“France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything.” ThinkingWorldCultureLeftAcceptingFranceFarmersPrimitiveCowboyDominating Author:Adam Michnik
“Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed "the claims of the ideal." These are the three stages, profoundly interrelated, through which Western consciousness is forced to experience the blackmail of transcendence.” MomentsCultureThreeConsciousnessChristianityStageIdealsClaimsWesternSupremeSocialismPrimitiveTranscendenceWestern CultureBlackmailMonotheismSinaiIbsen Author:George Steiner
“A relatively primitive village in which there are still real feasts, common artistic shared expressions, and no literacy at all is more advanced culturally and more healthy mentally than our educated, newspaper-reading radio-listening culture.” StillsRealCultureReadingCommonExpressionListeningHealthyRadioNewspapersEducatedArtisticVillagePrimitiveLiteracy Book:The Sane Society Source: The Sane Society
“In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition.” KnowsWayHumansYoungLife IsCultureRolesTeachRecordsTeacherGroupsTeachingBehaviorLateAdultsTraditionSeparationInventionDefinedTiedPrimitiveHabitualHuman SocietyExplicitImplicit Author:Margaret Mead
“Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.” MenLyingCultureProcessStepsFeetModernHairMalesBottomContemporaryContactCoveredPrimitiveEightyWild Man Book:Iron John: A Book about Men Source: Iron John: A Book about Men
“In their overestimation of the role of civilization, the humanists misunderstand the primary forces of the world of primitive human drives with their untamable violence. With their optimistic view of the role of culture, they (the humanists) trivialize the terrifying, hardly solvable problems of mass hatred and of the great passionate psychoses of the human race.” WorldHumansProblemHateHumanityCultureForceViewsRaceRolesViolenceCivilizationMassHatredPassionateOptimisticPrimariesHuman RacePrimitivePsychosisGreat Passion Author:Stefan Zweig
“Religion, even the most primitive and superstitious, is inevitably a beginning of culture. It is not possible without some kind of symbolic expression ... and begets dramatic gesture, dance, and chant.” KindReligionCultureExpressionDramaticGesturesPrimitiveSymbolicBegetsSuperstitious Author:Susanne Katherina Langer