Old Culture Quotes & Sayings

One line of thinking holds that similar principles of networked communication, if applied correctly to the realm of international affairs, could help solve age-old problems of violent conflict. Traditional ethnic and sectarian rivalries may be muted in the Internet age, this theory posits, because "people who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners. With more data, everyone gains a better frame of reference. — Henry Kissinger

You cannot win the war. You will seem to win but it will be an illusion. You will win the battles, kill billions, rape Worlds, take slaves, and destroy ships and weapons. But after that you will be forced to hold the subjection. Your numbers will not be expendable. You will be spread thin, exposed to other cultures that will influence you, change you. You will lose skirmishes, and in the end you will be forced back. Then will come a loss of old ethics, corruption and opportunism will replace your honor and you will know unspeakable shame and dishonor... your culture will soon be weltering back into a barbarism and disorganization which in its corruption and despair will be nothing like the proud tribal primitive life of its first barbarism. You will be aware of the difference and unable to return. — Charles V. De Vet

In the case of the Indian villager, an age-old culture is hidden under entrustment of crudeness. — Mahatma Gandhi

Don't lie to anyone, but particularly don't lie to millennials. They just know. They can smell it. Be yourself: if you're old, be old. If you don't know anything about pop culture, don't pretend to know anything about pop culture. When you credit teenagers with intelligence and emotional sophistication, they respond intelligently and with emotional sophistication. — John Green

A generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic ... a blind faith in some higher and wiser "authority." The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister ... all the way up to "God. — Hunter S. Thompson

When the forms of an old culture are dying,
the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure. — Rudolf Bahro

The art of holding on to money is all about saying no to consumer culture. Saying no to takeout, $4 lattes, and that shiny new computer when the old one still works fine. — Austin Kleon

Basically the message is: Steal It! Art, music, culture, the odd book and the slab of cheese ... the new will be built upon the ruins of the old. — Buenaventura Durruti

I moved to San Francisco when I was 20 years old. I couldn't even drink yet. My friends in college thought I was so stupid for missing out on the four best years of my life. But I was so ready to start living my own life and absorb Silicon Valley culture. — Brit Morin

Parents embraced "Sesame Street" for several reasons, among them that it assuaged their guilt over the fact that they could not or would not restrict their children's access to television. "Sesame Street" appeared to justify allowing a four- or five-year-old to sit transfixed in front of a television screen for unnatural periods of time. Parents were eager to hope that television could teach their children something other than which breakfast cereal has the most crackle. At the same time, "Sesame Street" relieved them of the responsibility of teaching their pre-school children how to read - no small matter in a culture where children are apt to be considered a nuisance ... We now know that "Sesame Street" encourages children to love school only if school is like "Sesame Street." Which is to say, we now know that "Sesame Street" undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents. — Neil Postman

I'd much rather talk to a 30-year old that survived rough times in their lives [practicing Straight Edge] rather than someone that was harmed by a culture of violence. — Ian MacKaye

God's Word will never pass away, but looking back to the Old Testament and since the time of Christ, with tears we must say that because of a lack of fortitude and faithfulness on the part of God's people, God's Word has many times been allowed to be bent, to conform to the surrounding, passing, changing culture of that moment rather than to stand as the inerrant Word of God judging the form of the world spirit and the surrounding culture of that moment. In the name of The Lord Jesus Christ, may our children and grandchildren not say that such can be said about us. — Francis A. Schaeffer

Ours is certainly not an old culture. Yet in recent decades we've used more energy, destroyed more soil, created more pathogenicity (temporarily stopped some too, for sure), mutated more bacteria, and dumped more toxicity on the planet than all the cultures before us-combined. I love the United States, but I am not blind to the wrongs. I have no desire to live anywhere else, but that doesn't mean I think everything we're doing should be done or can be maintained. — Joel Salatin

