Cultural Stability Quotes

Ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to avoid change; they couldn't entirely do so, of course, but did preserve a cultural continuity for almost four thousand years.

The national Government sees in both Christian denominations the most important factor for the maintenance of our society.

Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.

A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.

In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery.

It's nice to know there are some things in early 21st-century post-industrial culture that don't change very fast. I am one of those.

A culture must be reasonably stable, but it must also change, and it will presumably be strongest if it can avoid excessive respect for tradition and fear of novelty on the one hand and excessively rapid change on the other.

I think the arc of history is long, and it bends toward justice. And I think that's what the 'Star Wars' message is. You know, the dark side is in the human heart. And chaos is very troubling for an individual or for a culture, which can lead you to authoritarian leaders. But the arc of history is on the right side. I believe that.

I believe in the Rip Van Winkle theory—that a man from 1910 must be able to wake up after being asleep for seventy years, walk into a ballpark, and understand baseball perfectly.

Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.

Companies that change best over time know first and foremost what should not change.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

The novelists of the nineteeth century had all the luck. They had a huge and easily pleased public and the world they surveyed had every appearance of permanence.

Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them there comes a moment when the center ceases to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but language.

A resilient culture has a certain amount of resistance embedded in it. Not so much to capsize it, but enough so that it doesn't atrophy.

Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

To have a healthy culture, you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don't have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.

It is diversity that makes any natural system robust, and diversity that stabilizes culture against the eccentricity and arrogance that have so often called themselves reason and science.

When work goes out of style we may expect to see civilization totter and fall.