Roz Chast Quotes

In the late 20th century, it became possible to travel between cultures, between the old world and the new, with great ease. So when you go back, you take the changed person with you who, in turn, changes things that otherwise might have stayed the same.

All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history.

Culture is our nature, and the ability to learn and change is our most important and fundamental instinct.

Culture does matter, but politics can change culture.

We see culture as a self-organising thing.

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.

Change is no threat to culture.

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

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

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

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

As history unfolds, as cultures evolve, of course the intelligences which they value change.

Culture is a fluid, ongoing process. People tend to look at culture in a fixed time but it's constantly moving and evolving, as is the conversation between Americans and Cubans.

Capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated.

Culture is not a matter of a change of climate.

Culture in America and everywhere else comes from the suffering, from those who don't want the old ways. They want to bring in the new, whether it's the ballet, when it started, or Shakespeare.

Our ambitions are bold and so must be our desire to change and evolve our culture.

We're going to have to change our traditions, our history.

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.

If the lives of men can be measured in terms of years, ideologies in decades, and nations in centuries, then the unit measuring civilizations, born of the interaction among peoples, would be the millennium.

Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West.

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

People don't want to embrace culture shifts because it's not going to happen in the next 20 minutes.

Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got.

The most distinguished hallmark of the American society is and always has been change.