Franklin Foer Quotes

We sing these songs for the everyday occasions of life, and they are very close to the hearts of our people.

My parents used to play cards on Saturday… all the friends would come across. So it was like one massive Parsee gathering… and the value system kind of creeps in.

People don't want to just root for a team anymore. They want to root for something more.

In India, religious life forms the centre, the keynote of the whole music of national life.

The best thing about sports is the sense of community and shared emotion it can create.

There may have been a time when preservation was about saving an old building here and there, but those days are gone. Preservation is in the business of saving communities and the values they embody.

Even a poor, out-of-datecollection reflects in its own way the values of the people who created it and the community it serves.

Experience supplies painful proof that traditions once called into being are first called useful, then they become necessary. At last they are too often made idols, and all must bow down to them or be punished.

You can't be from Montgomery, Alabama, and not have a background in the church. It's at the core of who we are as a people.

We must accept all the implications of our human inheritance, one of the most important of which is the small scope of biologically transmitted behavior, and the enormous role of the cultural process of the transmission of tradition.

The music does bring us together and it's cheaper than therapy!

Rituals are important.

Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.

Culture is coded wisdom

Women serve as guardians of culture, upholders of society.

Soccer is one of the most unifying activities amongst us.

Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.

One of the other experts we consulted with, this guy named Dacher Keltner, he was big on sadness as community bonding - I think is the word he used.

Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are. A story composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within that community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be -- knowledge based on experience. These stories become the conscience of the group. They belong to everyone.

I’m just one of the people who stands on the Kop. They think the same as I do, and I think the same as they do. It’s a kind of marriage of people who like each other.

When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you've given enough, your place is near the centre.

Culture has always been more important than politics. Sometimes culture is a mirror that reflects what is; sometimes it's a search-light pointing the way to what will be.

[ My time and our common culture] it's what I'm photographing, and I'm very involved with that.

Storytelling has always been at the heart of being human because it serves some of our most basic needs: passing along our traditions, confessing failings, healing wounds, engendering hope, strengthening our sense of community.