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User:Steeev~enwikiquote

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title: User:Steeev~enwikiquote


text:
B. F. Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner (20 March 1904 – 18 August 1990) was an American behaviorist, author, inventor, baseball enthusiast, social philosopher and poet.

Quotes

 * Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
 * Walden Two (1948), p. 95

 * Man's power appears to have increased out of all proportion to his wisdom. He has never been in a better position to build a healthy, happy, and productive world; yet things have perhaps never seemed so black.
 * Science and Human Behavior (1953)

 * The strengthening of behavior which results from reinforcement is appropriately called "conditioning". In operant conditioning we "strengthen" an operant in the sense of making a response more probable or, in actual fact, more frequent.
 * Science and Human Behavior (1953)

 * Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
 * Freedom and the control of men (1955/1956) American Scholar, 25 (1), 47-65

 * Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
 * "New methods and new aims in teaching", in New Scientist, 22(392) (21 May 1964), pp.483-4

 * We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.
 * As quoted in B. F. Skinner : The Man and His Ideas (1968) by Richard Isadore Evans, p. 73

 * The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.
 * Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis (1969)

 * Ethical control may survive in small groups, but the control of the population as a whole must be delegated to specialists—to police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and so on, with their specialized reinforcers and their codified contingencies.
 * Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), p. 155

 * We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word "admire" then means "marvel at."
 * Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971)

 * A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
 * Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971)

 * It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.
 * "I have been misunderstood" An interview with B.F.Skinner, Center Magazine (March/April 1972), pp. 63

 * Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived", but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious. It is a difficult assignment. The conditions the teacher arranges must be powerful enough to compete with those under which the student tends to behave in distracting ways.
 * "Free and Happy Student" in The Phi Delta Kappan (September 1973); later published in Reflections on Behaviorism and Society (1978)

 * I do not admire myself as a person. My successes do not override my shortcomings.
 * Journal of Humanistic Psychology (Spring 1991) Vol. 31 No. 2, p. 112

 * The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
 * As quoted in Meditations for Parents Who Do Too Much  (1993) by Jonathon Lazear and Wendy Lazear, p. 5

 * It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life.
 * As quoted in Performance-based Assessment for Middle and High School Physical Education (2002) by Jacalyn Lea Lund and Mary Fortman Kirk, p. 165

 * I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is.
 * As quoted in "Unpacking the Skinner Box : Revisiting B. F. Skinner through a Postformal Lens" by Dana Salter in The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology Vol. 4 (2008) edited by Joe L. Kincheloe and Raymond A. Horn, Ch. 99, p. 872

Quotes about Skinner

 * Sorted alphabetically by author or source

 * Today behaviourists like Skinner imprison the very concept of man within the limits of what they conclude from their artificial tests with animals.
 * John Berger, About Looking (1980), "Why Look at Animals?", p. 14

Slater's sensationalist book rehashes some of the old stuff, but offers some rumours that are entirely new to me. ... '''My early childhood, it's true, was certainly unusual — but I was far from unloved. I was a much cuddled baby.''' Call it what you will, the "aircrib" ,"baby box", "heir conditioner" (not my father's term) was a wonderful alternative to the cage-like cot. My father's intentions were simple, and based on removing what he and my mother saw as the worst aspects of a baby's typical sleeping arrangements: clothes, sheets and blankets. These not only have to be washed, but they restrict arm and leg movement and are a highly imperfect method of keeping a baby comfortable.
 * I have heard the lies before, but seeing them in black and white in a respected Sunday newspaper felt as if somebody had punched me hard in the stomach. Admittedly, the facts of my unusual upbringing sound dodgy: esteemed psychologist BF Skinner, who puts rats and pigeons in experimental boxes to study their behaviour, also puts his baby daughter in a box. This is good fodder for any newspaper. ... The early rumours were simple, unembellished: I had gone crazy, sued my father, committed suicide. My father would come home from lecture tours to report that three people had asked him how his poor daughter was getting on. I remember family friends returning from Europe to relate that somebody they had met there had told them I had died the year before. The tale, I later learned, did the rounds of psychology classes across America. One shy schoolmate told me years later that she had shocked her college psychology professor, who was retelling the rumour about me, by banging her fist on her desk, standing up and shouting, "She's not crazy!"
 * Deborah Skinner Buzan, Skinner's daughter, in "I was not a lab rat" in The Guardian (12 March 2004)

His careless descriptions of the aircrib might have contributed to the public's common misconception as well. He was too much the scientist and too little the self-publicist — especially hazardous when you are already a controversial figure.
 * I loved my father dearly. He was fantastically devoted and affectionate. But perhaps the stories about me would never have started if he had done a better job with his public image. He believed that, although our genes determine who we are, it is mostly our environment that shapes our personality. A Time magazine cover story ran the headline "BF Skinner says we can't afford freedom". All he had said was that controls are an everyday reality — traffic lights and a police force, for instance — and that we need to organise our social structures in ways that create more positive controls and fewer aversive ones. As is clear from his utopian novel, Walden Two, the furthest thing from his mind was a totalitarian or fascist state.
 * Deborah Skinner Buzan, in "I was not a lab rat" in The Guardian (12 March 2004)

