Culture Wars Quotes

“Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.”
― Joseph Fort Newton

“Science is not going to change its commitment to the truth. We can only hope religion changes its commitment to nonsense.”
― Victor J. Stenger

“Political correctness is a code to silence dissent as western society is razed. The culture wars will erupt into violence, pitting those who defend western values vs. leftists, their 'allies', and the rulers who want to consign western civilization to oblivion.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“The Procrustean bed. . .suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairmen of many English departments.) There's just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it.”
― Anne Fadiman, At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

“The efforts spent on defending our turf in the culture wars could be better served on loving our neighbor as ourselves.”
― Allen Yeh, Still Evangelical? Ten Insiders Reconsider Political, Social, and Theological Meaning

“We’re at the point in history where being a person has become a liability. Better to just be a disembodied jumble of ideas. p57”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“The Jews had a love-hate relationship with the Greek culture. They craved its civilization but resented its dominance. Josephus says they regarded Greeks as feckless, promiscuous, modernizing lightweights, yet many Jerusalemites were already living the fashionable lifestyle using Greek and Jewish names to show they could be both. Jewish conservatives disagreed; for them, the Greeks were simply idolaters.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“Yet the freedom of the artist, the pure beauty of nature, and the liberty of each of us to live our lives as we choose are still under threat—and despite all our progress, this threat may be greater now than in many years. The slave religions have used the weapons of fear, guilt, superstition, greed, terror and paranoia to achieve significant gains in political, ideological, and cultural power during recent decades, notably in the forms of militant Islamic fundamentalism and Christian dominionism.

It takes strength to stand in defense of beauty, truth and freedom, and strength requires unity.

Even while we celebrate our diversity and individuality with justified exuberance, it is critical that we remember those principles we hold in common, and those things we owe to each other as brothers and sisters of this, our Holy Order.”
― Sabazius X°, Beauty and Strength: Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial National Ordo Templi Orientis Conference

“I've learned that, at certain points, even if we're of such different cultures, we can think alike, and understand each other easier than we may expect.”
― Tamuna Tsertsvadze, Notes of Oisin: From an Irish Monk to a Skaldic Poet

“What the fanatical Jewish conservatives regarded as heathen pollution, cosmopolitans saw as civilization. This was the start of a new pattern in Jerusalem: the more sacred she became, the more divided.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“The culture of power versus the power of culture,” he quoted. “One side always loses.”
― Ausma Zehanat Khan, The Unquiet Dead

“The church can only defend its own space by fighting, not for space, but for the salvation of the world. Otherwise the church becomes a "religious society" that fights in its own interest and thus has ceased to be the church of God in the world.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“...The economic right was shrewd enough to understand that the issues they didn't care much about--abortion, gay rights, creationism--did matter to liberals, and that those culture wars drew off political energy from the left that might otherwise have fueled complaints and demands about the reconstructed political economy. And Establishment Republicans could keep reassuring themselves that when push came to shove, their culture-warrior political partners didn't ever actually wind, that abortion was still legal, gay and lesbian rights expanded, creationism kept out of the public school curricula.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“Somehow each of the three bears figured out exactly what was comfortable for them. And yet despite the obvious differences, they did not try to impose their preferences on the rest of the family. And if we can take a lesson from that, maybe that would make our society a bit more bearable.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“In the end, Buchanan was one of the paleocons to back Trump and many of those who formerly loathed most of what Yiannopoulos and what he represented decided to change their minds and back the winning horse, not only of Trump, but also of the new libertines of the online irreverent ‘punk’ right. Having lost Buchannan’s conservative culture war, they were perhaps strategically right to calculate that the only way they can ever have at least some of their ideas heard again would be to back a groping, lecherous, godless presidential candidate and a libertine figure such as Yiannopoulos and his army of online racist, foul-mouthed, porn-loving nihilists, who in many ways represent everything people like Buchannan are supposed to stand against. The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right.”
― Angela Nagle

“[T]he American Left, in its horror at the Vietnam War, reinvented sin.”
― Richard M. Rorty

“Between my generation and that of my students is an entire cohort of writers in their 30s and 40s. I think they’ve suffered most from the climate I’m describing. They prepared for their trade in the traditional way, by reading literature, learning something about history or foreign countries, training as reporters, and developing the habit of thinking in complexity. And now that they’ve reached their prime, these writers must wonder: Who’s the audience for all this? Where did the broad and persuadable public that I always had in mind go? What’s the point of preparation and knowledge and painstaking craft, when what the internet wants is volume and speed and the loudest voices? Who still reads books?

