The quotes below are arranged loosely by theme. Please send us yours!
DIVERSITY
There is only one man in the world
and his name is All Men.
There is only one woman in the world
and her name is All Women.
There is only one child in the world
and the child’s name is All Children. —Carl Sandburg, from prologue to The Family of Man (1955)
[C]ivilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species […] Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item. —Claude Levi-Strauss, anthropologist, from Tristes Tropiques (1955)
A diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another. When a particular species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that a link in the network is broken, a diverse community will be able to survive and reorganize itself... In other words, the more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be. —Fritjof Capra, physicist and ecologist, from The Web of Life (1997)
There are a number of attributes of species and populations that are not of any particular selective advantage to any single individual in a population but that are of great advantage to the population as a whole. —Ernst Mayr, biologist, from Evolution and the Diversity of Life (1976)
I am caught within a circle from which there is no escape: the less human societies were able to communicate with each other and therefore to corrupt each other through contact, the less their respective emissaries were able to perceive the wealth and significance of their diversity. —Claude Levi-Strauss, from Tristes Tropiques
The ideal of a single civilization for everyone implicit in the cult of
progress and technique impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the
world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a
possibility of life. —Octavio Paz, Mexican poet
IDENTITY
I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any. —Mahatma Gandhi
It is hardly possible to overrate the value, for the improvement
of human beings, of things which bring them into contact with persons
dissimilar to themselves and with modes of thought and action unlike
those with which they are familiar... It is indispensable to be
perpetually comparing [one's] own notions and customs with the experience
and example of persons in different circumstances... There is no
nation which does not need to borrow from others. —John Stuart Mill, 19th century British philosopher and economist
Identity is a concept of our age that should be used very carefully. All types of identities, ethnic, national, religious, sexual or whatever else, can become your prison after a while. The identity that you stand up for can enslave you and close you to the rest of the world. —Murathan Mungan, contemporary Turkish poet
Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity
of a society
can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren't
authentic; they're just dead. —Kwame Anthony Appiah, contemporary
Ghanaian/British philosopher
Why have we as a people been able to continue to exist? Because we know where we come from. By having roots, you can see the direction in which you want to go.
— Joenia Wapixana, attorney, Roraima Indigenous Council, Brazil, quoted in the NY Times
They say that we do not know anything
That we are backwardness
That our head needs changing for a better one
They say that some learned men are saying this about us
These academics who reproduce themselves
In our lives
What is there on the banks of these rivers, Doctor?
Take out your binoculars
And your spectacles
Look if you can.
Five hundred flowers from five hundred different types of potato
Grow on the terraces
Above abysses
That your eyes don't reach
These five hundred flowers
Are my brain
My flesh. —José Maria Arguedas, Peruvian poet,
from "A Call to Certain Academics"
[T]he opposition between globalization and local traditions is false: globalization directly resuscitates local traditions, it literally thrives on them, which is why the opposite of globalization is not local traditions, but universality. —Slavoj Zizek, Serbian social critic
PLACE
God gives all men all earth to love,
But since man’s heart is small,
Ordains for each one spot shall prove
Belovèd over all. —Rudyard Kipling, from “Sussex”
The word culture itself doesn't really mean anything. I mean, you
can have culture in a petri dish. But we define culture as something
that links us to a sense of place. This place, we live here. —Eric Enos, Hawaiian cultural activist
Along with all the rest of the world's people, we have inherited
ancient instructions for the stewardship and good husbandry of the
earth, with clear warnings, now significantly verified, of the disasters
that will (and already do) attend our failure. We have responded
by continuing our elaborately rationalized destructions. —Wendell Berry, contemporary American writer
A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a
native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the
face of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds
and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home
a familiar nonmistakable difference amidst the future widening of
knowledge. —George Eliot, 19th century British writer
LANGUAGE
Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men
migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar
and settled there. And they said to one another, "Come, let
us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick
for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let
us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens,
and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad
upon the face of the whole earth."
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the
sons of men had built. And the Lord said, "Behold, they are
one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the
beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to
do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there
confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's
speech."
So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of
the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name
was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of
all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over
the face of the earth. —from The Bible, Genesis 11
The day is approaching when all the peoples of the world will have
adopted one universal language and one common script. When this
is achieved, to whatsoever city a man may journey, it shall be as
if he were entering his own home. —Bahá'u'lláh, founder
of the Baha’i faith
At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space.... The alternative, it would seem, is indigenous groups left to live in isolation—complete with the maltreatment of women and lack of access to modern medicine and technology typical of such societies. —John McWhorter, linguist, writing in World Affairs, Fall 2009
POWER
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.
