16 quotes found
“The measure of a society is not only what it does but the quality of its aspirations.”
“You know, once something freezes, it's solid. That's the key to the arctic - they didn't fear the cold, they made use of it.”
“All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history.”
“Let him who thinks war is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking honour and praise and valour and love of country Let him but look at a little pi...”
“Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constan...”
“In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless a...”
“It was more than love at first sight. For Mallory it was as if a dam had burst and the impounded emotions of a young lifetime had found immediate release.”
“They brought their whole intellectual energy to bear on their relationships; they wanted to know not only that they loved people but how and why they loved them, to understand the mechanism of thei...”
“She had a hundred precocious ideas, and some were good and true, but they could never be hers until she found them alone, for ideas are but words unless they are sown in experience.”
“What is even more astonishing is that the entire science of wayfinding is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you are by knowing precisely where you have been and how you got to where you ...”
“If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is...”
“The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being YOU: they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.”
“Culture is not trivial. It is not a decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that al...”
“The full measure of a culture embraces both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel their lives. And no description of a people can be ...”
“There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people,' Winston Churchill wrote home from the front. 'Severity always,' went the British motto, 'justice when possible.”
“Social mores, he argued, rules of protocol, concepts of rectitude and honor had no objective basis. They were only reflections of public and private fears.”
