#culture

When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman--known, marked, lined, familiar—-who hands him the paper every morning. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#aging #beauty #body-image #cosmetic-surgery #cosmetics

We don't have to look far for miracles because they're all around us. Everything is astonishing. The universe on it's surface is alive with mystery. ↗

— Terrence McKenna

#evolution #new-age #pschedelic #age

One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. ↗

— Marshall Sahlins

#culture #evolution #hunger #hunters #starvation

In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there. ↗

— Gary Snyder

#history #human #primitive #stone-age #age

Our society on a whole is trained to see young women. There are proportionally far more of them on magazine covers, on TV, and in films than int the actual population. As a result, we have a citizenry taught to see the young and ignore the not-so-young. It isn’t conscious; it’s Pavlovian. (13) ↗

— Victoria Moran

#media #society #women #youth-culture #age

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive. ↗

— George Santayana

#culture #george-santayana #tradition #age

Then he asked my age and I asked his. That's the tradition in China. If we know each other's ages we can understand each other's past. We Chinese have been collective for so long, personal histories are not worth mentioning. Therefore as soon as Xiaolin and I knew how old the other was, we knew exactly what big shit had happened in our lives. The introduction of the One Child Policy shortly before out births, for instance and the fact that, in 1985, two pandas were sent to the USA as a national gift and we had to sing a tearful panda song at school. 1989 was the Tiananmen Square student demonstration. Anyway, Xiaolin was one year younger than me, so I assumed we were from the same generation. ↗

— Xiaolu Guo

#culture #lived-history #mores #temporality #age

The epitome of culture is the search for truth, or at least a reasonable approximation of reality, most notably the need to know ourselves and the world around us. ↗

— Eric Chaisson

#reality #truth #age

I believe that even 'returning-to-nature' and anti pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the over development of the present age. ↗

— Masanobu Fukuoka

#development #green #nature #age

The only interesting ideas are heresies ↗

— Susan Sontag

#culture #art