Quotes & Sayings About European Culture

Don't talk to me about Matisse
the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio
where the nude style woman reclines forever
on a sheet of blood.

Talk to me instead about the culture generally
how the murderers were sustained
by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote
villages the painters came, and our white-washed
mud-huts were splattered with gunfire. — Michael Ondaatje

For years all I seemed to be doing was lobbying politicians and others to persuade them that European culture needed movies, and that we had to protect it. — Wim Wenders

The Renaissance of Europe did not take place in the 15th century. Rather it began when Europe learned from the culture of the Arabs. The cradle of European awakening is not Italy. It is the Muslim Spain. — Robert Briffault

Well, if I use Hispanic culture I get corruption and really good salsa music. If I use Chinese culture I get rigid thinking and decent Szechwan. If I use Islamic culture I get ... not damned much of anything. And ditto for Africa although at least the rhythm is good and you can dance to it. But if I use Western European Culture I get industry, higher standards of living, longer lifespans and a generally happier society. Damn, I think I'll just have to go with WesternCiv even if I do have to put up with the Lutherans. — John Ringo

Aquinas brought an Aristotelian view of reason back into European culture, and lighted the way toward the Renaissance. — Ayn Rand

The big house ... reminded me of the types of structures you can still see in places like Center City: gingerbread houses, two-story affairs built back in the nineteenth century when people didn't have televisions and were forced to build interesting things out of wood. I have a theory that the outrageous fashions you see in pre-twentieth century culture came about as a result of the lack of television. I'm talking wild hats on women with lots of feathers, pelts, sequined dresses with long trains, as well as top hats on the men, with long-tailed coats. I figure that life in those days was s dull that people themselves became televisions. I'm still working on the theory. I include European royalty in this construct, but let's move on. — Gary Reilly

Modern Existentialism ... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe. — William Barrett

I've come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that. — John Tanton

Think of it! An opportunity to remake the world! An opportunity to create a steam-driven utopia! To re-educate humanity to despise violence. And what do they do, those incompetents? They opt for the pretty clothes and the empire-mad European imperialist culture of the 19th century. Damn those fools. Those geeks, arrogant, myopic, ivory tower board gamers. Damn them. — Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

The history of representations of Cleopatra provides one of the clearest instances of the conviction that whiteness is the pinnacle of human beauty. Cleopatra became a byword for feminine beauty in European culture, but in the process she had to be represented as white. As — Richard Dyer

I'm trying to take culture and put it onstage, demonstrate it is capable of sustaining you. There is no idea that can't be contained by life: Asian life, European life, certainly black life. My plays are about love, honor, duty, betrayal - things humans have written about since the beginning of time. — August Wilson

Where can an interrogation lead us which does not follow reason in its horizontal course, but seeks to retrace in time that constant vertically which confronts European culture with what it is not? — Michel Foucault

I believe that with the complete formation of the global Zionist network, they have seized control of the fate of the European governments, and of the US government. To the independent countries in the world, I would like to say: You should know that the influence of the Zionist network on your culture, your politics, and your economy is tantamount to a violation of your independence. They cling like ticks. The moment they gain influence, they never stop. — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

In the General History of Africa, we come across very impressive facts about the culture of primitive African peoples. It is known, for example, that in the old African kingdoms, all foreigners-whether white or colored- enjoyed hospitality and had the same rights as the native people. At the same time, a foreigner in ancient Rome or Greece usually became a slave. Such and similar facts have probably made Leo Frobenius, a well-known German ethnologist and a great connoisseur of Africa, write : The Africans are civilized up to their bones, and the idea of their being barbarians is a European fiction. — Alija Izetbegovic

Only by establishing military supremacy were the European and North American colonizers able to eliminate the crafts and industries of Third World peoples, control their markets, extort tribute, undermine their cultures, destroy their villages, steal their lands and natural resources, enslave their labor, and accumulate vast wealth. — Michael Parenti

I think the basic culture of this country is European and Christian and I think that if we lose that, we lost America ... I don't think we should suppress other races, but I think if we lose that White - what's the word for it - that White dominance in America, with it we lose America. — David Duke

My parents are European immigrants. And I think as Europeans there are so many languages in close proximity that it's part of the culture to try to learn at least one other language. So my parents really encourage it in the house. Chinese would be really great to learn - like Mandarin or Cantonese. Portuguese would be incredible. — Stana Katic

