Quotes about Culture

The American flag has smothered the glory of the cross. Many people can't see the beauty of the cross because everything the American flag represents to them is in the way.

The worlds of poverty and wealth collided, and I guess I felt a little dose of what the experts call culture shock. According to Mother Teresa, it is among the wealthy that we can find the most terrible poverty of all— loneliness. So perhaps I was still among the poorest of the poor, but these poor folks had some cash!

To cling to the gift of life we've been given and scramble to protect our own interests is to cooperate in a culture of death that threatens to destroy us all.

In our culture of "seeker sensitivity" and radical inclusivity, the great temptation is to compromise the cost of discipleship in order to draw a larger crowd. With the most sincere hearts, we do not want to see anyone walk away from Jesus because of the discomfort of his cross, so we clip the claws on the Lion a little, we clean up a bit the bloody Passion we are called to follow.

The utter destruction of our culture isn't just around the corner. It has been here for some time.

I admit that living in Nigeria sounds romantic, but Africa isn't America by a long shot. It's a different world and a different place in time...

So the advocacy of "ethnicity," means racism plus tradition i.e., racism plus conformity i.e., racism plus staleness.

Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future.

There are only individual minds and individual achievements—and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

It wasn't a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks.

I was talking to my lawyer and he was saying we have to meet with somebody right away because they really want to get something done. I said, okay, how about tomorrow? He said, 'Well no, it's going to take at least two weeks.' And I had to explain, 'Where I'm from, right away means if we don't do something in half an hour somebody dies.

Ben informed me that those lines were written by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa'adi, one of the most beloved figures in Iranian culture. We found this ironic, given how much of my time at UNGA was devoted to trying to curb Iran's development of nuclear weapons.