On Culture (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being." (Thomas Carlyle, "Jean Paul Friedrich Richter" (1827)

"This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer." (Lev N Tolstoy, "War and Peace", 1867)

"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, "Culture and Anarchy", 1869)

"Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming is the character of perfection as culture conceives it." (Matthew Arnold, "Culture and Anarchy", 1869)

"The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language." (Anton Chekhov, [letter to A.S. Suvorin] 1892)

"As the traveller who has been once from home is wiser than he who has never left his own door step, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinise more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own." (Margaret Mead, "Coming of Age in Samoa", 1928)

"The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within [...] They come from a peculiar type of brainy people, always found in our country, who if they add something to our culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals." (Winston Churchill, [speech] 1933)

"There are and have been worlds and cultures without end, each nursing the proud illusion that it is unique in space and time. There have been men without number suffering from the same megalomania; men who imagined themselves unique, irreplaceable, irreproducible. There will be more [...] more plus infinity. (Alfred Bester, "The Demolished Man", 1953)

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." (Ray Bradbury, "Fahrenheit 451", 1953)

"No one person can change a whole culture." (Poul Anderson, "Ghetto", 1954)

"When two alien cultures meet, the stronger must transform the weaker with love or hate." (Damon Knight, "Stranger Station", 1956)

"The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)

"Homo can truly be called sapiens when he practices his specialty of being unspecialized. His repeated attempts to freeze himself into an all-answering pattern or culture or ideology, or whatever he has named it, have repeatedly brought ruin. Give him the pragmatic business of making his living, and he will usually do rather well. He adapts, within broad limits." (Poul Anderson, "The Queen of Air and Darkness", 1971)

"No culture as yet has actually forgotten history because no culture has really possessed more than fragments of it." (Edgar Pangborn, "Mount Charity", 1971)

"When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictability about the outcome." (Joanna Russ, ‘"When It Changed", 1972)

"Man creates culture and through culture creates himself." (Pope John Paul II, "Osservatore Romano", 1980)

"A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot." (Robert A. Heinlein, "Friday", 1982)

"Love was always a word that covered too much territory, from loving a spouse to loving a hobby or abstract justice, and the emotion-mongers of popular entertainment portrayed it as everlasting and exclusive. In a culture under stress the truth could not be concealed by sentimental fluff. The Greenhouse people learned to appreciate love without glorifying it." (George Turner, "Drowning Towers", 1987)

"Some cultures send their young people to the desert to seek visions and guidance, searching for true thinking spawned by the openness of the place, the loneliness, the beauty of emptiness." (Pat Murphy, "Rachel in Love", 1987)

"Most people don’t listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they’re going to say next. True Listeners have always been revered among oral cultures, and prized for their rarity value." (Terry Pratchett, "Pyramids", 1989)

"As the soil, however rich it may be, cannot be productive without culture, so the mind without cultivation can never produce good fruit." (Seneca)

"Culture is acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit." (Matthew Arnold)

"Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs." (Thomas Wolfe)

"Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart." (Mohandas Gandhi)

"In rhetoric, this art of omission is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it is proof of high culture, to say the greatest matters in the simplest way. Veracity first of all, and forever." (Ralph W Emerson)

"It surprises me how our culture can destroy curiosity in the most curious of all animals - human beings." (Paul Maclean)

"Language is the road of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going." (Rita Mae Brown)

"No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive." (Mohandas Gandhi)

"Noble life demands a noble architecture of noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall." (Frank Lloyd Wright)