A Quote by Steven Pinker

There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

Steven Pinker

Quote Topics

About Acknowledge Anything Could Culture Good Guilt Intellectual Intellectual Life Life Modern Native Our Treatment Western Western Culture

Quote Author

Steven Pinker
Canadian - Scientist
Born: September 18, 1954

When you think after 25 years of Mao, Chinese people had no idea about western music or even western culture. They had no idea about James Dean or the Beatles or Charlie Chaplin, modern music or modern cinema.

Jean-Michel Jarre

When Europeans arrived on this continent, they blew it with the Native Americans. They plowed over them, taking as much as they could of their land and valuables, and respecting almost nothing about the native cultures. They lost the wisdom of the indigenous peoples-wisdom about the land and connectedness to the great web of life...We have another chance with all these refugees. People come here penniless but not cultureless. They bring us gifts. We can synthesize the best of our traditions with the best of theirs. We can teach and learn from each other to produce a better America.

Mary Pipher

We're very good at talking about the individual in American politics and excellent at talking about the government. But we have little ability to even acknowledge everything that exists in the middle, and given how influential politics is on every other part of our life, I think that failure of discourse is pretty corrosive to our overall culture.

J. D. Vance

Modern civilization is largely devoted to the pursuit of the cult of delusion. There is no general information about the nature of mind. It is hardly ever written about by writers or intellectuals; modern philosophers do not speak of it directly; the majority of scientists deny it could possibly be there at all. It plays no part in popular culture: no one sings about it, no one talks about it in plays, and it's not on TV. We are actually educated into believing that nothing is real beyond what we can perceive with our ordinary senses.

Sogyal Rinpoche

I'm just going to say it: I'm pro-guilt. Guilt is good. Guilt helps us stay on track because it's about our behavior. It occurs when we compare something we've done - or failed to do - with our personal values.

Brene Brown

Canada, Australia and New Zealand have apologised for their treatment of native peoples.

Stephen Kinzer

It is not for us . . . to send out missionaries to foreign peoples; it is our task to build up our own Western culture.

Carl Jung

Instead of kids just hearing about beads and baskets and fringe, and about what 'was' and 'were,' we present Native American culture as a living contemporary culture.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

Everything can be brought to the extreme. Food is good, overeating is bad. Possessions are good, hoarding is bad. Guilt is good, obsessing about guilt is bad. But I think guilt is good because I'm like, "Hey, I just stabbed that guy and I feel pretty good."

Lino Rulli

In western culture, we have ignored death. We're running the other way - everything is about life and youth. So, there's something resonant about walking around with our own death masks. Zombies are the visible embodiment of death staring at us with our own faces.

Andrew Lincoln

At the beginning of my career as a writer, I felt I knew nothing of Chinese culture. I was writing about emotional confusion with my mother related to our different beliefs. Hers was based in family history, which I didn't know anything about. I always felt hesitant in talking about Chinese culture and American culture.

Amy Tan

We have huge holes in our education in the West. I think that we have little knowledge of Asian history. If you ask a well-educated, modern Western person about World War II, most will think that the theatre of war was only in Europe. But it's known that the Pacific War was going on concurrently, and we don't know anything about it.

Min Jin Lee

Our perception that we have 'no time' is one of the distinctive marks of modern Western culture.

Margaret Visser

Where it is the majority religion, Islam does not recognize religious freedom, at least not as we understand it. Islam is a different culture. This doesn't mean that it's an inferior culture, but it is a culture that has yet to connect with the positive sides of our modern Western culture: religious freedom, human rights and equal rights for women.

Walter Kasper

Lionsgate and Lorenzo di Bonaventura saw my Korean Western-style film, 'The Good, the Bad, the Weird,' and probably felt that I would be right for 'The Last Stand,' which could be classified as a modern Western.