Whether you regard it as infantile or as the highest achievement of the European mind, what we find in Kant are the philosophical roots of our modern identification of freedom with choice, where choice is understood as a pure flashing forth of the unconditioned will. This is important for understanding our culture because thus understood, choice serves as the central totem of consumer capitalism, and those who present choices to us appear as handmaidens to our own freedom.
When the choosing will is hermetically sealed off from the fuzzy, hard-to-master contingencies of the empirical world, it becomes more "free" in a sense: free for the kind of neurotic dissociation from reality that opens the door wide for others to leap in on our behalf, and present options that are available to us without the world-disclosing effort of skillful engagement. — Matthew B. Crawford

His older compatriot Friedrich Nietzsche had entertained no such hopes: "For long now our entire European culture has been moving with a tormenting tension that grows greater from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restless, violent, precipitate, like a river that wants to reach its end."23 — Margaret MacMillan

The levelling of the European man is the great process which cannot be obstructed; it should even be accelerated. The necessity of cleaving gulfs, distance, order of rank, is therefore imperative - not the necessity of retarding this process. This homogenizing species requires justification as soon as it is attained: its justification is that it lies in serving a higher and sovereign race which stands upon the former and can raise itself this task only by doing this. Not merely a race of masters whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an overflow of energy for beauty, bravery, culture, and manners, even for the most abstract thought; a yea-saying race that may grant itself every great luxury - strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative, rich enough to have no need of economy or pedantry; beyond good and evil; a hothouse for rare and exceptional plants. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I grew up in Europe, and I used to like those very slow-moving European films. I've been contaminated by the American TV culture, and I just want things to move faster now. — Rebecca De Mornay

God is with the vanquished, not with the victors! At a time when His Holiness, the infallible Pope of Christendom, is concluding a peace agreement, a Concordat, with the enemies of Christ, when the Protestant's are establishing a "German church" and censoring the Bible, we descendants of the old Jews, the forefathers of European culture, are the only legitimate German representatives of that culture. Thanks to inscrutable divine wisdom, we are physically incapable of betraying it to the heathen civilization of poison gases, to the ammonia-breathing, Germanic war god. — Joseph Roth

Europe's experiment with multiculturalism, or the side-by-side existence of different cultures, has failed throughout the continent. Integration requires a minimum basis of shared values, that is, a culture of mutual tolerance and respect - in other words, what constitutes the heart of European culture. — Walter Kasper

What we must think about is an agriculture with a human face. We must give standing to the new pioneers, the homecomers bent on the most important work for the next century - a massive salvage operation to save the vulnerable but necessary pieces of nature and culture and to keep the good and artful examples before us. It is time for a new breed of artists to enter front and center, for the point of art, after all, is to connect. This is the homecomer I have in mind: the scientist, the accountant who converses with nature, a true artist devoted to the building of agriculture and culture to match the scenery presented to those first European eyes. — Wes Jackson

I don't want to rescind American directors but I think that European directors in general, because of the size of the nations in Europe are exposed to all different cultures, they can easily travel from one distinct culture to another in a matter of hours - you can drive for two weeks across the United States and you're in the same basic culture - so there is a certain breadth of understanding and sophistication that they bring to it and frankly, in some cases they are less expensive than American directors. — Wes Craven

As part of the E.U., my children can have the freedom and the opportunity to work and live across Europe; to be ambitious in the world's largest market; and to access so much of the history, the culture and the opportunity which is our common European heritage. — Andrew Lansley

It seemed [there are] musical nodes on the planet where cultures meet and mix, sometimes as a result of unfortunate circumstances, like slavery or something else, in places like New Orleans and Havana and Brazil. And those are places where the European culture and indigenous culture and African culture all met and lived together, and some new kind of culture and especially music came out of that. — David Byrne

I do not want you to believe any of this because it is all crap, but it is the crap in which the piles of our psuedo-European culture are embedded, so you had better understand it because no one who does not understand the history and taxonomy of crap will ever come to know the difference between crap and pseudocrap and noncrap ... — Louis De Bernieres

Ryanair brings lots of different cultures to the beaches of Spain, Greece and Italy, where they couple and copulate in the interests of pan-European peace. — Michael O'Leary

For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Drinking wine was not historically limited to people who could afford it. Western and European culture turned it into an elite thing. Winemakers were farmers and field workers. Everyday people. And that's who should enjoy and have access to wine. — Andre Hueston Mack

