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Culture Quotes

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Culture Quotes

“Raising a daughter is an extremely political act in this culture. Mothers have been placed in a no-win situation with their daught ers: if they teach their daughters simply how to get along in a world that has been shaped by men and male desires, then they betray their daughters' potential But, if they do not, they leave their daughters adrift in a hostile world without survival strategies.”

Ifs Men World Has Beens Political Mother Desire Culture Winning Situation Teach Survival Daughter Strategy Males Betray Hostile Mother Daughter Adrift

Author:Elizabeth Debold

“The arts, like language, emerged spontaneously and universally in similar forms across cultures, employing imaginative and intellectual capacities that had clear survival value.”

Art Form Values Culture Language Clear Survival Intellectual Capacity Imaginative Employing

Book:The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution

Source: The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution

“The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most "things" now done by our brains, and essential both to our cultures and to our very survival, are epiphenomena of the computing power of this machine, not genetically grounded Darwinian entities created specifically by natural selection for their current function.”

Knows Humans Done Culture Causes Natural Brain Essentials Survival Machines Function Currents Entity Grounded Selection Natural Selection Human Brain Computing Good Causes

Author:Stephen Jay Gould

“Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men's tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.”

Men Culture Survival Female Tools Males Lust Factors Aggression Pagan Vastness Energizing

Book:Sexual Personae

Source: Sexual Personae

“Nostalgia is also a trait of the organizations that I call lodges - everything from corporate cultures to religious sects. Their bonding power often exceeds loyalty to family or country because they create intimacy through shared ideals and beliefs, ceremonies, stories, and legends, and depend on it for their survival. The message is clear: Don't question what we're doing. Just appreciate how long we've been doing it.”

Source: Thinking In The Future Tense

“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”

Source: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

“Psychologist Nathaniel Branden speaks of a benevolent sense of life possible to those with rational, productive values, vividly contrasted with the coercive parasitic group-culture of mystics and altruists we live in, where people all around you seem a burdensome annoyance, a threat to your survival. Having been told from childhood that life is a zero-sum game in which you owe everything to others, at some level you worry all the time that someday the bastards will collect. And collect they do, every April 15th. Why do you think they call it collectivism?”

“John Lilly suggests whales are a culture maintained by oral traditions. Stories. The experience of an individual whale is valuable to the survival of its community. I think of my family stories-Mother's in particular-how much I need them now, how much I will need them later. It has been said when an individual dies, whole worlds die with them. The same could be said of each passing whale.”

Source: Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

“Evolution explains our biological evolution, but human beings are very unique creatures. As the Dobzhansky said, all animals are unique; humans are the uniquest. And that uniqueness of being human, language, art, culture, our dependency on culture for survival, comes from the combination of traditional biological evolution.”