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. — Susan Sontag

The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty. — Oscar Wilde

It is no accident that, of the early Jesuit scholars who were pioneers in making China's culture known in Europe, those who concerned themselves with the Book of Changes were all later declared to be insane or heretic. Indeed, to the Chinese themselves the study of the I Ching is not to be taken lightly. By an unwritten law, only those advanced in years regard themselves as ready to learn from it. Confucius is said to have been seventy years old when he first took up the Book of Changes. — Hellmut Wilhelm

Humans are by nature self-centered. It doesn't matter how civilized or primitive they are. If they want something, they'll find a way to get it or take it. The old empires used land, women, religion, pride in one's nationality, or preservation of their culture as an excuse to start war. Presently, you use technology, world policing, expanding markets, and protecting national interest, but the underlying theme has never changed. As long as there are greedy people in this world, there will always be wars. — Ednah Walters

Those who have most at stake in the old culture, or are most rigid in their beliefs, try to summon people back to the old ideas.' — Marilyn Ferguson

Our culture teaches us about shame - it dictates what is acceptable and what is not. We weren't born craving perfect bodies. We weren't born afraid to tell our stories. We weren't born with a fear of getting too old to feel valuable. We weren't born with a Pottery Barn catalog in one hand and heartbreaking debt in the other. Shame comes from outside of us - from the messages and expectations of our culture. What comes from the inside of us is a very human need to belong, to relate. — Brene Brown

In fact, they didn't even keep track of birth dates here. Instead, they used a traditional method of counting a person's age. Newborn babies were "one year old," and became one year older at the start of the new year. As for the reason it didn't start at zero... I was briefly afraid I'd discover they didn't yet have the concepts of zero or place-value notation. In fact, they had both. Newborn babies being "one" was just a holdover from previous times, before the numeral "zero" existed within their culture. Old — Kanata Yanagino

In time, foods such as hamburgers and ice cream became more than just meals. They became part of American history and culture, touchstones that are almost immediately nostalgic and sentimental no matter how old you are or what part of the country you are from. — Homaro Cantu

It is not, of course, only the Japanese who find flat sterile surfaces attractive and kirei. Foreign observers, too, are seduced by the crisp borders, sharp corners, neat railings, and machine-polished textures that define the new Japanese landscape, because, consciously or unconsciously, most of us see such things as embodying the very essence of modernism. In short, foreigners very often fall in love with kirei even more than the Japanese do; for one thing, they can have no idea of the mysterious beauty of the old jungle, rice paddies, wood, and stone that was paved over. Smooth industrial finish everywhere, with detailed attention to each cement block and metal joint: it looks 'modern'; ergo, Japan is supremely modern. — Alex Kerr

We moved to Gambia from Sweden when I was six years old because my dad was from there. It was definitely a culture shock. — Seinabo Sey

Henceforth we find woman no longer a slave of man and tool of lust, but the pride and joy of her husband, the fond mother training her children to virtue and godliness, the ornament and treasure of the family, the faithful sister, the zealous servant of the congregation in every work of Christian charity, the sister of mercy, the martyr with superhuman courage, the guardian angel of peace, the example of purity, humility, gentleness, patience, love, and fidelity unto death. Such women were unknown before. The heathen Libanius, the enthusiastic eulogist of old Grecian culture, pronounced an involuntary eulogy on Christianity when he exclaimed, as he looked at the mother of Chrysostom: "What women the Christians have! — Philip Schaff

As American culture changes, the scandal of Christianity is increasingly right up front, exactly where it was in the first century. The shaking of American culture will get us back to the question Jesus asked his disciples at Caesarea Philippi: "Who do you say that I am?" As the Bible Belt recedes, those left standing up for Jesus will be those who, like Simon Peter of old, know how to answer that question. Once Christianity is no longer seen as part and parcel of patriotism, the church must offer more than "What would Jesus do?" moralism and the "I vote values" populism to which we've grown accustomed. Good. — Russell D. Moore

When politicians like Sen. Joseph Lieberman target video game violence, perhaps it is to distract attention from the material conditions that give rise to a culture of domestic violence, the economic policies that make it harder for most of us to own our own homes, and the development practices which pave over the old grasslands and forests. Video games did not make backyard play spaces disappear; rather, they offer children some way to respond to domestic confinement. — Henry Jenkins

