Cultural Change Quotes

• All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Media, Psychics, Faculty

  Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel (1996). “The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects”, Hardwired

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• All media work us over completely.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Media

  Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel (1996). “The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects”, Hardwired

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• Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Media, Understanding, Way

  Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel (1996). “The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects”, Hardwired

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• Any social or cultural change has to be made openly and with people agreeing. You don't get there by just pushing an outsider's point of view.

  Melinda Gates

  Views, People, Outsiders

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• Social and cultural change, however desirable, should not be effected by the engines of national power. Let us, through persuasion and education, seek to improve institutions we deem defective. But let us, in doing so, respect the orderly processes of the law. Any other course enthrones tyrants and dooms freedom.

  Barry Goldwater

  Tyrants, Law, Persuasion

  Barry Goldwater (2010). “The Conscience of a Conservative”, p.27, Bottom of the Hill

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• All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Media, Psychics, Political

  Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel (1996). “The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects”, Hardwired

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• A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural change.

  Richard Rorty

  Arguing, Talent, Chiefs

  Richard Rorty (1989). “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity”, p.7, Cambridge University Press

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• Cultural diversity and cultural change are desirable and inevitable. We are cultural animals, someone without a culture is not human. But the cultures we possess vary enormously. Indeed, the variability, over time and space is the great evolutionary advantage of humanity. Instead of changing biologically over millennia, human beings can change culturally over decades

  Martin Wolf

  Animal, Space, Diversity

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• Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

  Jacques Barzun

  Fake People, Routine, Ends

  Jacques Barzun (1959). “The House of Intellect”

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• I'm not saying that you need a State Department that looks like the litigation department of a major law firm. But you need people who are not afraid to make the case for the United States, who are not afraid to stand their ground, not afraid to be isolated in international organizations when that's the correct approach for our diplomacy. This is a cultural change that has to be effected through incentive systems, promotion systems, career training systems. This is not something that you can do with the stroke of a magic wand, it's going to take years to make this change.

  John Bolton

  Years, Law, Careers

  Source: humanevents.com

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• The Marines estimate that roughly a hundred or 200 women will be interested in going into these jobs - roughly 2 percent of those jobs. Still, this is historic. It's a biggest cultural change in the military maybe ever, probably bigger than integrating the force back in 1948 when African-Americans were no longer segregated in separate units.

  Renee Montagne

  Jobs, Military, Marine

  Source: www.npr.org

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• Photography can still be used to champion activism and change. I believe this, even while standing in the cool winds of postmodernism... Postmodernism looked radical, but it wasn't. As a movement it was profoundly liberal and became a victim of itself. Precisely at this historical moment, when multicultural democracy is the order of the day, photography can be used as a powerful weapon toward instituting political and cultural change. I for one will continue to work toward this end.

  Carrie Mae Weems

  Photography, Powerful, Believe

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• Christian adults need to think about talking to our own children as a form of cross-cultural missions. Cultural change happens so quickly that teens are exposed to ideas and worldviews very different from those of previous generations.

  Nancy Pearcey

  Christian, Children, Thinking

  "Finding Truth: An Interview with Nancy Pearcey". Interview with Jonathan Petersen, www.biblegateway.com. December 10, 2015.

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• Welfare is the basic cause of the deleterious cultural changes we have witnessed in the West over the past 60 years.

  Martin Durkin

  Past, Years, West

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• Feminism means something - legislation, cultural change - but 'Girl Power' meant nothing more than being friends with your friends.

  Caitlin Moran

  Girl, Mean, Feminism

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• Jim Grimsley's unflinching self-examination of his own boyhood racial prejudices during the era of school desegregation is one of the most compelling memoirs of recent years. Vivid, precise, and utterly honest, How I Shed My Skin is a time-machine of sorts, a reminder that our past is every bit as complex as our present, and that broad cultural changes are often intimate, personal, and idiosyncratic.

  Dinty W. Moore

  School, Past, Self

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• Even a cursory reading of the book of Ecclesiastes shows that culture is a stationary bike that each generation climbs on in hopes of getting somewhere only to die and fall off so that the new young stud can take his turn peddling and, like a fool, make pronouncements about his progress. We would be wise to see postmodernity as simply the new guy on the old bike and not mistake cultural change for kingdom progress.

  Mark Driscoll

  Wise, Mistake, Book

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• As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

  Richard Rorty

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Swings

  "Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3". Book by Richard Rorty (Introduction), March 13, 1998.

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• The correct rate of speed in innovating changes in long-standing social customs has not yet been determined by even the most expert of the experts. Personally I am beginning to think there is more danger in lagging than in speeding up cultural change to keep pace with mechanical change.

  Mary Barnett Gilson

  Change, Thinking, Long

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• It was said that Chile was not ready to vote for a woman, it was traditionally a sexist country. In the end, the reverse happened: the fact of being a woman became a symbol of the process of cultural change the country was undergoing.

  Michelle Bachelet

  Country, Facts, Vote

  "Michelle, top woman in a macho world" by Diane Dixon, www.theguardian.com. April 02, 2006.

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• Since biological change occurs slowly and cultural changes occur in every generation, it is futile to try to explain the fleeting phenomena of culture by a racial constant. We can often explain them-in terms of contact with other peoples, of individual genius, of geography-but not by racial differences.

  Robert Lowie

  Change, Science, Race

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• Agriculture probably required a far greater discipline than did any form of food collecting. Seeds had to be planted at certain seasons, some protection had to be given to the growing plants and animals, harvests had to be reaped, stored and divided. Thus, we might argue that it was neither leisure time nor a sedentary existence but the more rigorous demands associated with an agricultural way of life that led to great cultural changes.

  Charles Heiser

  Garden, Animal, Agriculture

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• Several Southeastern tribes have long said that their ancestors received immigrants from Mesoamerica and that these immigrants introduced many cultural changes. Far too few anthropologists were listening.

  Richard Thornton

  Long, Listening, Tribes

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• You can’t mandate [cultural change], can’t engineer it. What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But then you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.

  Lou Gerstner

  Reality, Goal, Culture

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• Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.

  Steven Pinker

  Technology, Humanity, Violence

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