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To believe that I could, at twenty-three, sacrifice history and culture for "the Absolute" was further proof that I had not understood India. My vocation was culture, not sainthood.
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As quoted in Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade (2002) by Douglas Allen, p. 216

 

Mircea Eliade

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Types.—To show that the Old Testament is only figurative, and that the prophets understood by temporal blessings other blessings, this is the proof: First, that this would be unworthy of God. Secondly, that their discourses express very clearly the promise of temporal blessings, and that they say nevertheless that their discourses are obscure, and that their meaning will not be understood. Whence it appears that this secret meaning was not that which they openly expressed, and that consequently they meant to speak of other sacrifices, of another deliverer, etc. They say that they will be understood only in the fullness of time. The third proof is that their discourses are contradictory, and neutralize each other; so that if we think that they did not mean by the words "law" and "sacrifice" anything else than that of Moses, there is a plain and gross contradiction. Therefore they meant something else, sometimes contradicting themselves in the same chapter. 658

 

Blaise Pascal

 

There has never been a time in history when more of our "culture" was as "owned" as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now.

 

Lawrence Lessig

 

"Teaching," wrote Alain, "must be determinedly slow in pace." This phrase is full of meaning for some modern educators with a dangerous tendency towards neglecting the ancient culture of the race, a necessary foundation for all education, and towards stressing recent doctrines and happenings. Information is not culture, and young men need culture much more than they need information.

 

Andre Maurois

 

Before industrial civilization, local and regional communities made their own music, their own entertainment. The esthetics were based on traditions that went far back in time—i.e. folklore. But part of the con of mass culture is to make you forget history, disconnect you from tradition and the past. Sometimes that can be a good thing. Sometimes it can even be revolutionary. But tradition can also keep culture on an authentic human level, the homespun as opposed to the mass produced. Industrial civilization figured out how to manufacture popular culture and sell it back to the people. You have to marvel at the ingenuity of it! The problem is that the longer this buying and selling goes on, the more hollow and bankrupt the culture becomes. It loses its fertility, like worn out, ravaged farmland. Eventually, the yokels who bought the hype, the pitch, they want in on the game. When there are no more naive hicks left, you have a culture where everybody is conning each other all the time. There are no more earnest "squares" left—everybody's "hip," everybody is cynical.

 

Robert Crumb

 

"From the perspective of scripting theory, same-gender erotic preferences are elicited and shaped by the systems of meaning offered for conduct in a culture. What is usually construed as culture against "man" or culture against nature is thus actually conflict among differently enculturated individuals or groups.
What is required is a constant recognition that acts of usage and explanation are acts of social control in the strong sense, that "homosexual" and "homosexuality" are names that have been imposed on some persons and their conduct by other persons - and that this imposition has carried the right of the latter to tell the former the origins, meaning, and virtue of their conduct."

 

John Gagnon