Maggie Nelson Quotes

This call for a new culture is not a new idea.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

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

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

That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

For politics to change … culture must change too --- and that takes much more than dispatching troops, holding elections, and writing constitutions.

Culture does matter, but politics can change culture.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

It has taken us centuries of thought and mockery to shake the medieval system. -- With this in view I have taken as impulses, instincts, or needs certain driving forces in the human species as we know it at present, and argued for such social and economic changes as will give them new, free, and varied expression. To take even this first step towards a happy society is a herculean task. After it has been accomplished, generations to come will see what the creature [us] will do next. We none of us know; and we should be thoroughly on our guard against all those who pretend that they do

No conventions and covenants can remake human nature in a day.

I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of ants.

Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.

It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life.

Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.

Lies are the mortar that binds the savage individual man into the social masonry.

Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.

Man perfected by society is the best of all animals; he is the most terrible of all when he lives without law, and without justice.

We ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is' that there is no viable alternative to the present.

Governments, systems, ideologies come and go, but it is humanity which remains.

When politics is too slow, change has to come from culture.

Cultural diversity and cultural change are desirable and inevitable. We are cultural animals, someone without a culture is not human. But the cultures we possess vary enormously. Indeed, the variability, over time and space is the great evolutionary advantage of humanity. Instead of changing biologically over millennia, human beings can change culturally over decades

Normal is a cycle on the washing machine. There is no such thing when it comes to human beings.

Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences. When the individual's behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot, and it is time for him to die and be reborn. Time to "drop out," "turn on," and "tune in.

Civilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life.