Cultures Quotes

“Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.”
― Joseph Fort Newton

“The ultimate pacifist with a gun! That’s my girl, always with surprises.”
― Patricia D'Arcy Laughlin, Sacrifices Beyond Kingdoms: A Provocative Romance Torn Between Continents and Cultures

“We will preserve the capacity for independent thought through a society so heterogeneous that it will make our own look trite. We will intentionally craft new ethnicities, religions, and ways of existing. The genome will be our canvas and flesh our clay. Man is a young species. We still occupy the same bodies with which our ancestors hunted and picked berries. We are so trapped by the limitations of our biology that we lack the capacity to conceive our ultimate potential.”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing

“Elizabeth felt as if every cell in her body was aflame with desire.”
― Patricia D'Arcy Laughlin, Sacrifices Beyond Kingdoms: A Provocative Romance Torn Between Continents and Cultures

“The first time the extent of this problem was obvious to me was when I was hanging out with a small group of people in which one unironically said, “I would not consider dating someone who was not regularly seeing a psychologist” —and others in the group agreed with them. It was at that point I realized that some psychologists were convincing their patients that no person could be mentally healthy without regularly visiting them. They had so thoroughly incepted a dependency in their patients that they had created a cultural identity around that dependency.”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing

“We are not sheep or cows. God didn’t create fences for us or boundaries to contain our nationalities. Man did. God didn’t draw up religious barriers to separate us from each other. Man did. And on top of that, no father would like to see his children fighting or killing each other. The Creator favors the man who spreads loves over the man who spreads hate. A religious title does not make anyone more superior over another. If a kind man stands by his conscience and exhibits truth in his words and actions, he will stand by God regardless of his faith. If mankind wants to evolve, we must learn from our past mistakes. If not, our technology will evolve without us.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“People experience anger when their expectations around how they should be treated don’t align with their actual treatment (or when they expect a thing to happen based on some series of actions and it does not happen).”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing

“Understanding languages and other cultures builds bridges. It is the fastest way to bring the world closer together and to Truth. Through understanding, people will be able to see their similarities before differences.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Through love, tribes have been intermixing colors to reveal a new rainbow world. And as more time passes, this racial and cultural blending will make it harder for humans to side with one race, nation or religion over another.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Build bridges, not walls.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative connotations of words likealienoroutlandish.And yet the monuments and cultures of each of our civilizations merely represent different ways of being human. An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. The Cosmos may be densely populated with intelligent beings. But the Darwinian lesson is clear: There will be no humans elsewhere. Only here. Only on this small planet. We are a rare as well as an endangered species. Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Entrer chez les gens pour déconcerter leurs idées, leur faire la surprise d'être surpris de ce qu'ils font, de ce qu'ils pensent, et qu'ils n'ont jamais conçu différent, c'est, au moyen de l'ingénuité feinte ou réelle, donner à ressentir toute la relativité d'une civilisation, d'une confiance habituelle dans l'ordre établi.”
― Paul Valéry

“Call-out cultures and us-versus-them thinking are incompatible with the educational and research missions of universities, which require free inquiry, dissent, evidence-based argument, and intellectual honesty.”
― Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

“All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. [Amy Wax & Larry Alexander]...
Anthropologists generally agree that cultures and subcultures instill different goals, skills, and virtues in their members”
― Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

“There is no wild culture; it is wild to have none.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“You need to go. You will go,” she proclaimed. “You’re already a pilgrim, Freddi.”
Every time I spoke to her, she repeated it for years, including the last time I’d spoken with her, just a few days before I walked off the doorstep of that albergue in Saint-Jean-Pied-De-Port.
“Pilgrim.”
She was the first to call me that, but not the last. Everyone became a pilgrim that first day. Our openness with one another created something. We surrounded ourselves with people of all generations and cultures and backgrounds; we were united in exhaustion from carrying our damaged, decaying spirits.”
― Steven Keith Hunter, Relish In the Tread

“History favors the intrepid.”
― Lee Lockwood, Castro's Cuba, Cuba's Fidel

“A culture can be thought of as ever-evolving software that sits on top of—and synergistically interacts with—both biological hardware and firmware, addressing flaws our biology hasn’t had sufficient evolutionary time to address. To go further with this analogy: Biological evolution provides some basic coding, much like a low-level programming language might for a given hardware, whereas cultural evolution manipulates the high-level, object-oriented code that lets us program highly nuanced behaviors.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models

“When a person gets severe radiation poisoning, some time passes before they feel the adverse effects. Their DNA has functionally been scrambled; their cells can’t divide; the person is dead—they just don’t know it yet. Many wildly popular cultural movements are currently in this state. It may be easier to coax a caged panda to reproduce than it would be to convince a cosmopolitan progressive to raise their own kid.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models

“Our goal with this book is to, for the first time, intentionally design an opt-in, diverse, multiphase ecosystem that can govern the interaction of multiple specialized cultures, which will serve society through their diversity of viewpoints, skill sets, and talents. Until now, competing cultures have been dumped into a geographic cage and forced to “figure it out for themselves” with only the barest of rules (like “don’t kill each other” ) governing their interactions.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models

