Culture Quotes - Page 6

in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good, otherwise they can't do it.

Literalness, however, is not the substance from which human culture is made.

It must never be forgotten that the general standard of learning and culture of a nation has a large part in determining its law and polity.

Liberals tend to view traditions, policies, and morals of past generations as arbitrary designs put in place by less enlightened people. Because of this, liberals don't pay much attention to why traditions developed or wonder about possible ramifications of their social engineering.

Zeitgeist – spirit of the age. No such thing. Imposition by hierarchy. People rebel – & are marginalised; or follow, chained.

[T]he choice of human groupings for cultural comparisons is not a natural or scientific choice, but a political one.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, it is our duty to furnish it well.

Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.

What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her "beauty" his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.

A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.

Health makes good propaganda.

The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.

The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty.

Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.

What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?

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.

When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman-known, marked, lined, familiar - -who hands him the paper every morning.

Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.