If you wish to find the past preserved, follow the million feet of the crowd. At the worst the uneducated only wear down old things by sheer walking. But the educated kick them down out of sheer culture. — G.K. Chesterton

[On Los Angeles:] This city is a hundred years old but try and find some trace of its history. Every culture is swallowed up and spat out as a franchise. Taco Bell. Benihana of Tokyo. Numero Uno Pizza. Pup 'N' Taco. Kentucky Fried Chicken. Fast food sushi. Teriyaki Bowl. — Anne Finger

In the common perception, there is something unseemly about young people getting rich. Getting rich is supposed to be the reward for hard work, preferably arriving when you are too old to enjoy it. And the spectacle of young millionaires who made their bundle not from business or crime but from avant-garde art is particularly offensive. The avant-garde is supposed to be the conscience of the culture, not its id. — Janet Malcolm

The races are like America's children. White people are the firstborn, so they were Dad's favorite. Black people are the second kids, the abused ones, so they still hate Dad. Latinos are the third, caught in the middle and always trying to make peace between the other siblings. Asians are the youngest, and get good marks in school, but basically are just trying to keep their heads down and not get involved. And Native Americans are the old uncle who owns a house and everyone else in the family was like, "He's not using that! Let's move in! — Colin Quinn

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

I began to realize that my pictures of God were old. They were not old in the sense of antique champagne flutes, which are abundant with significance precisely because they are old - when you sip from them you remember your grandmother using them at birthday dinners, or your sister toasting her beloved at their wedding. Rather, they were old like a seventh-grade health textbook from 1963: moderately interesting for what it might say about culture and science in 1963, but generally out of date. — Lauren F. Winner

In order to confer their lost Nationality upon exiled Jews , the British with the help of the League of Nations began to rehabilitate the old Hebrew country, Palestine, with its long lost children. The Jews had maintained their race, religion, culture and language; and all they wanted was their natural territory to complete their Nationality. The reconstruction of the Hebrew Nation on Palestine is just an affirmation of the fact that Country, Race, Religion, Culture and Language must exist unequivocally together to form the Nation idea. — M. S. Golwalkar

Piracy is robbery with violence, often segueing into murder, rape and kidnapping. It is one of the most frightening crimes in the world. Using the same term to describe a twelve-year-old swapping music with friends, even thousands of songs, is evidence of a loss of perspective so astounding that it invites and deserves the derision it receives. — Nick Harkaway

We must be compelled to hold this doctrine to be false, and the old and new law called the Old and new Testament, to be impositions, fables and forgeries — Thomas Paine

I used to imagine that making it in music - really making it in music - is if you're an old man going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That's the ultimate. You're in the culture. — Tom Waits

It is true that freedom, when it is made up principally of privileges, insults labor and separates it from culture. But freedom is not made up principally of privileges; it is made up especially of duties. And the moment each of us tries to give freedom's duties precedence over its privileges, freedom joins together labor and culture and sets in motion the only force that can effectively serve justice. The rule of our action, the secret of our resistance can be easily stated: everything that humiliates labor also humiliates the intelligence, and vice versa. And the revolutionary struggle, the centuries-old straining toward liberation can be defined first of all as a double and constant rejection of humiliation. — Albert Camus

Can you imagine growing up in a culture where you can never ask anyone anything about themselves? Where "How are you?" is considered a personal question that one is not obligated to answer? Where you are trained to always wait for others to first mention what is troubling them, even as you are trained to never mention what is troubling you? It must be a survival skill left over from the old Viking days, when long silences were required to prevent unnecessary homicides during the long, dark winters when quarters were close and supplies were dwindling. While — Hope Jahren

Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term "human" a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies are of course not human
they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates.
In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.
It is true that they look human
but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.
Subconsciously, too, every one recognizes they are animals
why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely. — Richard Hughes

Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading.
Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain
boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.
Now the subject who keeps the two texts in his field and in his hands the reins of pleasure and bliss is an anachronic subject, for he simultaneously and contradictorily participates in the profound hedonism of all culture (which permeates him quietly under the cover of an "art de vivre" shared by the old books) and in the destruction of that culture: he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss). He is a subject split twice over, doubly perverse. — Roland Barthes

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

Ugster vinyl pumps, Partridge Family records, plastic daisy jewelry, old postcards ... It's a magpie Christmas market. — Francesca Lia Block

The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited black folks, are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure. — Bell Hooks

Culture in America and everywhere else comes from the suffering, from those who don't want the old ways. They want to bring in the new, whether it's the ballet, when it started, or Shakespeare. — Russell Simmons

Quite a few people still listen to vinyl records, use film cameras to take photographs, and look up phone numbers in the printed Yellow Pages. But the old technologies lose their economic and cultural force. They become progress's dead ends. It's the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people's behavior and shape their perceptions. That's why the future of knowledge and culture no longer lies in books or newspapers or TV shows or radio programs or records or CDs. It lies in digital files shot through our universal medium at the speed of light. — Nicholas Carr

There's an old saying that the difference between abstract knowledge and real wisdom is that "wisdom is knowledge with the knower left in." It is taking the truth into all your relationships. It is to ask, "What does this mean for my relationship to God? to myself? to this or that person or group? to this or that behavior or habit? to my friends, to the culture? — Timothy Keller

You have to be at the forefront of culture to create art, which they call "product," and Hollywood is not. It's this very old business model, which I think is dying in a lot of ways. — Rose McGowan

A solid 90 percent of my readers are teenage girls. You are a force. You influence art and fashion and culture. You're eight different kinds of cool. You get overlooked far too much, but my 17 year old soul loves you endlessly. — Kiera Cass

Our culture teaches that sex is for the sexy, and the only way to be sexy is to be pretty.
No wait
that's still too weak. Sex should properly arise from sexiness. For unsexy people
fat people, old people, funny-looking people, disabled people
to even feel sexual desire is inappropriate, perverse, disgusting. For them to engage in sexual display is offensive. For them to have sex ... well, there oughta be a law. — Vinnie Tesla

Some day, the public might actually revolt against the undemocratic system of seniority that allows Congress to keep the old ways of Washington ingrained into the culture of Congress. — Chuck Todd

All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. — Hunter S. Thompson

Every old man that dies is a library that burns. — Amadou Hampate Ba

I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker. — Bharati Mukherjee

I had always heard rumors of her, Nanook thought, she who can control the wind, the water, the earth, and fire ... she who can talk to time. But those were old myths of a woman who lived many thousands of years ago, the first daughter of the Earth. There is a prophecy that she will return again, during the end times -- every religion has someone like that, someone to wait for and put your faith in, but my culture had mostly covered up her existence. We had a god of the sea, a god of the land, a god of the air, a god of fire, but no one who could control all of the elements. We spoke, only in whispers, of the ancient bloodline -- the descendents of the Great Mother. Too many superstitious minds, too many men concerned only with their own power and position, had heard these whispers in the past and taken gruesome steps to erase the descendents. The lineage was said to be broken, the blood of the Great Mother spilled for the last time. — Sarah Warden

It is quite reasonable to subscribe both to the old saw that no good girl was ever ruined by a book and to the perception that it is not good for children to be constantly exposed to the sexual violence in our popular culture. Protecting children seems to me logically, legally, and rather easily differentiated from censorship ... — Molly Ivins

I grew up in a wonderful blend of a lot of old culture. — Kenny Ortega

Do not speak harshly to a grown-up man. He is old enough to be your father. — Lailah Gifty Akita

We still have our television and our books, our imagination. Children grow up in their houses, without the forest and the river. They can only look at them. These are completely different children. And I go to them and recite Pushkin, who I thought was eternal. And then I have this terrible thought: what if our entire culture is just an old trunk with a bunch of stale manuscripts? Everything I love . . . He: — Svetlana Alexievich