The U.K. is outward-looking, trade-oriented, growth-oriented, and we do not have enough of that storyline, that tradition, that culture within the European Union. — Mark Rutte

The Holocaust committed by the Nazis turned this country, where most of the European Jews used to live and where their culture used to flourish, into a massive grave. This is why initiatives to revive Jewish culture in Poland is so important. — Marek Belka

Russia is a part of European culture. Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy. — Vladimir Putin

The general public long ago stopped looking for beauty in high culture. But it still has TV and the movies....you are far more likely to find genuinely mesmerising images and real beauty in big-budget Hollywood movies -- think of, say, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar or his Dark Knight Trilogy -- than in any European art-house — Sohrab Ahmari

With calm, knowledgeable precision, Daniel Ziblatt wades into the adjacent swamps of federalism and nineteenth-century European history, emerging with hands full of gems. Beneath the tangle of great statesmen and national culture he discovers conflicting regional political interests, sharp regional variations in political capacity, fearful defenses against excessive democracy, coercive conquest of weak states, and unintended consequences galore. Read, think, and learn. — Charles Tilly

We are accused of being obsessed by property. The truth is the other way round. It is the society and culture in question which is so obsessed. Yet to an obsessive his obsession always seems to be of the nature of things and so is not recognized for what it is. The relation between property and art in European culture appears natural to that culture, and consequently if somebody demonstrates the extent of the property interest in a given cultural field, it is said to be a demonstration of his obsession. And this allows the Cultural Establishment to project for a little longer its false rationalized image of itself. — John Berger

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The monetary union tries to handle two groups of countries which differ greatly in terms of economic culture. First, the North-West European countries [ ... ] which aspiring to rules and discipline, and the Mediterranean countries [ ... ] which aspiring political solutions to economic problems. The first group [ ... ] aspires to solidity, the second group aspires solidarity, that is to say; other people's money. — Frits Bolkestein

The ancient bond between the tsarist state and Russian nationalism could be used to create powerful emotions when the enemy came from the heathen east. The Mongol invasion had left a powerful mark on the Russian psyche. It was expressed in a deep anxiety about the mixed Eurasian roots of the people and it's culture, which made it easy for an educated liberal to convince themselves that this war was nothing less than a defense of Russia's European identity against the Asian hordes. — Orlando Figes

In the realm of culture in America, white European culture has held the floor for centuries; just as with any one-sided conversation, a balance can only be achieved if the speaker who has dominated speaks less and listens more. — David Mura

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.' — Viktor E. Frankl

I feel more European than Belgian. However I do think that my Flemish roots have an impact on my character and culture. — Ann Demeulemeester

The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions where the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from western clothes and hair styles to the European practice of colonizing foreign people. Unfortunately, they took up empire-building at precisely the moment when the cost of imperialism began to exceed the benefits. — Niall Ferguson

Don't forget that we lawyers, we're a higher breed of intellect, and so it's our privilege to lie. It's as clear as day. Animals can't even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore rescinded the state's European Heritage Month proclamation for fear it would sound racist. It's too bad. Thus ends a month of celebrating the 400-year progression of our nation's British culture from wood to steel to graphite shafts. — Argus Hamilton

For although there is not a single aspect of European growth in which the decisive influence of Islamic culture is not traceable, nowhere is it so clear and momentous as in the genesis of that power which constitutes the permanent distinctive force of the modern world, and the supreme source of its victory, natural science and the scientific spirit. — Robert Briffault

The UK is not going to leave the European Union. Of course not. We are inextricably wound up with Europe. In terms of culture, history and geography, we are a European nation. — Nick Clegg

Certainly the European overlords did little enough to prepare Africa for self-government but Democracy would find it hard in any case to put down roots in a tribalist and patrimonial culture that long before the west invaded Africa had sacralized the personal authority of chieftains and ordained the submission of the rest. What the west would call corruption is regarded through much of Africa as no more than the prerogative of power. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe
until recently
have been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all of our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning ... I do not believe that culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes. — T. S. Eliot

an attachment to his culture is, for the European, the beginning of the slippery slope. — Theodore Dalrymple

We want a culture of the people, by the people, and for the people, not defined by white European traditions, male preferences, or any other form of group identity. — R. R. Reno

You people in all parts of the world, who have passed away over the ages, you did not live only to fertilize the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your descendants could become happy through European culture — Johann Gottfried Herder