 * Suppose that an engineer is presented with a device whose functioning he does not understand, and suppose that through experiment he can obtain information about input-output relations of this device. He would not hesitate, if rational, to construct a theory of the internal states of the device and to test it against further evidence. ... By objecting, a priori, to this research strategy, Skinner merely condemns his strange variety of “behavioral science” to continued ineptitude.
 * Noam Chomsky, "The Case Against B. F. Skinner", The New York Review of Books, December 30, 1971

 * I was lucky in the ‘60s to also be taking a class in Classical Ethology by a professor named Tom Evans, where I learned that operant conditioning does not explain all animal behavior. He explained how fixed action patterns and hardwired instinctual behavior works. And I remember going on a visit to Dr. Skinner and I felt like I was visiting, you know, the grand temple of psychology. And I went up to his office and, you know, he seemed, I'm like, "oh, you mean he's actually an ordinary person?" And we got to talking and of course back then I wore a dress you know ‘cause, you know, ladies had to be, like, dressed up, and I had a very conservative dress on, and B.F. Skinner touched my legs. And I said "You may look at them, but you may not touch them" and that ended that. And that is as he was showing me around the rat lab, I said "Dr. Skinner if we can just learn about the brain then we really would know some things". And Dr. Skinner says to me "We don't need to know anything about the brain, we have operant conditioning". And I just never really could accept that. You know, especially after taking Tom Evans' class at the same time.
 * Temple Grandin Interview with NPR (2006)

 * For practical or theoretical reasons, dictators, Organization Men and certain scientists are anxious to reduce the maddening diversity of men's natures to some kind of manageable uniformity. In the first flush of his Behaviouristic fervour, J. B. Watson roundly declared that he could find "no support for hereditary patterns of behaviour, nor for special abilities (music, art, etc.) which are supposed to run in families." And even today we find a distinguished psychologist, Professor B.F. Skinner of Harvard, insisting that, "as scientific explanation becomes more and more comprehensive, the contribution which may be claimed by the individual himself appears to approach zero. Man's vaunted creative powers, his achievements in art, science and morals, his capacity to choose and our right to hold him responsible for the consequences of his choice — none of these is conspicuous in the new scientific self-portrait.
 * Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World Revisited" (1958)

 * When you start thinking about art and creativity, rationality is not big enough to contain it all. Otherwise you end up at a B.F. Skinner hypothesis where it is all purely to do with stimulus and response. B. F. Skinner actually put forward — and this is a measure of scientific desperation over consciousness — the idea that consciousness was a weird vibrational by-product of the vocal cords. That we did not actually think. We thought we thought because of this weird vibration caused by the vocal cords. This shows the lengths that hard science will go to to banish the ghost from the machine.
 * Alan Moore, in "Alan Moore Interview" by Matthew De Abaitua (1998), later published in Alan Moore: Conversations (2011) edited by Eric L. Berlatsky

 * There are occasions when a worthless, insignificant book acquires significance as a scrap of litmus paper exposing a culture's intellectual state. Such a book is Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner.... The book itself is like Boris Karloff's embodiment of Frankenstein's monster: a corpse patched with nuts, bolts and screws from the junkyard of philosophy (Pragmatism, Social Darwinism, Positivism, Linguistic Analysis, with some nails by Hume, threads by Russell, and glue by the New York Post). The book's voice, like Karloff's, is an emission of inarticulate, moaning growls — directed at a special enemy: "Autonomous Man."
 * Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. 1, No. 8 (17 January 1972)

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title: B. F. Skinner


text:
Disco

Quotes regarding disco music.

Quotes

 * Disco is the best floor show in town. It's very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else, all in one big mix.
 * Truman Capote,

 * Disco is a major influence in the world of fashion. It is a dynamic factor in contemporary advertising.  It is a message from every consumer that there has been a rediscovery of America's greatest by-product: fun.
 * Neil Bogart at the 1977 Disco Forum

 * Break-beat music and hip-hop culture were happening at the same time as the emergence of disco (in 1974 known as party music). Disco was also created by DJs in its initial phase, though these tended to be club jocks rather than mobile party jocks -- records by Barry White, Eddie Kendricks and others became dancefloor hits in New York clubs like Tamberlane and Sanctuary and were crossed over onto radio by Frankie Crocker at station WBLS.  There were many parallels in the techniques used by Kool DJ Herc and a pioneering disco DJ like Francis Grasso, who worked at Sanctuary, as they used similar mixtures and superimpositions of drumbeats, rock music, funk and African records.  For less creative disco DJs, however, the ideal was to slip-cute smoothly from the end of one record into the beginning of the next.  They also created a context for breaks rather than foregrounding them, and the disco records which emerged out of the influence of this type of mixing tended to feature long introductions, anthemic choruses and extended vamp sections, all creating a tension which was released by the break.  Break-beat music simply ate the cherry off the top of the cake and threw the rest away.  In the words of DJ Grandmaster Flash:"
 * 'Disco was brand new then and there were a few jocks that had monstrous sound systems but they wouldn't dare play this kind of music. They would never play a record where only two minutes of the song was all it was worth.  They wouldn't buy those types of records.  The type of mixing that was out then was blending from one record to the next or waiting for the record to go off and wait for the jock to put the needle back on.'
 * DJ Grandmaster Flash quote (1984, 1991) by David Toop. Rap Attack 2, 62. New York: Serpent's Tail.  ISBN 1852422432.
 * See: Break (music).

