Quotes about Culture

Whenever you believe that the evil outside you is greater than the evil inside you, a heartfelt pursuit of Christ will be replaced by a zealous fighting of the "evil" around you. A celebration of the grace that rescues you from your own sin will be replaced by a crusade to rescue the church from the ills of the surrounding culture. Christian maturity becomes defined as a willingness to defend right from wrong. The gospel is reduced to participation in Christian causes.

It is this rattling I believe that affects the second point: our uneasiness with our own feelings of foreignness, our own rapidly fraying sense of belonging. To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with foreignness?

Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man. You hear of solitary white men, but niggers? Can't stay away from one another a whole day. So. It looks to me like you the envy of the world.

It was an opportunity to intervene at the heart of the problem: to bring God and language to natives who were assumed to have neither; to alter their diets, their clothes, their minds; to help them despise everything that had once made their lives worthwhile and to offer them instead the privilege of knowing the one and only God and a chance, thereby, for redemption. (227)

Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.

Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all by themselves with no help from the mind.

if she wishes to be American—to be known as such and to actually belong—she must become a thing unimaginable in her home country: she must become white.

Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn't even interesting. I was more interesting than they were.

When one assumes that you can substitute license for freedom, when one assumes that you can use another's deficiency for one's own generosity, when one assumes that you can use another person's misery and nightmares in order to clarify your own dreams. When all of those things are done and completed, then the surrender and the betrayal of one's culture is also complete.

The impulse to do and revere art is an ancient need - whether on cave walls, on ones own body, a cathedral or religious rite, we hunger for a way to articulate who we are and what we mean.

for one's language, the one we dream in, is home.

We live in a culture that has switched the tags on greatness. It has put a lot of value on the flashy lifestyle while putting only $99 on character. Our culture has put a lot of value on cars and careers but only ten cents on integrity, family, and impact.