Rowan Williams Quotes

You seek help from the elders. A society with elders is healthy. It's not always that way in the West.

In Africa... age is not important over there. They don't care.

White people don't seem to have many Elders. They do have a lot of oldsters.

If someone were to put a proposition before men bidding them choose, after examination, the best customs in the world, each nation would certainly select its own.

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

To some extent, we've always had an admiration for extroversion in our culture. But the extrovert ideal really came to play at the turn of the 20th century when we had the rise of big business.

Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.

To me, I learned along the way, you know, culture is behavior. That's all it is; culture is people's behaviors.

Once we accept violence as an adaptation, it makes sense that its expression is calibrated to the environment. The same individual will behave differently if he comes of age in Detroit, Mich., versus Windsor, Ontario; in New York in the 1980s versus New York now; in a culture of honor versus a culture of dignity.

It seems that when you get to a certain age you almost give yourself permission to misbehave and say what you think. People allow it, with very old people.

We seem to live in an age where we are quietly appalled by the idea of appetites, whether they be for sex, food or diamonds.

We do not get to this age to be written off. Older people can act as a support system, which is what happens more in Mediterranean countries. People become much wiser as they get older and we should value that.

I don't know how one actually would define obscenity. I'm sure the definition is different according to the age one is living in.

Look, demanding somebody do anything in this day and age is not going to fly.

Miss not the discourse of the elders.

A country can be judged by the quality of its proverbs.

Even hoar hairs [elderly scholars] have something to learn; and old age, it would seem, cannot in all respects be trusted for wisdom

There is endless variety in the details of the customs and laws which prevail of the world at large.

In modern civilized communities... the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum.

Culture is more important than rules and regulations.

The beauty of age is we grow, we learn. We have more wisdom. And as much as the youth-glorifying Hollywood would like us to believe, it's nothing. They're wrong.

Cultural concepts are one of the most fascinating things about historical fiction.

Every culture is different in terms of what is taboo and what is acceptable. I grew up in Singapore, where people are very mindful of that. One can see that as restriction or as consideration for a fellow person living within a shared environment.

We are a very youth-driven culture, and I don't really know why because wisdom tends to come with more years, not fewer.

What is one China? You have to tell me what one China looks like. If a girl is to marry into another family, you have to tell her what that family is like.