 * I hadn't heard of either disco or Meco. When I was asked to listen to Meco's now-famous recording, I was a little apprehensive, wondering how a pop record could be made from "The March from Star Wars" and what it would be like.  I immediately liked what I heard and sensed that a geniune communication was taking place.  Meco took things forward another step by bringing Star Wars to a vast audience who otherwise would not have heard it in its original symphonic setting.  I am most grateful to Meco for all of this and I am delighted that 'disco' and 'Meco' are now household words.
 * John Williams, quoted in Jones, Alan and Kantonen, Jussi (1999). Saturday Night Forever: The Story of Disco, p. 74. Chicago, Illinois: A Cappella Books.  ISBN 1556524110.

 * Disco is here to stay.
 * Casey Kasem, from a 1979 episode of American Top 40; the genre fell out of popularity soon afterward.

 * Disco is from hell, okay? And not the cool part of hell with all the murderers, but the lame ass part where the really bad accountants live.
 * Hyde, from an episode of That 70's Show

title: Disco


text:
Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher.

Quotes

 * A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.
 * from L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze: G comme Gauche (“Gilles Deleuze's Alphabet Book: Left-wing Politics”), 1988–1989.

 * There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.
 * from Postscript on the Societies of Control

 * In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side — there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return.
 * from Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 104.

 * Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of a war-machine in general, why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistence which undermines the plane of organization of the World and the States?
 * from Dialogues with Claire Parnet, p. 147 [emphasis in original].

 * A book is a small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into relationships of current and counter-current, of back-wash with other flows — the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money, politics, etc.  Like Bloom, writing on the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other — two flows in what relationship?
 * from I have Nothing to Admit

 * It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.
 * from Anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, p. 1

 * Nous sommes fatigués de l'arbre. Nous ne devons plus croire aux arbres, aux racines ni aux radicelles. Nous en avons trop souffert. Toute la culture arborescente est fondée sur eux, de la biologie à la linguistique. Au contraire, rien n'est beau, rien n'est amoureux, rien n'est politique, sauf les tiges souterraines et les racines aériennes, l'adventice et le rhizome.
 * We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial root, adventitious growths and rhizomes.
 * from A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, p. 15

Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962)

 * Translated by Hugh Tomlinson

 * One of the principal motifs of Nietzsche’s work is that Kant had not carried out a true critique because he was not able to pose the problem of critique in terms of values.
 * p. 1

 * Evaluations, in essence, are… ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate.
 * p. 1

 * This is Nietzsche’s twofold struggle: against those who remove values from criticism, contenting themselves with producing inventories of existing values or with criticizing things in the name of established values (the “philosophical labourers”, Kant and Schopenhauer, BGE 211); but also against those who criticise or respect values by deriving them from simple facts, from so-called “objective facts” (the utilitarians, the “scholars”, BGE Part 6). In both cases philosophy moves in the indifferent element of the valuable in itself or the valuable for all. Nietzsche attacks both the “high” idea of foundation which leaves values indifferent to their origin and the idea of simple causal derivation or smooth beginning which suggests an indifferent origin for values. Nietzsche substitutes the pathos of difference or distance (the differential element) for both the Kantian principle of universality and the principle of resemblance dear to the utilitarians. “It was from the height of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for them; what did utility matter?” (GM I 2 p. 26)
 * p. 2

 * Nietzsche’s break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple.
 * p. 7

 * When Nietzsche praises egoism it is always in an aggressive or polemical way, against the virtues, against the virtue of disinterestedness (Z III “Of the three evil things”). But in fact egoism is a bad interpretation of the will, just as atomism is a bad interpretation of force. In order for there to be egoism it is necessary for there to be an ego.
 * p. 7

Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1977)

 * It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in firs and starts . It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines- real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it.
 * The Desiring Machine
 * Schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring machines, universal primary production as "the essential reality of man and nature"
 * The Desiring Machine
 * Second, we make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man.
 * The Desiring Machine

About Deleuze

 * Deleuze is a key figure in postmodern French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, post-structuralism, difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity and subjectivity. Notably, within his metaphysics he favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence with everything a mode of one substance, and thus on the same level of existence.
 * Jon Roffe (2002-05) "Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995)" in  Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Last updated: July 12, 2005

title: Gilles Deleuze


text:
Paul Graham

Paul Graham (born 1964) is an English computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp, his former startup Viaweb (later renamed Yahoo! Store), cofounding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his essays, and Hacker News.

