Quotes about Culture

Pinchas Lapide, toward the end of his book that develops what he calls a theo-politics of loving small steps, finds in these words of Jesus six pillars that can help each of us reshape our culture from hate toward love: (1) Jesus is a realist who knows a world of evil; (2) Jesus has a faith that humans can change; (3) Jesus humanizes haters and their hatred; (4) Jesus calls us to imitate God; (5) Jesus knows this is a battle to fight; and (6) this theo-politics moves in small steps:

The gospel is capable and designed to strike home in every culture, in every age, and in every language.

In the Roman Empire a child's religion was determined not by some choice in the teenage years but by that child's family.

Babylon will never be the new Jerusalem; it cannot be Christianized.

Prime-time network television has become an island without religion in an ever-more-religious America.

Law is downstream from culture. By the time you make a law about something, you're reacting, not acting. I'd rather shape the culture.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.

We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can show off and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off.

When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always 20 years behind the times.

There is no such thing as the Queen's English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

A Russian imbues his polite things with a heartiness, both of phrase and expression, that compels belief in their sincerity.

Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian—not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The Turk and the Chinaman will buy those to kill missionaries and converts with.