“Almost all hard cultures have some ritual focused on voluntary self-denial, such as Ramadan, Lent, or the Fast of the Firstborn. The question is, why? Why do cultures that practice something that makes membership less pleasant historically outcompete cultures that encourage people to indulge in whatever they want? This question becomes more pointed when we look at how common it is for pop cultures to emotionally reward people for succumbing to their base desires, as is seen in pop culture outputs like the Intuitive Eating Movement, which entails telling people they are being healthy by eating whatever they want whenever they want in an age in which we’re surrounded with an abundance of foods that are designed to be highly addictive. Movements telling people to indulge in their immediate desires have been around since the ancient Greeks. These movements resurface during every civilization’s brief golden age and only seem to be successful in the short run. While the pop cultures that produce them consistently die, stodgy hard cultures persist. Why?”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models

“Society can be thought of as a collection of overlapping nodal networks (things like companies and cultivars), with each node representing a person and their connections to other people. Historically, pop cultures, simple memetic viruses, evolved to target single nodes. These cultures would flip target nodes (convert them) by offering individuals an easy life and positive emotional subsets. While these viruses lowered the birth rates among the individual nodes they flipped and could sometimes lead to wild outbreaks, those outbreaks were always contained within single or closely-related nodal networks, meaning they were never really an existential threat to our species....The supervirus evolved a new strategy. Instead of flipping individual nodes, it works to flip entire nodal networks. Instead of selling the promise of minimizing emotional suffering within a single node, it entices nodal systems with the prospect of minimizing negative emotion across the entire network.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models

“Once the supervirus controls a certain number of nodes within a culture, it begins to systematically erase that culture's core, including its inherent values and objectives, maintaining only cosmetic features (consider attributes like accents, dress, superficial holidays… nothing representing deep underlying beliefs).... The supervirus has already gutted a few of the more progressively minded cultivars to a point at which they are now functionally the same culture wearing different skins… and it won’t stop there, having wrapped its tendrils deep within many more traditional belief systems. In erasing the genuine differences in how these cultures historically saw the world—the “offensive” bits—the supervirus robs us of these cultivars’ rich cultural histories and unique approaches to problems. It achieves equality by shaving off beliefs, objectives, and traditions that may produce genuine conflict among its vassals. The last thing our society needs is a monoculture wearing a skin mask of its victims.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models

“Upon hearing about an Indian caste system comprised of five main castes, each of which is divided into about 3,000 sub-castes based on occupation, most foreigners contextualize the concept as being quite alien. People of Anglo-Saxon descent may come to this conclusion forgetting that many of their brethren still walk around with names like Smith and Tailor attached to them—names that hail from a similar caste system. That’s right: In the medieval period, families often maintained specialist trades passed down from one generation to the next. While the Anglo-Saxon caste system was never as strict as that which ultimately developed in India, it wasn’t profoundly less strict than its pre-British Indian counterpart.... What is fascinating about caste systems, and likely a core reason they evolved in so many cultures, is that they allow for the genetic concentration of skills within certain specialties. As offensive as this concept is, the genetic vortices created by castes are so strong that their effects can be seen centuries after they dissolved. A study conducted in the U.K. in 2015 found that people with the surname Smith (descended from the smith caste) had higher physical capabilities and an above-average aptitude for strength-related activities, while those with the surname Tailor (descended from the tailor caste) had a higher-than-average aptitude for dexterity-related tasks.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models

“People who see themselves as “good” are much more likely to do “evil” things. This is because believing you are the “good guy” allows you to define your actions as good because you are the one doing them. This is why many successful cultures frame humans as intrinsically wretched. It can seem harsh to raise a child to believe deeply in their own wretchedness, but doing so helps them remember to always second-guess themselves by remembering their lesser, selfishly motivated instincts. Instincts that run counter to your morality and values have every bit as much access to your intelligence as “the better angels” of your consciousness and will use your own knowledge and wit to justify their whims. You can’t outreason your worst impulses without stacking the deck in your favor. Coming from a culture that anticipates bad impulses and steels you against them can do that. That said, cultures will no doubt develop different, less harsh mechanisms for achieving the same outcome.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models

“Try foods from other cultures too. Food gets you closer into knowing other people.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“It seems international USA war bases just cause unrest in the world.”
― Steven Magee

“The essence of Hinduism and the brilliance of India are not contradictory, but complementary, like two faces of a coin that compose our beloved Bharat. Hinduism is the soul of India, and India is the body of Hinduism. They are inseparable, like the sun and its rays. Together, they form a glorious nation that celebrates its rich heritage and embraces its bright future. They are the threads that bind our diverse religions, cultures, and states into a beautiful tapestry.”
― Srinivas Mishra

“Because Japan looks modern on the surface, westerners feel like it ought to be" just like us ", and are surprised when it is not.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“Aesthetic sensibilities among creative individuals can transcend borders, language differences and varying cultural teachings.”
― Ellen Palestrant, A Fantasist & A Scientist In Conversation: Creativity, Imagination, and Scientific Verification