Wherever Europeans or the descendants of European emigrants live, we see Socialism at work to-day; and in Asia it is the banner round which the antagonists of European civilization gather. If the intellectual dominance of Socialism remains unshaken, then in a short time the whole co-operative system of culture which Europe has built up during thousands of years will be shattered. For a socialist order of society is unrealizable. All efforts to realize Socialism lead only to the destruction of society. Factories, mines, and railways will come to a standstill, towns will be deserted. The population of the industrial territories will die out or migrate elsewhere. The farmer will return to the self-sufficiency of the closed, domestic economy. Without private ownership in the means of production there is, in the long run, no production other than a hand-to-mouth production for one's own needs. — Ludwig Von Mises

Of course I am a child of European culture. There are a number of great directors from which I learned, but there is nobody in particular I got inspired from. — Michael Haneke

I like this idea of the re-foundation of the European Union, maybe it can be done, because Europe - I do not say is unique, but it has a force, a culture, a history that cannot be wasted, and we must do everything so that the European Union has the strength and also the inspiration to make it go forward. — Pope Francis

When Ron Howard does 'Rush,' he has to learn and steep himself in F1 culture and European racing culture, and that's part of the fun of the gig. You learn to learn. Your real skill as a director is being a learner and an observer. You're constantly learning another thing in context. — Jon Favreau

Unless legal and illegal immigration is halted and reversed, European First World nations across all of Europe from Spain to Russia, North America, Australia and New Zealand - will be destroyed and have their very culture and civilisation changed to that of the Third World. Immigration is now the single most important issue facing all First World nations, and will determine whether Western Civilisation continues to exist or not. — Arthur Kemp

All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, epidemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture. — Stefan Zweig

The plot is certainly sensational, but it hardly represents what actually happened. It is difficult to believe that the European emigrants by whom America has been populated took away with them all the virtues and left behind them all the vices of the races from which they had sprung; or that a few generations of residence on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean is sufficient to create an order of beings definitely superior in morals, in culture, and in humanity to their prototypes in Europe. The American — Winston S. Churchill

I must say that the United States, of all the countries of the West, is the least guilty and has done the most in order to prevent it. The United States has helped Europe to win the First and the Second World Wars. It twice raised Europe from postwar destruction - twice - for ten, twenty, thirty years it has stood as a shield protecting Europe while European countries counted their nickels to avoid paying for their armies (better yet, to have none at all), to avoid paying for armaments, thinking about how to leave NATO, knowing that in any case America would protect them. These counties started it all, despite their thousand year old civilization and culture, even though they are closer to the danger and should have seen it more clearly. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Orientalism is never far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe,3 a collective notion identifying "us" Europeans as against all "those" non-Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter. — Edward W. Said

Such Africans soon encounter the many contradictions inherent in colonialism as a civilizing institution and agent of European culture on the one hand, and colonialism as an oppressive, exploitative, and violent political and economic system and agent of white supremacy on the other. — John Mukum Mbaku

High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor ... — Milan Kundera

I've created a bridge between European electronic culture and urban American culture, and I've worked with established brands. — David Guetta

The Jesuits had learned that a Christian mission to China could never succeed if it were not in a position to show and convince the Chinese intelligentsia of the superiority of the European culture. — Hu Shih

In my view the European culture carries a very heavy responsibility for the creation of Israel ... it is a product of both British and Stalin's anti- Semitism, but the British never faced their own complicity in its construction. — Tom Paulin

Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumamism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European. — Mark Steyn

Today, nobody cares about European culture. We have a tradition, a vision, a culture of the past, we have legacy, but we don't have a present culture and we don't have a future. — Frederic Martel?

Coming from a sort of very rigid European type of training to this culture which is just a little more open - a lot more open, and kind of curious, and asking different sorts of questions.Because the problem for me was that the European modernist movement in the '70s was all about right or wrong. Some things were right and you were dealing with the truth, as it were, and then some things were wrong and therefore not allowed. — Esa-Pekka Salonen

As stripped of our ancestral knowledge as we Settlers seem to be, we defy the position of patriarchal dominance and undermine the notion of cultural superiority when we reclaim the roots of our authentic indigenity. It is our birthright as human beings to declare our true status as People of the Earth (as it is for all cultural groups), and if we collectively reject the delusional separation from nature that Empire has forced upon us, we move back into right relationship with Earth Community. Anchoring ourselves deeply into our earth-honoring culture and reclaiming our EIK (European Indigenous Knowledge) is a powerful blow against the monolith of cultural imperialism. (Page 43, Chapter 6, "We All Have IK") — Pegi Eyers

