Arturo O'Farrill Quotes

It's like a 'chicken or the egg' thing. We're all part of the culture. We're reflecting it; we're changing it. So, yeah, I think culture is always changing.

Finally, I have to say that the most surprising aspect has been the speed at which the folks in India adapt to Western practices. They learn fast, really, really fast.

Culture does matter, but politics can change culture.

When cultural movements happen, it's so beyond your control.

Capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated.

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

In the late 20th century, it became possible to travel between cultures, between the old world and the new, with great ease. So when you go back, you take the changed person with you who, in turn, changes things that otherwise might have stayed the same.

All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history.

Over the past several years, all of us as Canadians, and as members of the North American cultural and economic environment, have been to a greater or lesser extent party to a significant attitudinal change towards our culture.

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

In such diffused changes of culture two factors are necessary: contact and understanding.

We see culture as a self-organising thing.

Class doesn't create culture anymore.

I think culture is a very challenging thing to reverse.

...culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.

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

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.

The evolution of cultures appears to follow the pattern of the evolution of species. The many different forms of culture which arise correspond to the "mutations" of genetic theory. Some forms prove to be effective under prevailing circumstances and others not, and the perpetuation of the culture is determined accordingly.

People who want to wage cultural wars ought to keep in mind that cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.

It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

We are American at puberty. We die French.