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“You must make a counter-culture decision to focus on becoming more like Jesus. Otherwise, other forces like peers, parents, coworkers, and culture will try to mold you into their image.”
― Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

“I was once asked to pick a couple of records for an interview I was doing on Radio 2. I picked one by Will Oldham and one by Joanna Newsom. Someone on the production phoned me to say that I couldn't have either record because they were 'too alternative' and I could just pick two from their playlist. Now, personally, I think that Radio 2's listeners would dig both Joanna Newsom and Will Oldham if they heard their records, and that the fact they don't get to hear them contributes to the cultural wasteland we live in. I told them that I'd been to see Joanna Newsom in the Albert Hall a couple of weeks before and it had been sold out. How could she be 'too alternative'?
'Alternative' and 'mainstream' aren't strictly to do with whether things are popular or minority interest. They are ideological labels. Someone like Joe Pasquale would be called 'mainstream' and regularly pops up on TV, but would play the smaller end of the touring-theatre circuit. If Joanna Newsom can sell out Albert Hall, why can't she get played on Radio 2? I would agree that it's because her work is too layered, challenging and interesting. Think about that. What you get to hear about is filtered, and not filtered to get rid of useless cunts like Joe Pasquale, but of things that might enrich your life.”
― Frankie Boyle, Work! Consume! Die!

“Tea has nothing to do with being hungry," said Nimrod. "For Englishmen, it is like a canonical hour. And almost as much of an important ritual as the tea ceremony in Japan. Except for one thing. With tea, in Japan, recognition is given that every human encounter is a singular occasion which can, and will, never recur again exactly. Thus every aspect of tea must be savored for what it gives the participants. But in England, the significance occurs in the fact that teas is always the same, and will always recur again and again, exactly . For how is the endurance of a great civilization to be measured?”
― P.B. Kerr, The Akhenaten Adventure

“It seems to me that America is constantly reinventing what "America" means.”
― Ronald Reagan

“The danger we face does not come from religion. It comes from a growing intellectual bankruptcy that is one of the symptoms of a dying culture. In ancient Rome, as the republic disintegrated and the Caesars were deified, as the Roman Senate became little more than an echo chamber of the emperor, the population’s attention was diverted by a series of frontier wars and violent and elaborate spectacles in the arena. The excitement of entertainment consumed ancient Rome’s emotional and intellectual life. It poisoned civic and political discourse. Social critics no longer had a form in which to speak. They were answered with ridicule and rage. It was not prerogative of the citizen to think.”
― Chris Hedges, I Don't Believe in Atheists

“...Religious observances, once so full of suffering and awe, have become accommodating and benign. Teachers go out of their way to avoid embarrassing, insulting, overworking, or otherwise vexing their students. Each year public language is further purged of impurities that might injure sensitive groups. Prime-time television series seem dedicated to the comforting message that things are really okay.
Indeed, modern society's war on pain has been vastly more successful than its war on pain's causes.”
― Robert Grudin, The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Innovation

“Cultures of permission valorized bad taste as liberation.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens

“You know the only rule you need to know to get on in this country? ‘Never complain, never explain.”
― Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds

“It is impossible to examine questions we refuse to ask.”
― Chuck Klosterman, But What if We're Wrong?

“Whenever I hear people clucking about the decline of civilization, what's wrong with young people, how vulgar popular culture is, how confusing and frightening they find the internet, alarms go off. I know I'm around somebody whose hinges are rusting. Death will be bad enough, but for me, this early harbinger is more fearsome, because a part of one's spirit and openness and ability to learn and grow disappears.”
― Jon Katz, A Dog Year: Twelve Months, Four Dogs, and Me

“Culture is critical in marriage because in a real sense, culture is the behavioral expression of one's values, appreciations, tastes, and relational style in both simple and serious matters of life. Add to this the dimensions of language and cultural memory, and you have worlds within worlds. In effect, culture provides the how and why of an individual's behavior.”
― Ravi Zacharias, I, Isaac, Take Thee, Rebekah

“A narcissist with power will attempt to prove in the world only what is already in his head. He can't 'see' otherwise. For him, the 'outside world' is not beyond him and does not question or challenge him and his ideas. He is the world. Others will assent to his distorted worldview, because he is powerful, not because he is believable. If he possesses any reflection, that will be exactly what will gnaw at the narcissist with power most of all: his 'truths' are inauthentic, and he is a human being without integrity. The very narcissism and power he possesses prevent him from an ongoing relationship with the truth, which begins with self-humility and the curiosity this can create in a person.”
― Sergio Troncoso

“Despite the voices of the culture that would scream otherwise, victory is irreparably tied to the surrender of self. And that explains why so few are truly victorious.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“انا غجري. بلدي هي الدنيا بدون حدود، وشعبي هو البشرية بدون عروق، وديني هو حبي لكل العبود، ولغتي هي لسان كل من نطق العطف والحنان على كل الأمور....وصلواتي مع كل من نشد الحب بالقلوب..
انا غجري ضائع بين الوحوش...أعطني يدك وانضم معي إلى حرية بلاوعود.......”
― Husam Wafaei, Honourable Defection

“I am a Jewish mother. My dying words will be, “Put a jumper on”
― Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds

“I’ll tell you the difference between our countries. Americans think life is serious but not hopeless; the English that life is hopeless but not serious.”
― Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds

“And I'm probably wrong.
Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually.”
― Chuck Klosterman, But What if We're Wrong?

