Pastoral Resources

Because some people have sex with people of the same sex, an entire culture has been created, broadly speaking, out of oppression. Which in a rational world would not be an issue.

A lot of what used to be known as gay culture - broadly speaking, homoeroticism and being camp - has been brought into mainstream culture. I think we should be moving to an era where it's just sex.

I'm always uneasy with messages. I think if there is a message, it's about taking control of your life. Not becoming a victim. Be true to yourself. In essence it's about love in the drug culture.

You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture.

A lot of people in my world - in the acting world - have either lost friends to Aids or live with HIV because its origin in our culture, in New York for instance, was in the gay community.

I have had lots of friends who've been affected by Aids and a very good friend of mine, Oscar Moore, died of Aids and I was with him in his last year quite a bit. And of course he was a man living in a very rich culture with a wealthy family who was able to afford health care.

The teacher of history's work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.

Not all intelligence can be artificial now, so if we make a mistake, the consequences are no longer simply located within an institution or a national culture.

For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come.

The Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.

It's typical of Italian culture that we only start to feel emotional about something when we have the possibility to see it in front of us. By February, Italy will have Olympic fever.

There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.

The Ancient Games are relatively obscure to most Olympians, but to understand just what the Games are about, it is really necessary to investigate the roots and the meaning that has transformed culture and society for so many years.

Now they're attracted to one another, but repelled by their ethnic origins, so that there was something to overcome. They had to overcome their own prejudices, which had been imposed by the culture - their own shame at being Mexican and Italian.

How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint.