Cultural Conditioning Quotes

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.

A lot of people are scared. It's the way you're raised. The way you've been told your whole life, that you've got to do this and that. Get a job, go to school. So, a lot of people are scared to just do what they really want. They're worried about what people will think and stuff like that. It's just fear.

There are stories we take on from our culture, and there are stories based on our own personal history. Some of those stories lock us in limiting beliefs and lead to suffering, and there are others that can move us toward freedom.

If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.

Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?

There are no conditions to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

Our identity is fictional, written by parents, relatives, education, society.

The myth of redemptive violence - Caesar, peace, and victory - is in people's bones so deeply, we aren't even aware of it. You crush the opposition; that's how we bring peace.

The public never knows what he wants, but he always wants what he knows.

Trying to convince someone that they are a racist or they have White Privilege - if it's in the air they breathe and the culture supports them, sometimes they never have to think about it at all.

The collective dream is the hypnosis of social conditioning. Only sages, psychotics & geniuses manage to break free.

Even in my adult years, when I heard a white person speaking in a Southern accent I was initially suspicious.

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.

It's not easy to change world views. Faith has its own momentum and belief is comfortable. To restructure reality is traumatic and scary. That is why many intelligent people continue to believe: unbelief is an unknown.

It is in the nature of man to like what he is familiar with and in what he has been brought up, and that he fears anything alien. The plurality of religions and their mutual intolerance result from the fact that people remain faithful to the education they receive.

What we call education is nothing but domestication of the human being.

Our time and attention is scarce. Art is not that important to us, no matter what we might like to believe... Our love of art is often quite temporary, dependent upon our moods, and our love of art is subservient to our demand for a positive self image. How we look at art should account for those imperfections and work around them. Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader. Maybe we think we are supposed to like tough books, but are we? Who says? Many writers (and art museums) produce for quite a small subsample of the... public.

Men are taught to apologise for their weaknesses, women for their strengths.

Certainly in each social period, youth must be made to venerate the dominant absurdities.

I mean, let's look at it in the other way. If they claim that words have this mysterious power over people, well, 99 percent of on the songs on the radio deal with the topic of love and we use the term loosely. So, kids have heard love, love, love, love ... the minute they turn on the radio. Do you see any kids doing love? I see them doing crack ... but not love. So, it's bullshit!

We are all victims of culture.

Growing up in America is like being taught to be stupid.

Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.