Quotes

 * Architects know that some kinds of design problems are more personal than others. One of the cleanest, most abstract design problems is designing bridges. There your job is largely a matter of spanning a given distance with the least material. The other end of the spectrum is designing chairs. Chair designers have to spend their time thinking about human butts.
 * "Five Questions about Language Design", May 2001

 * The best thing software can be is easy, but the way to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices.
 * "The Other Road Ahead", September 2001

 * Software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can't design software as well as implement it, don't start a startup.
 * "The Other Road Ahead", September 2001

 * At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.
 * "Taste for Makers", February 2002

 * If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one.
 * "Revenge of the Nerds" May 2002

 * As a rule of thumb, the more qualifiers there are before the name of a country, the more corrupt the rulers. A country called The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably the last place in the world you'd want to live.
 * "A Plan for Spam", August 2002

 * A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of.
 * "Hackers and Painters", May 2003

 * The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want.
 * "What you can't say", January 2004

 * When those far removed from the creation of wealth -- undergraduates, reporters, politicians -- hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.
 * "How to Make Wealth", May 2004

 * I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up.
 * "Great Hackers", July 2004

 * At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work, and if you aren't one of them, you won't just have fewer great hackers, you'll have zero.
 * "Great Hackers", July 2004

 * There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student.
 * "How to Start a Startup", March 2005

 * Google never did any advertising. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.
 * "How to Start a Startup", March 2005

 * Competitors punch you in the jaw, but investors have you by the balls.
 * "How to Fund a Startup", November 2005

 * Consulting is where product companies go to die.
 * "How to Fund a Startup", November 2005

 * European public opinion will apparently tolerate people being fired in industries where they really care about performance. Unfortunately the only industry they care enough about so far is soccer.
 * "Why Startups Condense in America", May 2006

"Why Nerds are Unpopular," February 2003
Paul Graham, "Why Nerds are Unpopular", at paulgraham.com, February 2003

 * The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.

 * When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

 * Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

 * Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.

 * While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.

 * If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies.

 * The other thing that's different about the real world [compared to high school] is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together.

 * Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world.

"What You'll Wish You'd Known", January 2005
Paul Graham, "What You'll Wish You'd Known", at paulgraham.com, January 2005

 * Your teachers are always telling you [high school students] to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults.... Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time.

 * There's no switch inside you [high school students] that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.

 * It's not so important what you [high school students] work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.

 * The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.

 * If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You [high school students] don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.

"Good And Bad Procrastination", December 2005
"Good And Bad Procrastination", December 2005

 * No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well. There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination.

 * The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination [putting off important things to do unimportant things], because it doesn't feel like procrastination. You're "getting things done." Just the wrong things.

 * If you work on something you can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. If the reward is indefinitely far in the future, it seems less real.

 * Another reason people don't work on big projects is, ironically, fear of wasting time. What if they fail? Then all the time they spent on it will be wasted. (In fact it probably won't be, because work on hard projects almost always leads somewhere.)

 * I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.

"Two Kinds Of Judgment", April 2007
Paul Graham, "Two Kinds Of Judgment", at paulgraham.com, April 2007

 * The first type of judgement is the type where judging you is the end goal... But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else.

 * The more you realize that most judgements are greatly influenced by random, extraneous factors—that most people judging you are more like a fickle novel buyer than a wise and perceptive magistrate—the more you realize you can do things to influence the outcome.

 * One thing that leads us astray here is that the selector seems to be in a position of power. That makes him seem like a judge. If you regard someone judging you as a customer instead of a judge, the expectation of fairness goes away. The author of a good novel wouldn't complain that readers were unfair for preferring a potboiler with a racy cover. Stupid, perhaps, but not unfair.

"How To Lose Time And Money", July 2010
Paul Graham, "The Acceleration of Addictiveness", at paulgraham.com, July 2010

 * Someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.

 * If you'd asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by spending all their money. That's how it happens in books and movies, because that's the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments.

 * The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you're being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I'd feel like something was terribly wrong. ... But the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work.

"Mean People Fail", November 2014
Paul Graham, "Mean People Fail", at paulgraham.com, November 2014

 * Being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems.

 * Jessica and I have always worked hard to teach our kids not to be mean. We tolerate noise and mess and junk food, but not meanness.

 * Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending. There are exceptions of course, but usually the way to win is to race ahead, not to stop and fight.

title: Paul Graham


text:
Vladimir Barsky

Vladimir Barsky (1889 – January 24, 1936) was a Russian actor and director.

Quotes

 * In 16th-century Italy there lived Lodovico Gonzaga, a 16-year old seminarist who was very fond of playing ball. Once a certain priest passing by wondered if for a future priest the youth was too keen on his pursuit and asked him: "What would you do if you learned that in half an hour the end of the world was coming?" To which Lodovico replied: "I'd play on." According to the Russian thinker Georgy Fedotov, the importance of culture lies in precisely that: we go on playing ball on the verge of Doomsday...
 * Chromaticism, trans. Romela Kohanovskaya (1996, ISBN 371865704X, Introduction, p. ix

title: Vladimir Barsky


text:
Hermann Laroche

Hermann Laroche (May 25 1845 – October 18 1904) was a Russian banker, critic of classical music and composer who was renowned throughout Moscow

Quotes

 * No style can have absolute significance in art theory; each one is rooted in its own time and locality and bound by conditions above which it is incapable of elevating itself no matter how great the content it carries.
 * Quoted in Vladimir Barsky, Chromaticism (1996, ISBN 371865704X )

title: Hermann Laroche


text:
Culture

Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate") is a term commonly used to indicate the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group, an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning, or an excellence of aesthetic taste in the arts and humanities, (also known as high culture).

