Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.

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.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.

If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

Muslims, who have a completely different value system, come to the West, then they should accept that there are certain basic values in the West intrinsic to our culture. Just as I wouldn't suggest that any Westerner walk down the streets of Saudi Arabia in a bikini.

We found out that you can't pass on acquired things like bigotry, prejudice, greed. That's all learned in your culture or your sub-culture

Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.

There is no way you can think outside of your culture.

There's a lot of us who do not accept the culture of the bubbles.

When you first arrive in India, you think, 'God, these Indians treat their servants so badly! How awful!' It's something in the air, and something about the way people are, that very few people hold out. I wasn't able to. Everybody goes local. You stop saying 'thank you' and things like that.

In the past, modeling influences were largely confined to the styles of behavior and social practices in one's immediate community. The advent of television vastly expanded the range of models to which members of society are exposed day in and day out.

That's how a nation's manners are going to be taught - from watching others' behavior and learning from the effects of that behavior.

Immigrants have to adopt our values, not the other way around.

Class doesn't create culture anymore.

It's difficult to identify why two cultures will react differently to the same sport.

There's a difference between being culturally insensitive - being insensitive towards a culture - and being insensitive.

A proud and healthy society does not equivocate when it comes to stating clearly and unequivocally what it expects of its prospective immigrants. It is for immigrants to adapt to the host nation's values and never the other way around.

You can't escape culture. You can learn about it. You can criticize it. You can try to move it slowly. But at the end of the day, you can't actually opt out of the culture that you're in.

Different cultures produce a different 'cool.' And your perception of 'cool' changes depending on where you are.

You cannot merely expect culture to be a natural occurrence; it has to be taught and made a part of your everyday routine.

Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.

As for the Jewish-American question, what's funny is that I grew up in India, and the Jewish-American comparison is better for second-generation Asians. I'm sure there's something about globalization that has globalized our neuroses, so that I, growing up in India, somehow turned out very similar to you. It's a weird thing, when you think about it, but everyone now is exposed to a mainstream white American world, wherever you are. And so there's this need to belong or measure yourself up to that white world, which leads to all sorts of straining.

The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.

My father used to say that, through culture, humans effectively domesticated themselves.