Take up the White Man’s burden –
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard. —Rudyard Kipling, from “The White Man’s Burden”
We have no interest in spreading our culture. —George W. Bush, from State of the Union address, January 2002
We want a world where many worlds are possible. —Subcomandante Marcos, Zapatista National Liberation Army, Chiapas, Mexico
Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their
distinct political, economic, social and cultural characteristics,
as well as their legal systems, while retaining their rights to
participate fully, if they so choose, in the political, economic,
social and cultural life of the State. —Article 4, from Draft Universal
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (1993)
Modern industrial societies and their overwhelming superiority in technology and dynamic expansion are totally reorganizing the world. All traditional cultures that are alien to these technologically 'homogeneous' societies are doomed to extinction. —website of the Gâyan Uttjak Society, dedicated to preserving the traditional music of Hungary
Globalization does not necessarily or even frequently imply homogenization or Americanization... [D]ifferent societies appropriate the materials of modernity differently. —Arjun Appadurai, anthropologist, from Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
The requirement of one state for one people on one territory has
proved to be a recipe for nightmare without end. —Jonathan Schell, contermporaty
American writer
The connections, more or less near, which have taken place among
the nations of the earth, having been carried to that point, that
a violation of rights, committed in one place, is felt throughout
the whole, the idea of a cosmopolitical right can no longer pass
for a fantastic exaggeration of right; but is the last step of perfection
necessary to the tacit code of civil and public right; these systems
at length conducting towards a public right of men in general, and
towards a perpetual peace. —Immanuel Kant, from Perpetual Peace
Being digital is positive. It can flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people. The nation-state may go away. —Nicholas Negroponte, from Being Digital
I will say at the outset that there is only one world, and although we speak of the Old World and the New, this is because the latter was lately discovered by us, and not because there are two. —Garcilaso de la Vega, from Royal Commentaries of the Incas, and General History of Peru (1609)
To suggest that the universal civilization is in place already is to be willfully blind to the present reality and, even worse, to trivialize the goal and hinder the materialization of a genuine universality in the future. —Chinua Achebe, Nigerian author
The planet is falling precipitately apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment. —Benjamin Barber, from Jihad vs. McWorld
SPIRIT
When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we
had the land. They said "let us close our eyes and pray."
When we opened them, we had the Bible, and they had the land. —Desmond Tutu
We identify not merely with the society we live in. We identify with the universe; not just with a local group, but with the entire planet. There is no this side, or that side. There are no sides. There is just all of us. —Imelda Marcos, from her book Circles of Life
Why think thus O men of piety
I have returned to sobriety
I am neither a Moslem nor a Hindu
I am not Christian, Zoroastrian, nor Jew
I am neither of the West nor the East
Not of the ocean, nor an earthly beast
I am neither a natural wonder
Nor from the stars yonder
Neither flesh of dust, nor wind inspire
Nor water in veins, nor made of fire
I am neither an earthly carpet, nor gems terrestrial
Nor am I confined to Creation, nor the Throne Celestial
Not of ancient promises, nor of future prophecy
Not of hellish anguish, nor of paradisic ecstasy
Neither the progeny of Adam, nor Eve
Nor of the world of heavenly make-believe
My place is the no-place
My image is without face
Neither of body nor the soul
I am of the Divine Whole. —Rumi, 13th century
Sufi poet, translated from the Persian by Shahriar Shahriari
MARKETS
The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind. —Claude Levi-Strauss, from Tristes Tropiques
Just as trade typically makes countries richer in material terms, it tends to make them culturally richer as well. —Tyler Cowen, from Creative Destruction
To expand the global market, increase the number of consumers,
make sure that they buy what is sold, develop needs that conform
to what is produced, and develop the fever of consumerism, culture
must play a role in developing certain values, patterns of behavior,
visions of what is happiness and success in the world, attitudes
toward sex and love. Culture must model a global consumer. —Sherif Hatata, from "A Global
Culture for a Global Market," in The Cultures of Globalization,
Jameson & Miyoshi, eds.
The essence of globalization is a subordination of human rights,
of labor rights, consumer, environmental rights, democracy rights,
to the imperatives of global trade and investment. —Ralph Nader