A

 * Remember, Art is the one vital medium of the coming culture.
 * Agni Yoga, Leaves of Morya’s Garden I, The Call, 333, (1924)

 * Certainly life is beautiful. But heretofore it was judged by animal instinct, and that is why the beauty of life could not be pointed out. Egypt was of lofty culture, but it cannot be said that the present culture is lower. Culture used to be centered in the north of India, but only a limited class of people possessed knowledge. Castes—foolish mustiness—have hindered culture. Indeed, the Lord Buddha wished to abolish this caste foolishness. The Teaching of the Lord was imbued with joy.
 * Agni Yoga, Leaves of Morya’s Garden II, Illumination, p. 262, (1925)

 * Without culture there can be no international agreement or mutual understanding. Without culture the people's understanding cannot embrace all needs of evolution. Therefore the Banner of Peace comprises all subtle concepts that will lead nations to the understanding of culture. Humanity does not understand how to manifest reverence for that which comprises immortality of spirit. The Banner of Peace will bring the understanding of this lofty significance. Humanity cannot flourish without the knowledge of the greatness of culture. The Banner of Peace will open the gates to a better future. When countries are on the way to destruction, then even those who are spiritually depleted must understand in what the ascent consists. Verily, salvation lies in culture. Thus, the Banner of Peace brings a better future.
 * Agni Yoga, Hierarchy, 331, (1931)

 * The New Era can be built only by means of culture... Culture will be proclaimed as the one defense against disintegration. Nowadays one should strive only in this direction. Our Command is to miss no opportunity of reminding people about culture. Though We be regarded as fanatics on the subject, people will nevertheless harken and become accustomed to it. Thus We introduce brain patterns.
 * Agni Yoga, Fiery World I, 190, (1933)

 * Culture is the common heritage of all humanity. Despite differences in customs, creeds, and languages, every act of culture is the possession of all mankind. The unification of the world through culture is the first step toward the transformation of all life. The objection may be raised that each nation has its own culture. You can answer that culture should not be confused with customs. The objectors will also insist that there are great differences in the written languages of the various countries. But in speaking of culture We have in mind not the alphabets or the style of expression but the intended meaning and ideas. Compare the finest creations of the various nations and you will see that the basic ideas are common to all. Thus, We can affirm that even in diversity there is a unifying international aspiration. It is a joyous fact that the essence of human nature strives toward perfection. Man ignores this ever-present impulse, and will even rebel against this prompting of his higher nature, yet deep within the recesses of his Chalice the seed of culture radiates! Sooner or later this seed will sprout; this is why everyone carries within himself a sense of his humanity.
 * Agni Yoga, ''Supermundane", 373, (1938)

 * It might be said that the basic purpose of any culture is to maintain the ideal status quo. What creates differences among cultures and literatures is the way in which the people go about this task, and this in turn depends on, and simultaneously maintains, basic assumptions about the nature of life and humanity’s place in it. The ideal status quo is generally expressed in terms of peace, prosperity, good health, and stability.
 * Paula Gunn Allen, Chapter Two

 * The cultural bias of the translator inevitably shapes his or her perception of the materials being translated, often in ways that he or she is unaware of. Culture is fundamentally a shaper of perception, after all, and perception is shaped by culture in many subtle ways. In short, it’s hard to see the forest when you’re a tree.
 * Paula Gunn Allen, Chapter Three

 * The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.
 * Matthew Arnold, Preface to Culture and Anarchy (1869)

 * Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
 * Matthew Arnold, “Sweetness and Light,” Culture and Anarchy (1869), p. 7

B

 * The very ideology of "cultural production" is antithetical to all culture, as is that of visibility and of the polyvalent space: culture is a site of the secret, of seduction, of initiation, of a restrained and highly ritualized symbolic exchange.
 * Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), p. 64

 * In 16th-century Italy there lived Lodovico Gonzaga, a 16-year old seminarist who was very fond of playing ball. Once a certain priest passing by wondered if for a future priest the youth was too keen on his pursuit and asked him: "What would you do if you learned that in half an hour the end of the world was coming?" To which Lodovico replied: "I'd play on." According to the Russian thinker Georgy Fedotov, the importance of culture lies in precisely that: we go on playing ball on the verge of Doomsday.
 * Vladimir Barsky, Chromaticism (1996)

 * Politics is downstream of culture.
 * Andrew Breitbart, as quoted in Courrielche: Conservatives' Next Frontier, Daily Wire

C

 * The improvement of the soul consists in raising it above what is narrow, particular, individual, selfish, to the universal and unconfined. To improve a man is to liberalize, enlarge him in thought, feeling, and purpose. Narrowness of intellect and heart, this is the degradation from which all culture aims to rescue the human being.
 * William Ellery Channing, “Self-Culture” (1838)