I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment. — Lisel Mueller

St. Petersburg is a gem of world culture and Russia's most European city. — Valentina Matviyenko

Via the mediation of the Enlightenment, this movement had changed from a hobby among a tiny literate elite and their secretaries, an ostentatious amusement among princely and mercantile art patrons and their masterly suppliers (who established a first 'art system'), into a national, a European, indeed a planetary matter. In order to spread from the few to the many, the renaissance had to discard its humanistic exterior and reveal itself as the return of ancient mass culture. The true renaissance question, reformulated in the terminology of practical philosophy - namely, whether other forms of life are possible and permissible for us alongside and after Christianity, especially ones whose patterns are derived from Greek and Roman (perhaps even Egyptian or Indian) antiquity - was no longer a secret discourse or an academic exercise in the nineteenth century, but rather an epochal passion, an inescapable pro nobis. — Peter Sloterdijk

Although I was born in Idaho and now live in New York, I definitely identify with the European aesthetic. Paris is my mecca; it's where I discovered my flair for fashion. But I pay rent and work in New York, so that is my home - I love the culture clash of the city. — Dree Hemingway

Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror — Alasdair MacIntyre

What an advantage that knowledge can be stored in books! The knowledge lies there like hermetically sealed provisions waiting for the day when you may need a meal. Surely what the Collector was doing as he pored over his military manuals, was proving the superiority of the European way of doing things, of European culture itself. This was a culture so flexible that whatever he needed was there in a book at his elbow. An ordinary sort of man, he could, with the help of an oil-lamp, turn himself into a great military engineer, a bishop, an explorer or a General overnight, if the fancy took him. — J.G. Farrell

It has been the White Race who has been the world builder, the maker of cities and commerce and continents. It is the White Man who is the sole builder of civilizations. It was he who build the Egyptian civilization, the great unsurpassed Roman civilization, the Greek civilization of beauty and culture, and who, after having been dealt a serious blow by a new Semitic religion, wallowed through the Dark Ages, finally extricated himself, and then build the great European civilization. — Ben Klassen

At the end of the 1400s, the world changed. Two key dates can mark the beginning of modern times. In 1485, the Wars of the Roses came to an end, and, following the invention of printing, William Caxton issued the first imaginative book to be published in England - Sir Thomas Malory's retelling of the Arthurian legends as Le Morte D'Arthur. In 1492, Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas opened European eyes to the existence of the New World. New worlds, both geographical and spiritual, are the key to the Renaissance, the 'rebirth' of learning and culture, which reached its peak in Italy in the early sixteenth century and in Britain during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, from 1558 to 1603. — Ronald Carter

We don't think only men can be powerful and strong. Behind the heads of the Mafia, the leaders of culture, there are always very strong women. European culture is a matriarchy, especially in the south. The women have a lot of power. — Stefano Gabbana

Culture! Yes - if we had it! But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack of - well, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them. But you're in a pitiful little minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience. You're like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'The Portrait of a Gentleman.' You'll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get right down into the muck. That, or emigrate ... God! If I could emigrate ... — Edith Wharton

Supposing that what is at any rate believed to be the 'truth' really is true, and the meaning of all culture is the reduction of the beast of prey 'man' to a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal, then one would undoubtedly have to regard all those instincts of reaction and ressentiment through whose aid the noble races and their ideals were finally confounded and overthrown as the actual instruments of culture; which is not to say that the bearers of these instincts themselves represent culture. Rather is the reverse not merely probable - no! today it is palpable! These bearers of the oppressive instincts that thirst for reprisal, the descendants of every kind of European and non-European slavery, and especially of the entire pre-Aryan populace - they represent the regression of mankind! These 'instruments of culture' are a disgrace to man and rather an accusation and counterargument against 'culture' in general! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Hettites appeal to us not alone because of the influence they once exercised on the fortunes of the Chosen People, not alone because a Hittite was the wife of David and the ancestress of Christ, but also on account of the debt which the civilisation of our own Europe owes to them. Our culture is the inheritance we have received from ancient Greece, and the first beginnings of Greek culture were derived from the Hittite conquerors of Asia Minor ... The Hittites carried the time-worn civilisations of Babylonia and Egypt to the furthest boundary of Asia, and there handed them over to the West in the grey dawn of European history. — A.H. Sayce