At the same time, we may not as a culture be fond of old-fashioned supernaturalism, but we certainly like spirituality in whatever form we can get it. I suspect that if anyone other than Jesus (Krishna, say, or Buddha) were suddenly put forward as being due for a second coming, millions in our postsecular society would embrace such a thing uncritically, leaving Enlightenment rationalism huffing and puffing in the rear. We are a puzzled and confused generation, embracing any and every kind of nonrationalism that may offer us a spiritual shot in the arm while lapsing back into rationalism (in particular, the old modernist critiques) whenever we want to keep traditional or orthodox Christianity at bay. — N. T. Wright

Christian monks and nuns were, in effect, the guardians of culture, as they were virtually the only people who could read and write before the fourteenth century. It is interesting therefore that most of the native English culture they preserved is not in Latin, the language of the church, but in Old English, the language of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. — Ronald Carter

One of the things about working for an old school studio like Warner Bros. is that there is an institutional culture and institutional memory, in terms of production design, camera work, and directors who understand how to do this kind of thing. — Bruno Heller

In the two decades after I left, I waited for the end of Wall Street as I had known it. The outrageous bonuses, the endless parade of rogue traders, the scandal that sank Drexel Burnham, the scandal that destroyed John Gutfreund and finished off Salomon Brothers, the crisis following the collapse of my old boss John Meriwether's Long-Term Capital Management, the Internet bubble: Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents' world when you can buy it and sell off the pieces? — Michael Lewis

Attitudes towards menstrual blood in contemporary Western culture still circle around the subject with a mixture of denial and horror, advertisements for sanitary products typically use blue liquid in an attempt to sanitize the reality of blood, weary old jokes circulate about not trusting anything that bleeds for seven days and does not die. Menstrual blood is constructed either as something that requires a hygienic makeover or as something unnatural and obscene, a further indication of the horrors of sexual difference and the threatening 'secrets' of the female body. — Ruth McPhee

I have a friend who calls himself a Jewish-Buddhist, or a JewBu - he attends a synagogue where they meditate and chant Shalommmmmmmm - and when I asked how he reconciles the God of the Old Testament with the absence of a supreme god in Buddhism, he said, Maybe I don't believe in God. Maybe I only believe in culture. — Suzanne Morrison

The 'civil rights' revolutionary groups are a case in point. Their goal is not equality but power. The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and the purposes of magic are control and power ... Voodoo or magic was the religion and life of American Negroes. Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo, a modernized power drive. — R.J. Rushdoony

Here is an old phrase I like: "The only way to the universal good is that we all become strangers to ourselves." You imagine looking at yourself with a foreign gaze, through foreign eyes. I think this is something that could be the greatest thing in humanity. You are never really limited just to your own perspective. I don't like the false identity politics of multiculturalism which says that "you are enclosed in your culture." No, we have all this amazing capacity to be surprised, not by others, but by ourselves seeing how what we are doing is strange. — Slavoj Zizek

We live in a global village, Neel, where billions of voices babble simultaneously, and in this village a new hierarchy is being established, a new caste-system is being created. Only this time, it is money that sets the tone. Whoever has the most money buys the biggest loudspeaker and is the neo-Brahmin of this new world order. If the ninety-year-old neo-Brahmin on the other side of the earth is terrified of antibiotic resistant flesh-eating bacteria, we must think twice before offering treatment to a twenty-four-year old here. These are the new rules of our global village. — Anirban Bose

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

China is an old nation with a colourful history. Its booming economy has triggered an appetite and a curiosity around the world for its art and culture, one that continues to grow. I can, however, tell people that it is a show with no actor. — Ai Weiwei

Hey! look at us
We're digging and digging
Into stubborn, ancient earth;
We're discovering
Where we came from,
and how we came.

"but where are you going?"

Hey! look at us
We're learning and learning
Into stubborn laws
Of nature and space
And non-nature and non-space;
We're discovering
All there is to know.