“The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true--both objectively and subjectively--is habitually provisional.”
― Chuck Klosterman, But What if We're Wrong?

“And the quality all these reasonable failures share is an inability to accept that the statue quo is temporary.”
― Chuck Klosterman, But What if We're Wrong?

“The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.”
― Chuck Klosterman, But What if We're Wrong?

“And if something is only itself, it doesn't particularly matter.”
― Chuck Klosterman, But What if We're Wrong?

“It's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names.”
― Chuck Klosterman, But What if We're Wrong?

“Poverty is a culture cultivated by a poor mindset which can not evolve or accept possibilities of rising higher .”
― Tare Munzara

“We tend to think that what matters is decided by society or culture or religion or our peers, but no one can say what truly matters except us.”
― Teresa R. Funke, Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life blog

“A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urras.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“...the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don't cooperate--we obey.

We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear ur neighbor's opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice.
...
We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We've made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can't see them, because they're part of our thinking.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“« En sortant, il trouva son ami devant le rideau en berne d'une libraire.
- Je suis désolé de te l'annoncer mais ce n'est pas la première librairie qui met la clé sous la porte. Et ça ne sera pas la dernière.
- Une librairie qui ferme, Hervé, c'est un phare qui s'éteint, laissant les hommes dériver, s'échouer ou se fracasser contre les récifs d'une époque.
- Tu ne peux pas dire, simplement : " Ça me fait mal au cœur de voir cette librairie fermée? ��
- Je pourrais, mais ça ne serait pas suffisant. Gageons qu'un magasin de vêtements va vite prendre sa place, consacrant le triomphe de l'apparence. »”
― Erik L'Homme, Le regard des princes à minuit

“You cannot impose a culture from the top--it must come from under. It grows out of the soil, out of the people, out of their daily life and work. It is a spontaneous expression of their joy of life, of their joy in work, and if this does not exist, the culture will not exist. Joy is a spiritual quality, an impalpable quality: that too cannot be forced. It must be an inevitable state of mind, born of the elementary processes of life, a by-product of natural human growth.”
― Herbert Read, To Hell With Culture

“Some argue that in time there was a noticeable change in Ratzinger's position held during the Council. However, as he himself said, and others would say about him, "It is not Ratzinger who has somehow changed and suddenly become reactionary and conservative. It is the secular culture that has drifted beyond the pale.”
― Gediminas T. Jankunas, The Dictatorship of Relativism: Pope Benedicts XVI's Response

“The refusal to examine Islamic culture and traditions, the sordid dehumanization of Muslims, and the utter disregard for the intellectual traditions and culture of one of the world’s great civilizations are characteristic of those who disdain self-reflection and intellectual inquiry. Confronting this complexity requires work and study rather than a retreat into slogans and cliches. And enlightened, tolerant civilizations have flourished outside the orbit of the United Sates and Europe.

The ruins of the ancient Mughal capital, Fatehpur Sikri, lie about 100 miles south of Delhi. The capital was constructed by the emperor Akbar the Great at the end of the sixteenth century. The emperor’s court was filled with philosophers, mystics and religious scholars, including Sunni, Sufi, and Shiite Muslims, Hindu followers of Shiva and Vishnu, as well as atheists, Christians, Jains, Jews , Buddhists and Zoroastrians. They debated ethics and beliefs. He forbade any person to be discriminated against on the basis of belief and declared that everyone was free to follow any religion. This took place as the Inquisition was at its height in Spain and Portugal, and as Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Rome’s Campo de Fiori.

Tolerance, as well as religious and political plurality, is not exclusive to Western culture. The Judeo-Christian tradition was born and came to life in the Middle East. Its intellectual and religious beliefs were cultivated and formed in cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. Many of the greatest tenets of Western civilization, as is true with Islam and Buddhism, are Eastern in origin. Our respect for the rule of law and freedom of expression, as well as printing, paper, the book, the translation and dissemination of the classical Greek philosophers, algebra, geometry and universities were given to us by the Islamic world. One of the first law codes was invented by the ancient Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, in what is now Iraq. One of the first known legal protections of basic freedoms and equality was promulgated in the third century B.C. by the Buddhist Indian emperor Ashoka. And, unlike, Aristotle, he insisted on equal rights for women and slaves.

The division set up by the new atheists between superior Western, rational values and the irrational beliefs of those outside our tradition is not only unhistorical but untrue. The East and the West do not have separate, competing value systems. We do not treat life with greater sanctity than those we belittle and dismiss. Eastern and Western traditions have within them varied ethical systems, some of which are repugnant and some of which are worth emulating. To hold up the highest ideals of our own culture and to deny that these great ideals exist in other cultures, especially Eastern cultures, is made possible only by a staggering historical and cultural illiteracy. The civilization we champion and promote as superior is, in fact, a product of the fusion of traditions and beliefs of the Orient and the Occident. We advance morally and intellectually only when we cross these cultural lines, when we use the lens of other cultures to examine our own. It is then that we see our limitations, that we uncover the folly of or own assumptions and our prejudices. It is then that we achieve empathy, we learn and make wisdom possible.”
― Chris Hedges