The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all material.... He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hebrew culture is based on a single book, the Word of God. Greek culture, by contrast, is based on a thousand books, all of them b...y human authors. The god of the Hebrews sternly rejected graven idols. Consequently, the Hebrew tradition is iconoclastic--it scorns all attempts to materialize the divine. The Greek gods, conversely, admired the material world. Their admiration, as a matter of fact, often seems to be tinged with envy, as though they considered the material world better than the celestial. They wanted to be materialized. They approved of statues, and the statues they inspired were so beautiful that they eventually set standards for human beauty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination. Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meani...ngs in symbolic terms, and the reordering of nature--the qualities of space and time--in new perceptual and material form. Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic. Technology is the instrumental ordering of human experience within a logic of efficient means, and the direction of nature to use its powers for material gain. But art and technology are not separate realms walled off from each other. Art employs techne, but for its own ends. Techne, too, is a form of art that bridges culture and social structure, and in the process reshapes both.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than i...ts spiritual contributions to our culture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the ...conditions of modern life--its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness--conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an... inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »