Culture Quotes – Reflections on Tradition and Society

"America was conceived in violence. Americans are attracted to violence. They attach themselves to processed violence, out of cans. They’re TV – hypnotized. TV is the invisible protective shield against bare reality. Twentieth-century culture’s disease is the inability to feel their reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movie, theatre, pop idols, and they have wild emotion over symbols. But in reality of their own lives, they’re emotionally dead."

Jim Morrison

"There is probably no other human cultural activity which is so all-pervasive and reaches into, and shapes—and often controls—so much of human behavior."

Alan P. Merriam

"Culture teaches that only “nuts” and “crazies” challenge authority. Law is the holiest and most sacred emblem of culture.

Insanity is not an inability to perceive reality; it is a willing rejection of reality in favor of the artificial constructs of tyranny. Law threatens violence upon all who refuse to obey it. When you chose to act upon an artificial view of reality, you are insane. People obey law out of fear of death, until they can be properly cultured to accept the rule of law without question. Cultural indoctrination is insanity. The definition of insanity is blind obedience.

It is insane to believe that those in power over people rightfully belong there. It is insane to assume that they will always be there. It is insane to believe that law has the right to command the obedience of people. The culture of royalty, the culture of patriotism and the culture of law are all insanity.
No human being who understands the fullness of their own worth would ever accept the notion that someone ought to rule over them. It is the function of culture to blind the eyes of people to their own worth, and to deafen their ears to any speech that may teach them. When cultural influence is at its peak, insanity ravages the mind. Obedience is the object of authority, and authority wants no possibility of rebellion. The definition of insanity is blind obedience."

Jeremy Locke

"Social media has degenerated into a deafening cacophony of groups signaling and repeating their shared myths."

Naval Ravikant

"Indeed, it is nearly impossible for any person inserted in a modern cultural context to escape the haze of the zeitgeist and develop a truly unbiased, critical, and personal worldview."

Bernardo Kastrup

"School has never really been about individualized learning, but about how to be socialized as a citizen and as a human being, so that we, we have important rules in school, always emphasizing the fact that one is part of a group."

Neil Postman

"Languages are the sheaths in which the swords of the spirit are hidden."

Martin Luther

"Language is the source of misunderstandings."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Language is the body of thought."

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"The most effective form of control is to make people adopt predetermined ideas as their own beliefs. Religions, cultures, traditions, and politics are constructs and dogmas that shape the perception, thinking, and behavior of the masses."

Unbekannt

"Language is an essential means of communication that countless people use to talk past each other."

Peter Kilian

"Despite its apparently high technical culture, ‘civilized humanity’ has reached such a low ethical level that it no longer realizes that such physical and moral decay is nothing other than the progressive decline of culture. For this reason, the sacred duty of people who are aware of the gravity of their mistakes is to constantly strive for the final correction of the consequences of mistakes."

Viktor Schauberger

"Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, preaches endless forms of false happiness, false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines."

Terence McKenna

"Every culture institutionalizes certain forms of behavior that communicate and encourage certain forms of thinking and acting, thus moulding the character of its citizens. To the degree that the individual is made an object of constant mental manipulation, to the degree that cultural institutions may tend to weaken intellectual and spiritual strength, to the degree that knowledge of the mind is used to tame and condition people instead of educating them, to that degree does the culture itself produce men and women who are predisposed to accept an authoritarian way of life."

Joost A.M. Meerloo

"Language is the clothing of thoughts."

Samuel Johnson

"Language is, after kissing, the most exciting means of communication that humanity has developed."

Unbekannt

"We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture, which despises the content."

Eduardo Galeano

"The first step in liquidating a people, is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster."

Milan Kundera