D

 * Culture suggests agriculture, but civilization suggests the city. In one aspect civilization is the habit of civility; and civility is the refinement which townsmen, who made the word, thought possible only in the civitas or city.
 * Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Chap. 1, p. 2
 * Culture is at once the expression and the reward of an effort, and any system of civilization which tends to relax effort will suffer a corresponding depreciation of culture.
 * Georges Duhamel, In Defense of Letters (1937), p. 22

F

 * Culture is all the things and ideas ever devised by humans working and living together.
 * Peter Farb, Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

 * The astonishing cluster of them [geniuses] that appeared in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. ...what changed was the culture, which allowed exceptional minds to flourish.
 * Peter Farb, Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

 * To say that the invention "was in the air" or "the times were ripe for it" are just other ways of stating that the inventors did not do the inventing, but that the cultures did.
 * Peter Farb, Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

 * In science, just as in art and in life, only that which is true to culture is true to nature.
 * Ludwik Fleck (1935/1979), Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. p. 35

 * Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.
 * Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927)

G

 * Whoever controls the media — the images — controls the culture.
 * Allen Ginsberg, as quoted in Brain Power : Learn to Improve Your Thinking Skills (1980) by Karl Albrecht, p. 6

 * The way you sustain and improve upon a culture is by fostering a sense of gratitude for what is best about it. You celebrate the good in your story while putting the bad in the correct context.
 * Jonah Goldberg, "What’s So Great about Western Civilization" (19 April 2019), National Review.

 * Remember, we live in a culture of immediacy. We live in a culture in which simplistic answers override more complicated answers. We live in a culture in which language is reduced to its bare bones. We live in a culture in which language is now in the service of violence.
 * Henry Giroux, as quoted in Henry Giroux on His Latest Book — The Terror of the Unforeseen — and How Neoliberal Capitalism Sets the Stage for Fascism (August 19, 2019), Media For Us.

H

 * Culture is neither natural nor artificial, neither genetically transmitted nor rationally designed. It is a tradition of learnt rules of conduct which have never been ‘invented’ and whose functions the acting individuals usually do not understand. There is surely as much justification to speak of the wisdom of culture as of the wisdom of nature—except, perhaps, that, because of the powers of government, errors of the former are less easily corrected.
 * Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 3 : The Political Order of a Free People (1979), Epilogue: The Three Sources of Human Values

 * When two cultures collide is the only time when true suffering exists
 * Hermann Hesse, as quoted in Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1977) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 456

 * Culture is constituted by human labor, the aesthetic, and the spirit. In this regard, culture is an integrated way of life which shuns false dichotomies between sacred and so-called secular. Human labor denotes a mutuality between base and superstructure. The aesthetic argues for a norm grounded in internal beauty and ethical functionality. And the spirit is the vivifying thread woven throughout all of culture.
 * Dwight Hopkins "A Black Theology of Liberation," Black Theology, v. 3, n. 1, January 2005

J

 * Our aim is to stop the life cycle of the enemy culture and replace it with our own revolutionary culture. This can be done only by creating perfect disorder within the cycle of the enemy culture's life process and leaving a power vacuum to be filled by our building revolutionary culture.
 * George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye (1971)

 * The disdain for culture expressed by Johst and Fanon is not identical, however. Both despise the deceit of culture, but for opposite reasons. For Johst, culture is in itself a fraud, the cheap talk of weaklings; for Fanon, culture deceives by reneging on its promises. Johst and the Nazis hated culture itself; Fanon hated its hypocrisy, a very different notion.
 * Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia (1999), p. 35

 * Wenn ich Kultur höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning!
 * Whenever I hear of culture ... I release the safety catch of my Browning!
 * Hanns Johst, Schlageter. Often misquoted as "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver", and misattributed to other National Socialist leaders.

K

 * Genes are the ultimate source of culture.
 * James Patrick Kelly, Glass Cloud (1987), reprinted in Gardner Dozois (ed.), The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection, p. 266

 * These expressions — "culture" and "civilization" — have to be used in their Continental sense to make the point clear. "Culture" is the sum of all products which represent a personal manifestation, like painting, poetry, religion, philosophy, and the humanities. "Civilization" is nonpersonal. It is the sum total of all efforts which contribute to the increase of comfort or "usefulness" in the practical sense. Bathtubs, dentists' tools, railways, and traffic regulations are products of civilization. […] Yet while civilization is basically lack of friction, smoothness, comfort, and material enjoyment we have to look at traditional Christianity as being something "uncomfortable." […] It is difficult to project into the frame of a comfortistic civilization the picture of Christ, hanging on the cross with a body convulsed by pain, the palms torn to shreds by the heavy nails, the hairs glued to the scalp by sweat and coagulated blood. It ought to be repeated again that culture is always "magnificent." […] Civilization is geocentric comfort. But culture, which must be bought by bitter suffering (there is neither art nor sanctity without suffering), points always toward heaven. And the ochlocratic millennium hell bent upon avoiding suffering will turn its back toward heaven.
 * Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of the Herd (1943), pp. 36–37