"but where are you going?"

Hey! look at us
We're planning and planning
Into stubborn years
Of education and training
And hopes and dreams;
We're discovering
How not to waste any time.

"but where are you going?"

Hey! look at us
We're shiny and bright
And clever and sophisticated
And witty and well-read;
We're discovering
How to really fill up
This old life.

"but where are you going?"

where?

"Yes; where? — Lois A. Cheney

Since its appearance the view that prostitution is a product of capitalism has gained ground enormously. And as, in addition, preachers still complain that the good old morals have decayed, and accuse modern culture of having led to loose living, everyone is convinced that all sexual wrongs represent a symptom of decadence peculiar to our age. — Ludwig Von Mises

But a people unable to reform will not be able to preserve its old culture either. — Lu Xun

As an old man who remembers the intellectual exhilaration and the pleasure of having done good work that characterized the CIA when it was young, I wonder if it might not be better to speak and think in terms of restoring its culture. — Charles McCarry

Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing ... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas ... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new. — G.K. Chesterton

It was an origin story pedaled to the world, but unlike the various creation stories of the old religions, there was no rich culture, no moral code, no beauty. — T.L. Zalecki

Himmler wants to send an expedition to Tibet to look for ancient manuscripts on the Aryans. The man is like a little schoolgirl. What culture is there in an old jug, I ask you? — Adolf Hitler

One grim Weltanschauung for this new era was well expressed by the Venetian nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin's novel, Dead Lagoon: There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven. — Samuel P. Huntington

Recently I've been dreaming
of cursing old people
with little provocation,
because their culture
has a long history of enslaving,
raping, and segregating,
and they have special lights
which prevent us from dancing. — Matthew Rohrer

I can't pretend that I don't subscribe to Internet music culture in that I discover new music and old music simultaneously. — Alan Palomo

The problem with the word "vagina" is that vaginas seem to be just straight-out bad luck. Only a masochist would want one, because only awful things happen to them. Vaginas get torn. Vaginas get "examined.".. No. Let's clear this up right now - I don't actually have a vagina. I never have. I, personally, have a cunt. Cunt is a proper, old, historic, strong word, and it doubles up as the most potent swear word in the English language. Yeah. That's how powerful it is, guys. If I tell you what I've got down there, old ladies and clerics might faint. I like how shocked people are when you say "cunt." Compared to this, the most powerful swear word men have got out of their privates is "dick," which is frankly vanilla. In a culture where nearly everything female is still seen as squeam-inducing and/or weak - menstruation, menopause, just the sheer, simple act of calling someone "a girl" - I love that "cunt" stands on its own, as the supreme, unvanquishable word. — Caitlin Moran

This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to "cycle through" different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson's. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing "chemistry" turn out not to be jokes at all. — Sherry Turkle

Talk of citizenship today is often thin and tinny. The word has a faintly old-fashioned feel to it when used in everyday conversation. When evoked in national politics, it's usually accompanied by the shrill whine of a descending culture-war mortar. — Eric Liu

Marla tells me how in the wild you don't see old animals because as soon as they age, animals die. If they get sick or slow down, something stronger kills them. Animals aren't meant to get old. Marla lies down on her bed and undoes the tie on her bathrobe, and says our culture has made death something wrong. Old animals should be an unnatural exception. Freaks. — Chuck Palahniuk

What I find interesting as a 40-year-old is the idea of trying to be a part of a pronounced, continuing independent culture. The basic tenet of America is that you rebel and then you get real. — Ian MacKaye

Remember preconceptions? Even though I'd landed hoping simply to somehow scrape the transatlantic fare home, I'd been an arrogant swine, imbued with that Old World toffee-nosed attitude: The United States of America's got no culture, not deep down. — Jonathan Gash

She has four sons," Nurse Purvis leads me on, "all with a London post code, but they never visit. You'd think old age was a criminal offense, not a destination we're all heading to." I consider airing my theory that our culture's coping strategy towards death is to bury it under consumerism and Sansara, that the Riverside Villas of the world are screens that enable this self-deception, and that the elderly are guilty: guilty of proving to us that our willful myopia about death is exactly that. — David Mitchell

