say it, but are you really? No, because when you try to literally copy a cultural artifact, you change it. It dissolves, and then who's looking at it? People who appreciate that kind of drawing, or people it means nothing to?

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.

The Arab who built himself a hut with marbles from the temple of Palmyra is more philosophical than all the curators of the museums of London, Paris, and Munich.

Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the coarse or centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved

Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society

A culture is the sum of all the things about which humanity can choose to differ.

Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West.

Having culture means we are the only animal that acquires the rules of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors, rather than from the genes they pass to us.