A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, ...thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... with every Asiatic country where we operate in cooperation with the existing culture, the need for intelligent understanding o...f that country and its ways of life will be crucial. These nations will very likely not respond to appeals with which we are familiar, and not value rewards which seem to us irresistible. The danger--and it would be fatal to world peace--is that in our ignorance of their cultural values we shall meet in head-on collision and incontinently fall back on the old pattern of imposing our own values by force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In many ways, Twain and Waugh were strikingly similar. Even within the group of great humorists, they belong together. Both anti-e...rotic imaginations, they stress male comradeships and represent love-relationships most conventionally and sentimentally. They both show society as dominated by fools and bores, and fate as characterized by betrayal and disaster--life as subordinate to death. For that reason, no doubt, both are much interested in militarism and the machinery of death, as well as in the military and manly virtues. Both men tell jokes that belong to the bar where magistrates gather, managers, captains, men who take responsibility for law and order. Both were quickly irritated by most real clubs and bars. One might say that both belonged to the same cultural type.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after the... forms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Compare the history of the novel to that of rock 'n' roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splint...ered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If Shakespeare has a singularity, it is because he has become a black hole. Light, insight, intelligence, matter--all pour ceasele...ssly into him, as critics are drawn into the densening vortex of his reputation; they add their own weight to his increasing mass. The light from other stars--other poets, other dramatists--is wrenched and bent as it passes by him on its way to us. He warps cultural space-time; he distorts our view of the universe around him. As Emerson said, "Now, literature, philosophy, and thought are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which at present we do not see." But Shakespeare himself no longer transmits visible light; his stellar energies have been trapped within the gravity well of his own reputation. We find in Shakespeare only what we bring to him or what others have left behind; he gives us back our own values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Determination and skill come out of a depth of political and cultural experiences. Women resist and are brave in the most ordinary...-seeming situations: on a welfare line, after being told that medical benefits are going to cut; on a street late at night helping a sister who is being harassed; as a mother demanding that the hospital stop experimenting with sterilization on her daughters; one sister to another trying to convince her to stop shooting up because it's giving the man a victory, swallowing up her life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism's... high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't wanna live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light. Freedom from... labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »