Scissors/culture/superstition

Famous quotes containing the words culture and/or superstition:

    One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.
    Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)

    The difference between faith and superstition is that the first uses reason to go as far as it can, and then makes the jump; the second shuns reason entirely—which is why superstition is not the ally, but the enemy, of true religion.
    Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986)