Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes

There is an invisible garment woven around us from our earliest years; it is made of the way we eat, the way we walk, the way we greet people.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

We delude ourselves into believing that morality comes from somewhere else, whereas in reality we behave as we've been told to behave.

All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.

A mind cannot be independent of culture.

We're all influenced by everything unless we're locked in an empty room.

We have religious superstitions of the Middle Ages that shape our 21st century social policies.

The spirit of the age, as it is revealed to each of us, is too often only the spirit of the group in which the accidents of birth or education or occupation or fellowship have given us a place.

What people will - or will not - laugh at is mainly determined by their social conditioning.

Politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality, and at the heart of morality is religion.

There is a mandate to impose a voluntary return to traditional values.

Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.

An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.

Ethics is a fluid term ...It's the standards by which a civilized society lives.

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

Culture is more important than politics.

What is a value? Obviously, normal and healthy people are able to appreciate something as a high value for which to live and if necessary, to die, for no other reason than that it was evolved in cultural ritualization and handed down to them by a revered elder.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains--chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment--in a word, Circumstance--and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.

Americans are so individualistic, they do not realize their individualism is a communally derived value.

A deep meaning resides in old customs.

Society becomes how we behave.

Culture is more important than politics and government.

We're all functions of our societies, right? And we all become who we are because of the invisible forces that mold us.

There are all these languages that keep people in place that conform us to a set of terms. It's why I think the whole idea of identity as something that is something of a straitjacket. That most of us like to think of as natural and innate. That we just find and go, 'Yeah, that's who I am.'