40 Inspiring Culture Quotes

In today’s interconnected world, culture plays a pivotal role in shaping our identities, values, and perspectives. Whether it’s the traditions that have been passed down through generations or the new cultural phenomena that emerge in the digital age, culture enriches our lives in countless ways. To celebrate this diversity and the power of cultural awareness, we've put together a curated collection of the top 40 inspiring quotes. These quotes will not only uplift your spirit but also deepen your appreciation for the myriad ways in which culture influences and inspires us. Dive in and let these words of wisdom spark a greater understanding and love for the vibrant tapestry of global cultures.

1. “We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But then you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.” - Camille Paglia

2. “Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.” - E.M. Forster

3. “I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each.” - Stephen Fry

4. “One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture.” - Marshall Sahlins

5. “Being postmodern, however, is about being complicit rather than virtuous, it is about approaching categories like Good and Evil with a certain ironic skepticism.” - Veronica Hollinger

6. “The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.” - Michael Pollan

7. “..while I was happy enough to pray to any god, knowing that they were simply different faces created by men, of one indivisible truth.” - Lian Hearn

8. “La barbarie n est le contraire de la culture que dans le cadre de la hierarchie de pensee que celle-ci nous propose. ” - Thomas Mann

9. “Are boys encouraged to express sadness, fear, or anxiety? In general, our society gives boys permission for one emotion: anger. If a boy is hurt or upset, he may be comforted briefly, but then he is told to stop crying and "be a man." This message usually implies he should hide his feelings. Boys and men are supposed to be solid unemotional rocks. Demonstrations of emotions are seen as "silly." Anger is seen as a sign of strength. Males are considered to be standing up for their rights if they react to a frustrating or undesirable event with anger. Outrage is often the only reaction to an injustice that is allowed from boys.” - Meg Kennedy Dugan

10. “[I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.” - Christopher Hitchens

11. “Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.” - Virginia Woolf

12. “The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if you are emotionally detached from it. I have always viewed it from a safe distance, knowing I don't belong; it doesn't include me, and it never has. no matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.” - George Carlin

13. “Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

14. “Cookbooks are almost a substitution for a lost sense of culture. People want some other life than the one they're living, so they buy a cookbook with pictures and imagine themselves as part of that life.” - Mark Miller

15. “الحضارة تُعلِّم أما الثقافة فتُنور. تحتاج الأولي الى تعلم, اما الثانية فتحتاج الى تأمل” - Alija Izetbegović

16. “Hey! look at usWe're digging and diggingInto stubborn, ancient earth;We're discoveringWhere we came from,and how we came."but where are you going?"Hey! look at usWe're learning and learningInto stubborn lawsOf nature and spaceAnd non-nature and non-space;We're discoveringAll there is to know."but where are you going?"Hey! look at usWe're planning and planningInto stubborn yearsOf education and trainingAnd hopes and dreams;We're discoveringHow not to waste any time."but where are you going?"Hey! look at usWe're shiny and brightAnd clever and sophisticatedAnd witty and well-read;We're discoveringHow to really fill upThis old life."but where are you going?"where?"Yes; where?” - Lois A. Cheney

17. “While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea” - E.M. Forster

18. “the sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature” - Graham Greene

19. “In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they're not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it's about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty.” - Orhan Pamuk

20. “This is the difference between the Spanish advent and the American; that the technical revolution provoked by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of this Filipinoness.” - Nick Joaquin

21. “The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition.” - Naomi Wolf

22. “We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it. Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking.Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light is her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.” - Naomi Wolf

23. “Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.” - Naomi Wolf

24. “She may resent Playboy because she resents feeling ugly in sex--or, if "beautiful," her body defined and diminished by pornography. It inhibits in her something she needs to live, and gives her the ultimate anaphrodisiac: the self-critical sexual gaze. Alice Walker's essay "Coming Apart" investigates the damage done: Comparing herself to her lover's pornography, her heroine "foolishly" decides that she is not beautiful.” - Naomi Wolf

25. “If you invest all your energy in economics, world commerce, parliamentarianism, military engagements, power and power politics, -if you take the quantum of intelligence, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming that you embody and expend it all in this one direction, there there won't be any left for the other direction. Culture and the state - let us be honest with ourselves - these are adversaries.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

26. “She missed -- without knowing what she missed-- paints and crayons” - Toni Morrison

27. “Our culture encourages us to plan every moment and fill our schedules with one activity and obligation after the next, with no time to just be. But the human body and mind require downtime to rejuvenate. I have found my greatest moments of joy and peace just sitting in silence, and then I take that joy and peace with me out into the world.” - Holly Mosier

28. “Politics is downstream from culture and not the other way around.” - Timothy S. Goeglein

29. “If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were educated. But a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.” - C.S. Lewis

30. “In WASP families, if you don't get along with someone, you have as little to do with them as possible. In Jewish families, you move next door, to make them as miserable as possible.” - Doreen Orion

31. “...Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable—the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

32. “No matter what is happening in the world, I continue to believe in humanity. The power of positive thinking is always enough.” - Britt Skrabanek

33. “He did not care about titles and was proud to be a farmer beyond all else.” - Tsuneichi Miyamoto

34. “The new fans of Japan won’t be Orientalists, but they will be anime-savvy.” - Morinosuke Kawaguchi

35. “Illusory universality is the universality of the art of the culture industry, it is the universality of the homogeneous same, an art which no longer even promises happiness but only provides easy amusement as relief from labour.” - J.M. Bernstein

36. “Everyone over 50 in America feels like a refugee. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because parenting is hard. Inadequate parents could say, 'Go outside and play in the culture,' and the culture -- relatively innocent, and boring -- could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Grown ups now know that you can't send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed.” - Peggy Noonan

37. “So this needs to be said, and so I will try to say it” - Jason Najum

38. “Do I have any recommendations for a Sadiri boys' night out?" I shrugged, smiled, and allowed myself a laugh. "I can come up with something."I did, too. The Ministry of Culture has all kinds of programmes, and I got someone to put together a package that even the Sadiri might enjoy. But people, this is Cygnus Beta. Yes, we have a few large cities and several towns -- we're not all country bumpkins, vagabonds and adventurers -- but there are few professional artists and actors, few galactic-standard museums and theatres. We simply can't afford them.” - Karen Lord

39. “Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.” - Jeff Bezos

40. “No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.” It is more rewarding - and more difficult - to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about “us.” But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter).” - Edward W. Said