"Culture is neither natural nor artificial, neither genetically transmitted nor rationally designed. It is a tradition of learnt rules of conduct which have never been ‘invented’ and whose functions the acting individuals usually do not understand. There is surely as much justification to speak of the wisdom of culture as of the wisdom of nature—except, perhaps, that, because of the powers of government, errors of the former are less easily corrected."

"Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to believe in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby create artificial instincts that enable millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instinct is called 'Culture'."

"The way you sustain and improve upon a culture is by fostering a sense of gratitude for what is best about it. You celebrate the good in your story while putting the bad in the correct context."

"Remember, we live in a culture of immediacy. We live in a culture in which simplistic answers override more complicated answers. We live in a culture in which language is reduced to its bare bones. We live in a culture in which language is now in the service of violence."

"Whoever controls the media — the images — controls the culture."

"Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature."

"In science, just as in art and in life, only that which is true to culture is true to nature."

"One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits."

"Cultural products which present foreign wars as the heroic effort of a master race to ennoble mankind are, to the degree they are successful as art, objectively in the interests of imperialists, who are people who make foreign wars against other races for profit."

"Cultural products that present people who have no money or power as innately stupid or depraved, and thus unworthy of money or power, are in the interests of the ruling class and the power structure as it stands."

"Cultural products which present women who do not want to be household slaves or universal mothers or sex objects as bitches or sexual failures objectively aid male supremacy."

"[Culture is] that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."

"I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it."

"No one can take culture seriously if he believes that it is only the uppermost of several layers of epiphenomena resting on a primary reality of economic activity."

"Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture's got to go"

"Culture is the attempt by man to realize the conceivable in the possible. Man’s consciousness of himself within his environment distinguishes him from the lower animals, and turns him into the only animal capable of culture. This consciousness, his highest faculty, allows him to project mentally states of being that do not exist at the moment. Able to construct a past and future, he becomes a creature of time – a historian and a prophet. More than this, he can imagine objects and states of being that have never existed and may never exist in the real world – he becomes a maker of art. Thus, for example, though the ancient Greeks did not know how to fly, still they could imagine it. The myth of Icarus was the formulation in fantasy of their conception of the state ‘flying’. But man was not only able to project the conceivable into fantasy. He also learned to impose it on reality: by accumulating knowledge, learning experience, about that reality and how to handle it, he could shape it to his liking. This accumulation of skills for controlling the environment, technology, is another means to reaching the same end, the realization of the conceivable in the possible."

"To say that the invention "was in the air" or "the times were ripe for it" are just other ways of stating that the inventors did not do the inventing, but that the cultures did."

"The astonishing cluster of them [geniuses] that appeared in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. ...what changed was the culture, which allowed exceptional minds to flourish."

"Culture is all the things and ideas ever devised by humans working and living together."

"Culture suggests agriculture, but civilization suggests the city. In one aspect civilization is the habit of civility; and civility is the refinement which townsmen, who made the word, thought possible only in the civitas or city."

"Computers will not preserve cultures. But they can be used to foster cultural pluralism and to provide people everywhere with the power to make their own bilingual educational materials, or to print pamphlets on how to grow better rice, or to record for future generations the customs and lore of those now alive."

"Culture is at once the expression and the reward of an effort, and any system of civilization which tends to relax effort will suffer a corresponding depreciation of culture."

"The improvement of the soul consists in raising it above what is narrow, particular, individual, selfish, to the universal and unconfined. To improve a man is to liberalize, enlarge him in thought, feeling, and purpose. Narrowness of intellect and heart, this is the degradation from which all culture aims to rescue the human being."

"Cultures are not made from free-floating values. They are rooted in institutions and organizations."

"Remember, Art is the one vital medium of the coming culture."