Daniel Dennett Quotes

Times change. Context changes. Just because something is old and a 'part of our history' shouldn't mean we are forced to honor it forever.

Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life.

The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.

Look what is happening in the world - we are being conditioned by society, by the culture we live in, and that culture is the product of man. There is nothing holy, or divine, or eternal about culture.

The style of life is a unity because it has grown out of the difficulties of early life and out of the striving for a goal.

What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.

So you want another story?" Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened." Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?" Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English." Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

Civilization is not an incurable disease, but it should never be forgotten that the English people are at present afflicted by it.

A historical property has morals and ethics of the society that created it and it can be revived. What I mean is that we can discover new possibilities from the process of dismantling, transforming, and recreating.

The Liberals may blather about protecting cultural minorities, but the fact is that undermining the traditional definition of marriage is an assault on multiculturalism and the practices in those communities.

In its amplest meaning History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth.

It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons.

The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth.

Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European.

Woman possesses the cosmic force of an element, an invincible force of destruction, like nature's. She is, in herself alone, all nature! Being the matrix of life, she is by that very fact the matrix of death - since it is from death that life is perpetually reborn, and since to annihilate death would be to kill life at its only fertile source.

A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by "progress.

The most likely way to kill a tradition is to over-formalize it, which is to carry it on in the same way after everyone has ceased to defer to it. The way to revive it is to show that it has grown out of and is still related to our most cherished values. But this requires radical insight and the stripping away of many things which are mere accretions.

Tradition, if not constantly recreated, can be as much a millstone as a mill-wheel.

In fact, every one of us - every nation, every individual begins hundreds, perhaps thousands of years prior to the date that appears in the passport.

It is a mark of civilised man that he seeks to understand his traditions, and to criticise them, not to swallow them whole.

I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it's about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.

We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years.

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.