Culture:

"No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive." - Gandhi

"The tendency of aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture." - Freud

"In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA." - Gregory Bateson

"The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes" - Salman Rushdie

"Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of." - John Stuart Mill

"Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit." - Jawaharlal Nehru

"Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere" - Chaim Potok

"Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture." - Alan Ginsberg

"Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world" - Matthew Arnold

"If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place." - Margaret Mead

"In any culture, subculture, or family in which belief is valued above thought, and self-surrender is valued above self-expression, and conformity is valued above integrity, those who preserve their self-esteem are likely to be heroic exceptions" - Nathaniel Branden

"The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the ''outlaw,'' the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order." - Michel Foucault

"If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him." - JFK

"The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was capable of being; expand, if possible to his full growth; resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions; and show himself at length in his own shape" - Thomas Carlyle

"If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather then by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called "education"." - Bertrand Russell

"The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play)." - Michel Foucault

"The individual is not accountable to society for his actions in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself. The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people." - John Stuart Mill

"Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap." - Herman Hesse

"Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart" - Gandhi

"Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not." - Samuel Johnson