 * One aspect of a “throwaway” culture is the desire to look the other way when it comes to evils like euthanasia, best exemplified by the changing terminology.
 * Caroline Kurt, "No, Helping Your Family Commit Suicide Is Not Compassionate", The Federalist (November 7, 2023)

 * We are our culture and tradition; If there is no culture or tradition we are no one
 * Tamerlan Kuzgov, as quoted in  (August/September 2015), by Joey Saputo, Panoram Italia Magazine, p. 14

M

 * Each form of the sacrosanct was regarded by members of the culture which gave rise to it as a revelation of the Truth.
 * André Malraux, in Voices of Silence [Les voix du silence] (1951), Pt. IV, Ch. V

 * Our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact.
 * André Malraux, in Voices of Silence [Les voix du silence] (1951), Pt. IV, Ch. VII

 * Culture would seem ... first and foremost, to be the knowledge of what makes man something other than an accident of the universe, be it by deepening his harmony with the world, or by the lucid consciousness of his revolt from it. ... Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love and of thought, which, in the course of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved.
 * André Malraux, quoted in Malraux : An Essay in Political Criticism (1967) by David O. Wilkinson, p. 153

 * Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
 * H. L. Mencken, Minority Report (1956), p. 360

 * The prestige of culture is among the major means by which powers of decision are made to seem part of an unchallengeable authority. That is why the cultural apparatus, no matter how internally free, tends in every nation to become a close adjunct of national authority and a leading agency of nationalist propaganda.
 * C. Wright Mills, "The Cultural Apparatus," in The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills (2008)

N

 * That is the secret of all culture: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles—that which can provide these things is, rather, only sham education. Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack the tender buds of the plant.
 * Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, as translated by R. J. Hollingdale

P

 * Two cultures rarely comprehend each other, especially when one is waxing and the other waning. The weaker needs to copy the stronger.
 * Kate Pullinger, "A Kind of Desired Invasion" (short story) in My Life as a Girl in a Men's Prison (London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 73

R

 * Our world is organized in large measure around groups with pervasive cultures.... membership of such groups... greatly affects one's opportunities.... If the culture is decaying, or if it is persecuted or discriminated against, the options and opportunities open to its members will shrink.
 * Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics (1994), Clarendon Press.

 * Culture binds men and women in a deeper way than political and even geographical borders—unless borders are the material expression of the culture of a nation that may have also organized itself in a state, which in this case is the visible manifestation of a national culture.
 * Marco Respinti, "Documenting the Horror. 3. Cultural Genocides", Bitter Winter (March 28, 2024)

 * A culture is a total way of life. It embraces what people ate and what they wore; the way they walked and the way they talked; the manner in which they treated death and greeted the newborn.
 * Walter Rodney,

 * In the hands of woman lies the salvation of humanity and of our planet... The mother suggests the first conscious thoughts to her child. She gives direction and quality to all his aspirations and abilities. But the mother who possesses no thought of culture can suggest only the lower expressions of human nature. But in her striving toward education, woman must remember that all educational systems are only the means for the development of a higher knowledge and culture. The true culture of thought is developed by the culture of spirit and heart. Only such a combination gives that great synthesis without which it is impossible to realize the real grandeur, diversity, and complexity of human life in its cosmic evolution. Therefore, while striving to knowledge, may woman remember the Source of Light and the Leaders of Spirit—those great Minds who, verily, created the consciousness of humanity. In approaching this Source, this leading Principle of Synthesis, humanity will find the way to real evolution.
 * Helena Roerich Letters I,  (1 March 1929)

 * Let your names be written down among the names of the great co-workers of evolution. What can be higher and more beautiful than cooperation for the General Good of the culture of nations!
 * Helena Roerich Letters I,  (24 February 1930)

 * Woman—mother and wife—witness of the development of man's genius, can appreciate the great significance of the culture of thought and knowledge.
 * Helena Roerich Letters I,  (7 October 1930)

 * What do we see in reality? Criminal stagnation of mind! Countries maintaining dead laws decay because they oppose the laws of evolution. Look around "with the eyes of a hawk." Study the present situation and approaching events on our planet! Verily, one may say that coming events already cast their shadow upon the Earth. It is impossible to arrest the awakened force of the new consciousness or understanding among the masses. All delays will only cause greater destruction. But we are not destroyers. We are creators. Therefore, let us ardently build the bastions of culture, knowledge of the Living Ethics, and Beauty. Knowledge and Beauty are the foundation and crown of cosmic evolution.
 * Helena Roerich Letters I,  (13 October 1930)

