our culture has made it harder to be good,

If the culture doesn't work, don't buy it.

"I remembered what Morrie said during our visit: “The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.”

"Morrie true to these words, had developed his own culture – long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted not time in front of TV sitcoms or “Movies of the Week.” He had created a cocoon of human activities– conversations, interaction, affection–and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.

If good people are asked to work in a bad culture, one in which leaders do not relinquish control, then the odds of something bad happening go up. People will be more concerned about following the rules out of fear of getting in trouble or losing their jobs than doing what needs to be done. And when that happens, souls will be lost.

A culture is strong when people work with each other, for each other. A culture is weak when people work against each other, for themselves.

... culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.

Our culture does not mean that much to me. It is not sacred. I am very critical of it. It has to change. We cannot develop unless we are strong enough to face our own weakness, head on. And Islam, well, Islam is a part of our culture.

There’s always a tension between self and society. If things are too tightly bound, then the urge to rebel is strong. But we’ve got the opposite problem. In a culture of “I’m Free to Be Myself,” individuals are lonely and loosely attached. Community is attenuated, connections are dissolved, and loneliness spreads. This situation makes it difficult to be good — to fulfill the deep human desires for love and connection. It’s hard on people of all ages, but it’s especially hard on young adults. They are thrown into a world that is unstructured and uncertain, with few authorities or guardrails except those they are expected to build on their own. Among other things, it becomes phenomenally hard to launch yourself into life.

In a weak culture, we veer away from doing "the right thing" in favor of doing "the thing that's right for me.

Our culture is ill-equipped to assert the bourgeois values which would be the salvation of the under-class, because we have lost those values ourselves.

I think you don’t change a culture. I think you coach people to win. Basically, people want to be successful. They want to go home at night and feel that they’ve made a contribution.

Contemporary culture is not very good on responsibility.

Unless we change ourselves as individuals and our culture—the way we relate to the earth—we can’t expect to make the overall changes in society that our necessary.

Western culture is in its twilight; there is a dark age ahead; and while college-humanities fads and "secular-progressive values" have certainly done much damage, they are symptoms, not causes - fragments of junk sucked into a vacuum. The fundamental reason why so much of our culture is shit - either literally, like Signor Manzoni's masterwork, or figuratively - is exhaustion, cultural exhaustion.