Some give in to the prevailing current, and they might enjoy their reward. Those who don’t are likely to withdraw. The greatest enemy of writing today might be despair.

From a speech made in January 2020 on receipt of the 2019 Hitchens Prize, also printed as an essay in The Atlantic.”
― George Packer

“At their core all cultures are cultureless.”
― B.S. Murthy, Crossing the Mirage - Passing through Youth

“This kind of hostile environment creates division within the cultures themselves, and it pits the bulls against each other while the matador watches from a safe place.”
― Thor Benson

“The greatest humiliations are to be outwitted by an idiot and shamed by a scumbag, but that is exactly what keeps on happening to Conservatives whenever they run into the Left... Based on what they espouse, the Left are clearly idiots and scumbags – they freely believe in any number of ostensibly absurd and immoral ideas – but they nevertheless manage to run rings round Conservatives using a very simple formula that should be relatively easy to understand and counter, but which Conservatives fail to do.”
― Colin Liddell

“Pain, misery, loss, loyalty, rage, frustration, fear, anxiety, and despair are the fuel and lifeblood of intractable conflict. Yet decades of research on social conflict has paid little attention to emotions. This has resulted in many practical techniques offering recommendations like 'If you become emotional during conflict, wait until it passes before you act' or 'Rise above your emotions and try to get a rational perspective on the situation.' This advice may be useful when emotions are a passing anomaly or inconvenience as they are in many low-level conflicts. But not with the 5 percent [of conflicts that are intractable]. Not when emotions are basic, not when they are enmeshed within the conflict, not when they ARE the rationale. To really comprehend the 5 percent, we need research models that place emotions at the center. We need models that not only see emotions as the energy behind the conflicts, but also recognize that they create the context through which we experience conflict.”
― Peter T. Coleman, The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts

“Multiculturalism is like having legs that want to walk in opposite directions, or having one hand that wants to slap your face and another that wants to stroke your face, or having two warring hemispheres of the brain, with completely different aims. It cannot work. A single monoculturalism is just as disastrous. It prevents change. What is required is a diverse monoculture ... a single system that can express itself in myriad different ways. Multiculturalism means trying to sustain different, competing systems and pretending they belong to the same system and are all working for the common good. They don’t and they aren’t. This is the central lie of multiculturalism, and liberalism in general.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“Had I lost my culture? I felt like I was constantly reminded that I was Indian—at work, at a store, when talking to white friends—some part of me was always aware that I wasn’t like the other people around me. It crept into every facet of my life, whether it was someone mispronouncing my name and me grinning and acting like it didn’t bother me, or people assuming I knew every other person with the last name Desai and not understanding it was as common as Smith and in a country far more populated than America. It followed me as I moved about my day, mentally tallying whether I was positive or negative on the karma scale, because while I wasn’t sure what the afterlife entailed, in the event reincarnation was our fate, I wanted to make sure I was on the right end of it. I still understood our native language, wore the clothes when needed, and ate the food mostly without complaint. I certainly never felt like I had “lost” it, but I wondered what made my mother think I had.”
― Mansi Shah, The Taste of Ginger

“the signposts for the [pellagra] disease...resulted from a vitamin B3 (niacin) deficiency...linked to poverty and a corn-based diet. That indisputable truth was disputed for decades by many Southern citizens and politicians, who insisted that it was a story contrived by Northerners to denigrate Southern culture. The end result was many lost lives, much like the lost lives from COVID-19, that have resulted from inaction in many countries, coupled with an anti-science, anti-expertise mindset.”
― Paul Cerrato, The Digital Reconstruction of Healthcare: Transitioning from Brick and Mortar to Virtual Care

“When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a culture war.”
― Pete Buttigieg

“There is a long history of extremist movements recruiting damaged and isolated individuals to do their dirty work.”
― Jude Ellison S. Doyle