So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation. — Zora Neale Hurston

Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who's out in front of nobody? Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves. — P. J. O'Rourke

Exploitation was rampant before statehood, and various factions actively tried to eradicate the roots of Hawaiian culture in the process of converting the natives to European religious beliefs. Some of the results can never be undone. We try to honor what is left. — Todd Rundgren

Europe is equal to its historical task. Against the anti-spiritual, anti-heroic 'ideals' of America-Jewry, Europe pits its metaphysical ideas, its faith in its Destiny, its ethical principles, its heroism. Fearlessly, Europe falls in for battle, knowing it is armed with the mightiest weapon ever forged by History: the superpersonal Destiny of the European organism. Our European Mission is to create the Culture-State-Nation-Imperium of the West, and thereby we shall perform such deeds, accomplish such works, and so transform our world that our distant posterity, when they behold the remains of our buildings and ramparts, will tell their grandchildren that on the soil of Europe once dwelt a tribe of gods. — Francis Parker Yockey

This will arguably be the third great revolution of America, if we can prove that we literally can live without having a dominant European culture. — William J. Clinton

So pervasively has Enlightenment culture's anti-supernaturalism affected the Western church, especially educated European and North American Christians, that most of us are suspicious of anything supernatural. — Craig S. Keener

There's more emphasis on art and culture in Europe than there is in the United States and I think that a lot of American directors and writers are just trying to copy other American horror films, they don't pick up much in the way that European filmmakers do. — Wes Craven

It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age. — Susanne Katherina Langer

The rich fertility of China's plains and a culture of uncommon resilience and political acumen had enabled China to remain unified over much of a two-millennia period and to exercise considerable political, economic, and cultural influence - even when it was militarily weak by conventional standards. Its comparative advantage resided in the wealth of its economy, which produced goods that all of its neighbors desired. Shaped by these elements, the Chinese idea of world order differed markedly from the European experience based on a multiplicity of co-equal states. — Henry Kissinger

The richness of every European language is a richness in ability to describe its own culture, represent its own world. When it ventures to do the same for another culture, however, it betrays its limitations, underdevelopment, semantic weakness. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Above all, what is our culture, and what has remained of it? Is European culture perhaps nothing more than the technology and trade civilization that has marched triumphantly across the planet? Or is it instead a post-European culture born on the ruins of the ancient European cultures?
There is a paradoxical synchrony in these developments. The victory of the post-European techno-secular world and the universalization of its lifestyle and thinking have spread the impression (especially in Asia and Africa) that Europe's value system, culture, and faith (in other words, the very foundations of its identity) have reached the end of the road and have indeed already disappeared. — Pope Benedict XVI

The word agriculture, after all, does not mean "agriscience," much less "agribusiness." It means "cultivation of land." And cultivation is at the root of the sense both of culture and of cult. The ideas of tillage and worship are thus joined in culture. And these words all come from an Indo-European root meaning both "to revolve" and "to dwell." To live, to survive on the earth, to care for the soil, and to worship, all are bound at the root to the idea of a cycle. It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term "agribusiness." (pg. 285, The Use of Energy) — Wendell Berry

In the index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, abridged version, the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton do not occur yet their cosmic quest destroyed the medieval vision of an immutable social order in a walled-in universe and transformed the European landscape, society, culture, habits and general outlook, as thoroughly as if a new species had arisen on this planet. — Arthur Koestler

in Sante Fe time is not that shallow. There one can go deep into a continuity as the pueblos and the culture they represent take one back at least eight hundred years through a single Indian dance. For a European that continuity is life-giving. — May Sarton

A precursor to the Social Darwinists, Hobbes argued from th premise that the primordial human condition was a war fought by each against each, so brutal and incesssant that it was impossible to develop industry or even agriculture or the arts while that condition persisted. It's this description that culmintes in his famous epithet "And the life of man, solitary, poor, brutish, and short." It was a fiction to which he brought to bear another fiction, that of the social contract by which men agree to submit to rules and a presiding authority, surrendering their right to ravage each other for the sake of their own safety. The contract was not a bond of affection or identification, bot a culture or religion binding togetehr a civilization, only a convenience. Men, in his view, as in that of many other European writers of the period, are stark, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategy and not by nature ... — Rebecca Solnit