Jane Hirshfield Quotes

There's no way to escape the culture that has evolved, from which we ourselves have evolved. Naturally, we stress it, break it up, reassemble it to suit our own needs. But it is there - a source of vital strength.

It's very, very hard to affect culture. And you can get surprised thinking you're farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.

Class doesn't create culture anymore.

You can’t mandate [cultural change], can’t engineer it. What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But then you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.

Over the past several years, all of us as Canadians, and as members of the North American cultural and economic environment, have been to a greater or lesser extent party to a significant attitudinal change towards our culture.

Culture is just a shambling zombie that repeats what it did in life; bits of it drop off, and it doesn't appear to notice.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

Civilisations which get cut off from their traditions and values do not survive for long.

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.

We are American at puberty. We die French.

But a people unable to reform will not be able to preserve its old culture either.

A culture that holds people back should and can be changed.

We have to realize our black heritage in order to give us strength to move on and progress. But as far as returning to the old African culture, it's unnecessary and it's not advantageous in many respects. We believe that culture itself will not liberate us. We're going to need some stronger stuff.

Cultural diversity and cultural change are desirable and inevitable. We are cultural animals, someone without a culture is not human. But the cultures we possess vary enormously. Indeed, the variability, over time and space is the great evolutionary advantage of humanity. Instead of changing biologically over millennia, human beings can change culturally over decades

Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo.

You can overcome wrong technology. Your people have the initiative, they see the problem, no big deal ... you can't overcome bad culture. You've gotta change whoever is in charge.

Englishmen must learn to be Brahmins, not banias.

This call for a new culture is not a new idea.

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

Culture is not made up but something that evolves which is human.

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.

Things change in different countries as people grow, and as generations change.