A Quote by John Desmond Bernal
The present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
The present aristocracy of western culture, at the very moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.
This present system by which industry is motivated exclusively by the quest for maximal profits - though it may have helped a great deal to develop, to industrialize our country so rapidly and so successfully - now it's clearly passed its usefulness. It is keeping us from achieving the ideal society that we should have. We say industry must produce to improve the quality of life for all our people.
Most people have learned to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. ... It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.
Both dance and dream are brought into being by the consciousness of a moment. They can never be repeated or successfully imitated. But you can dance and dream again. You must, if life is to continue.
We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary. From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complete unknown we call the future. Thinking about it almost makes you breathless.
The culture of the United States has flooded the world. It's the inevitable result of a powerful culture, art. We've got an instinctive touch when it comes to the popular mind because we've had no aristocracy. It is a democratic country. And we know without knowing it, without bothering to understand it, how to reach ordinary people, sometimes with the most vulgar, worthless junk on the face of the earth, but we know how to do it [laughter].
As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism.
Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing.
I don't know why people have divided the whole world into two groups, west and east. Education is neither eastern nor western. Education is education and it's the right of every human being.
What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.
Putting yourself in the ring to wrestle - create those emotions, ups and downs within the match - one moment dominates the one, and one moment dominates the other, and without having created a choreography, that is the real wrestling.
We don't have in our culture a healthy understanding and respect for the value of Being, which is simply being present in the moment, not trying to go somewhere, not trying to accomplish anything but, just present.
At the present moment in our culture this yearning for meaning and consciousness, this yearning to give and serve something higher than ourselves, is breaking through the hard crust of our widespread cultural materialism and pseudo-scientific underestimation of what a human being is meant to be together with an equally tragic overestimation of what we human beings are capable of in our present everyday state of being. The intensity of the present confusion about the nature and existence of God is a symptom of this yearning within the whole of our modern culture.
The argument now that the spread of pop culture and consumer goods around the world represents the triumph of Western civilization trivializes Western culture. The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former.
A lot of the time I'm in the present, and I'm thinking about the past or scheming about the future and missing every present moment, instead of actually partaking of the sacrament of every present moment.
In the spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense. The past and the future are both rolled up in this present moment of illumination, and this present moment is not something standing still with all its contents, for it ceaselessly moves on.
Related Authors
Austin O'Malley Quotes
American
Scientist
Carl Sagan Quotes
American
Scientist
Charles Darwin Quotes
English
Scientist
E. O. Wilson Quotes
American
Scientist
Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
German
Scientist
Isaac Asimov Quotes
American
Scientist
Jane Goodall Quotes
English
Scientist
Margaret Mead Quotes
American
Scientist
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
Lebanese
Scientist
Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes
American
Scientist
Richard Dawkins Quotes
English
Scientist
Stephen Jay Gould Quotes
American
Scientist
Steven Pinker Quotes
Canadian
Scientist
Sylvia Earle Quotes
American
Scientist
Thomas Huxley Quotes
English
Scientist
W. Edwards Deming Quotes
American
Scientist