Quotessence
Home / Topics / Culture Quotes

Culture Quotes

Browse 10727 quotes about Culture.

Related topics

Culture Quotes

“Coffee has assumed a social meaning that goes far beyond the simple black brew in the cup. The worldwide coffee culture is more than a culture - it is a cult. There are usenet newsgroups on the subject, along with innumerable sites on the World Wide Web, and Starbucks outlets populate every street corner, vying for space with other coffeehouses and chains. And after all is said and done, it's just the pit of a berry from an Ethiopian shrub.”

“In all cultures, it is the task of a religion to close the field of contingency ...and to set up havens of the absolute where it is possible to be led from acting to listening, from having to being, from planning to hoping, from judging to forgiving from the finite into the infinite. A society in which such open spaces of eternity do not exist or are only insufficiently developed dies of itself due to lack of air to breathe.”

“We should not measure our space-faring era by where footprints have been laid.... We should measure our era by how many people take no notice at all. A legacy rises to become culture only when its elements are so common that they no longer attract comment.”

“They all knew the mothership was coming, they all knew it was a flying saucer, they all knew it came from another planet through the vacuum of space. And so what do they do, to the left of that monument? They set up runway lights. And I'm thinking, if you could travel through the vacuum of space, you don't need runway lights. Runway lights are if you're using air for lift. Aliens would not need air for lift.”

“We live in a cluttered culture, a culture of information in which even our computers can't tell us what's worth knowing and what is merely cultural scrap. In such a society, we don't have the experience of contemplative space, of the time or mood to engage a book of poetry or even read a novel. Who can achieve the unconscious-conscious state of the reader when everything is stimulation, everything is movement and information?”

“In a way, being a Mormon prepares you to deal with science fiction, because we live simultaneously in two very different cultures. The result is that we all know what it's like to be strangers in a strange land. It's not just a coincidence that there are so many effective Mormon science fiction writers. We don't regard being an alien as an alien experience. But it also means that we're not surprised when people don't understand what we're saying or what we think.”