#cult

When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. "We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall. ↗

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#business

But show business has always been like that - any kind of show business. If these people didn't live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn't ride them too hard—well, they wouldn't be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid or project them across the footlights. ↗

— Raymond Chandler

#mystery-novels #thriller #business

Economics itself offers a parallel that explains why this integration affects creativity. Clay Christensen has written about the “Innovator’s Dilemma”: the fact that large traditional firms find it rational to ignore new, breakthrough technologies that compete with their core business. The same analysis could help explain why large, traditional media companies will undermine our tradition of free culture. The property right that is copyright is no longer the balanced right that it was, or was intended to be. The property right that is copyright has become unbalanced, tilted toward an extreme. The opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened in a world in which creation requires permission and creativity must check with a lawyer. ↗

— Lawrence Lessig

#creativity #culture #business

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else doing it wrong, without commenting. ↗

— T. H. White

#cult thing #difficult #difficult thing #doing #else

If you really want to change a culture to empower women improve basic hygiene and health care and fight high rates of infant mortality the answer is to educate girls. ↗

— Greg Mortenson

#educate #girls #change

Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo. ↗

— Wade Davis

#culture #evolve #future #past #survival

When we reject our origins, we become the product of whatever soil that we find ourselves planted; the colors of our leaves change as we consume borrowed nutrients with borrowed roots and, like a tree, we grow. ↗

— Mike Norton

#heritage #originality #reject #rejection #tree

No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty into a specific, concrete form is a very essential element in thinking. ↗

— J. P. Morgan

#concrete #difficulty #element #essential #form

Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology. ↗

— Edward Thorndike

#art #botany #chemistry #depend #depends

It may occasion surprise that the decree of a temporal power sufficed to give the classics a position that can be compared in other cultures to the place of sacred scriptures inspired by divine revelation. ↗

— Hellmut Wilhelm

#i-ching #occult #change