 * Thus, we are facing a majestic and threatening time, and only by the extreme tension of our entire strength can we conquer. Think in the broadest way, discuss together how you can best understand and apply what is sent to you! Learn how to oppose with dignity all the ignoramuses and destroyers of culture. Today, it is necessary to manifest the broadest understanding of the Banner of Peace. It is essential to understand the Banner of Peace and Culture as the greatest symbol. Yes, I can see that in the very near future the League of Culture will be established, in which will gather all the best representatives of thought, knowledge and creativeness, and where woman will have her full say; and this League of Culture will replace the extinct League of Nations... The new events are coming, and they will force the adversaries of culture to beware. . . but will it not be too late? It is necessary to know how to answer all ignoramuses and all those who try to suppress culture.
 * Helena Roerich Letters I,  (29 May 1931)

S

 * If the West is heading toward some kind of crisis, it's worth asking ourselves a few basic questions. Modern society as we normally define it—a secular culture built around tolerance, reason, and democratic values—occupies a rather small portion of the world, and there are signs that it is shrinking. Is modernity the inexorable force of progress that we tend to assume? Is it a mere moment of human history that is fast fading? If it is something to value, how can we rediscover it, separate the good and the bad in it, make it relevant and vital?
 * Russell Shorto, Descartes’ Bones (2008), ISBN 978-0-307-27566-0, Preface (p. xix)

 * Culture is the attempt by man to realize the conceivable in the possible. Man’s consciousness of himself within his environment distinguishes him from the lower animals, and turns him into the only animal capable of culture. This consciousness, his highest faculty, allows him to project mentally states of being that do not exist at the moment. Able to construct a past and future, he becomes a creature of time – a historian and a prophet. More than this, he can imagine objects and states of being that have never existed and may never exist in the real world – he becomes a maker of art. Thus, for example, though the ancient Greeks did not know how to fly, still they could imagine it. The myth of Icarus was the formulation in fantasy of their conception of the state ‘flying’. But man was not only able to project the conceivable into fantasy. He also learned to impose it on reality: by accumulating knowledge, learning experience, about that reality and how to handle it, he could shape it to his liking. This accumulation of skills for controlling the environment, technology, is another means to reaching the same end, the realization of the conceivable in the possible.
 * Shulamith Firestone,

 * The multitude are matter-of-fact. They live in commonplace concerns and interests. Their problems are, how to get more plentiful and better food and drink, more comfortable and beautiful clothing, more commodious dwellings, for themselves and their children. When they seek relaxation from their labors for material things, they gossip of the daily happenings, or they play games or dance or go to the theatre or club, or they travel or they read story books, or accounts in the newspapers of elections, murders, peculations, marriages, divorces, failures and successes in business; or they simply sit in a kind of lethargy. They fall asleep and awake to tread again the beaten path. While such is their life, it is not possible that they should take interest or find pleasure in religion, poetry, philosophy, or art. To ask them to read books whose life-breath is pure thought and beauty is as though one asked them to read things written in a language they do not understand and have no desire to learn. A taste for the best books, as a taste for whatever is best, is acquired; and it can be acquired only by long study and practice. It is a result of free and disinterested self-activity, of efforts to attain what rarely brings other reward than the consciousness of having loved and striven for the best. But the many have little appreciation of what does not flatter or soothe the senses. Their world, like the world of children and animals, is good enough for them; meat and drink, dance and song, are worth more, in their eyes, than all the thoughts of all the literatures. A love tale is better than a great poem, and the story of a bandit makes Plutarch seem tiresome. This is what they think and feel, and what, so long as they remain what they are, they will continue to think and feel. We do not urge a child to read Plato—why should we find fault with the many for not loving the best books?
 * John Lancaster Spalding, Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), pp. 11-12

 * One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
 * Wallace Stevens, in a journal entry (20 June 1899); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 3

 * When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.
 * Roger Stone,

T

 * Cultural products which present foreign wars as the heroic effort of a master race to ennoble mankind are, to the degree they are successful as art, objectively in the interests of imperialists, who are people who make foreign wars against other races for profit.
 * Meredith Tax, "Culture is not Neutral, Whom Does it Serve?" in Radical Perspectives in the Arts (1972), p. 15

 * Cultural products that present people who have no money or power as innately stupid or depraved, and thus unworthy of money or power, are in the interests of the ruling class and the power structure as it stands.
 * Meredith Tax, "Culture is not Neutral, Whom Does it Serve?" in Radical Perspectives in the Arts (1972), p. 15

 * Cultural products which present women who do not want to be household slaves or universal mothers or sex objects as bitches or sexual failures objectively aid male supremacy.
 * Meredith Tax, "Culture is not Neutral, Whom Does it Serve?" in Radical Perspectives in the Arts (1972), p. 15

 * [Culture is] that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
 * Edward B. Tyler, Primitive Culture (1871) as quoted by Peter Farb, Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

V

 * I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it.
 * Kurt Vonnegut, in an interview in Playboy (July 1973)

W

 * No one can take culture seriously if he believes that it is only the uppermost of several layers of epiphenomena resting on a primary reality of economic activity.
 * Richard Weaver, “The Importance of Cultural Freedom,” Life Without Prejudice (Chicago: 1965), p. 25

Other

 * Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture's got to go
 * Students protesting Stanford University's "Western Culture" course on 15 January 1987
 * Sometimes misquoted as "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go"
 * Sometimes wrongly attributed to Jesse Jackson

title: Culture


text:
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