Hallgrimur Helgason Quotes

For many societies, the journey to modernity has been painful and costly.

I can remember when I first went into the Himalayan area way back in 1951. Money, for instance, was not important at all to the local people. But now, finance has become just as important to them as it is to us, and this is a change maybe not for the better.

I wanted to explore what all this new-found wealth means for the different generations of Chinese who have to live together in this place that is transforming at warp speed into the richest country on the planet.

Even oil wealth will not insulate a country from modernity forever.

Advertising is the edge of what people know how to do and of human experience and it explains the latest ways progress has changed us to ourselves.

What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact.

Burmese authors and artists can play the role that artists everywhere play. They help to mold the outlook of a society - not the whole outlook, and they are not the only ones to mold the outlook of society, but they have an important role to play there.

The nature of the South is changing faster than the stereotypes are. Much of the South now looks like San Jose. Is it still southern?

Music is always a commentary on society.

The mantra of the National Commercial Bank is 'building a better Jamaica.' If this bank is going to be everlastingly successful, it has to take on the ailments of this society.

People always think they're in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor.

In the latter half of the last century the impact of the expanding influence of Western culture and economic system brought about in China a severe conflict.

Russia was culturally isolated for so long that some sort of transformation needs to happen and will happen.

Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.

I have believed in the biographies I have written. I truly can tell you that they have influenced our society politically, culturally, socially.

Asian literature is evolving with the people. It's always a reflection on what's happening to the culture at large.

But the Spain which emerged around 1960, beginning with its economic miracle, created by the invasion of tourists, can no longer result in impassioned dedication on the part of its intellectuals, and even less on the part of foreign intellectuals.

Law is downstream from culture. By the time you make a law about something, you're reacting, not acting. I'd rather shape the culture.

The civilized world is far ahead of us. We have no choice but to catch up.

Culture does matter, but politics can change culture.

Industrialization, by drawing people from the countryside to the cities brings with it the weakening of traditional political and social support systems.

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations

Edinburgh, Scotland went from a narrow, theocratic, awful society to the intellectuality and free thinking Great Enlightenment in only 100 years.

The duty of an American churchman in China is not simply introducing new ideas into the country, but modifying its industrial, social, and political life and institutions. Missionaries are the pioneers of trade and commerce. Civilization, learning, instruction breed new wants which commerce supplies.