I thought it such a shame that our culture had not devised a way to defang old age. A sophisticated civilization wouldn't ridicule senility, it would elevate it, worship it, wouldn't it? We would train ourselves to see poetry in the nonsense of dementia, to actually look forward to becoming so untethered from the world. We'd make a ceremony of casting off our material goods and confining ourselves to a single room, leaving all our old, abandoned space to someone new, someone young, so that we could die alone, indifferent to our own decay and lost beauty. (127 — Timothy Schaffert

The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to help to forget. — Theodor W. Adorno

It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing 'art' to defend their collapsing culture. — George Grosz

Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought. The process ... has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas. — M.H. Abrams

When people say that L.A. doesn't have a culture, I think it really does: a very old culture, and very specific. There's streets named after entertainers, and statues of entertainers, and it's great. Entertainment is still art, even if it makes billions of dollars. So it's like a city built on entertainment, and art in a way. — Fred Armisen

And on the night before he suffers the worst that wayward human culture can do, this is what he does: he takes bread and wine into his hands, lifts them up, and blesses them. Bread and wine, not wheat and grapes. Bread and wine are culture, not just nature. They are good for food and a delight to the eyes. Jesus takes culture, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to his friends. Taken, broken, blessed, and given, these cultural goods, these "creatures of bread and wine" as the old prayer book had it, become sign and presence of God in the world. — W. David O. Taylor

Our body does get old, but our spirit, never. If we write well enough, we might even live forever. — A.A. Patawaran

The use of drugs is not an effective means of facilitating real escape. It merely gives that erroneous and illusive impression. Well, illusive with an I and elusive with an E. At best, narcotics do no more than promote bonhomie and give you a temporary taste of what freedom might be like; and drugs take you into another sub-level of, or sub-culture in, the same old game. The same old game, but with additional consequences. And at worst, well ... suffice it to say that you really, really do not want to go there. — H.M. Forester

Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

He came to believe that this was the very sort of thing that happened when you let yourself get caught in one culture's insistence that love ought to be like this or that. The key for people like him, he ultimately concluded, in this as in most matters, was to be nimble. Your privilege as an immigrant was to pick and choose your inheritance, maintain what suited you and participate merely to the extent of your patience and interest. It was not in your nature to align with one side fully, and so you couldn't help but make a life that was both apart and among. You didn't make one choice and stick with it but, rather, hundreds of minor choices with which you created a unique path through the corridors of old traditions and the avenues of the new. And you cultivated this dividedness because you carried always the imprint of that first move -- the decision to leave home. Indeed, this initiating choice, more than anything, was your true inheritance. — Saher Alam

The myth of childhood happiness flourishes so wildly not because it satisfies the needs of children but because it satisfies the needs of adults. In a culture of alienated people, the belief that everyone has at least one good period in life free of care and drudgery dies hard. And obviously you can't expect it in your old age. So it must be you've already had it. — Shulamith Firestone

I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one. — Richard Wright

Ours has been an expansionist society, but that narrative must change as we run out of places to expand into. But our culture is like a cart stuck in the same old rut that has been leading us in one direction. The longer we've been using a path, the deeper the ruts get, the harder it is to escape them. We've been moving ever Westward, but there's only so far we can go in that direction before we fall into the ocean. It's a direction that we cannot continue on forever, but the breaking of those ruts will require a major rupture. The old narrative is dying, and it will be quite a crushing of gears before things are re-adjusted. A shared story is needed for a civilization to endure. — James Rozoff

Brands are either built on reruns or coming attractions. The future has no road map while the past does. Creating a brand that blazes new trails can sometimes be bumpy but will also allow you to be the first to discover something new, something meaningful and something that makes others ask, "Why didn't we think of that?" Be very scared of "old tricks" and build a spirit of innovation. It's the "old tricks" that have the highest risk, not doing something bold. — David Brier