Quotes About Cultural

The environment embodies both structural and cultural constraints and opportunities. In order to fully appreciate and explain the divergent social outcomes of human groups, we must take into account the exposure to different cultural influences.

I argue that the disappearance of work and the consequences of that disappearance for both social and cultural life are the central problems in the inner-city ghetto.

Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation, and our job here is to teach and to research and to create knowledge on Asia in conjunction and in cooperation with scholars as well as with political, intellectual, and cultural leaders in Asia.

Jesus asks the Samaritan woman at the well, 'Rax me a drap watter, will ye?' and she replies, 'What! A Jew lik ye seekin a drink o a Samâritan like mysel?' (John 4: 7–9)

Cultural contamination that is directed outward is always seen as 'enlightenment.

the conquests of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic dynasties encouraged commercial and intellectual exchanges reaching from central Asia to India to the western Mediterranean. In the East, the expansion under the Han and Tang dynasties had similar catalytic impacts within China. The intellectual residue left by these exchanges shaped the cultural traditions of the Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Mediterranean worlds.

Part of the resistance of Westerners to becoming patrons is that they react negatively to the idea of participating in a society that is basically built on institutionalized inequality.121

A traditional Eurocentric bias that lumps undifferentiated masses of "Africans" into one single category and undifferentiated masses of "Indians" into another, while making fine distinctions among the different populations of Europe, permits the ignoring of cases in which genocide against Africans and American Indians has resulted in the total extermination—purposefully carried out—of entire cultural, social, religious, and ethnic groups.

As American conservatives have felt the ebb of cultural power away from them, they have come to feel watched and judged. They do not like it. "How does it feel to be a problem?" memorably asked W. E. B. Du Bois.

But unlike the person with exquisite taste in painting or perfume, the movie nerd is classless as well. Grasping the genius of Russ Meyer or George Romero or Herschell Gordon Lewis carries no cultural cachet and gets no one laid, believe me.

It is a common understanding among many traditional African peoples that human beings do not simply die without a reason. If someone dies, someone must have killed them. If a Lele woman died in childbirth, for example, this was assumed to be because she had committed adultery. The adulterer was thus responsible for the death. Sometimes she would confess on her deathbed, otherwise the facts of the matter would have to be established through divination. It was the same if a baby died.

The preponderance of canned laughter on the American boob tube presents the viewer with a conundrum of three choices without the possibility of answering incorrectly. 1. The material is not that funny. 2. The audience is really that stupid. 3. Both 1 and 2.

Techno music is the foundational influence upon the modern tunes that saturate the cultural airwaves with unabashed monotony giving today's tunes all of the lyrical sophistication of a kindergarten merry-go-round rhyme combined with the musical nuances of an electric can opener.

Thomas Merton characterized it: "One breaks through the limits of cultural structural religion ... [where one experiences] a kind of limitlessness.... lack of inhibition, ... psychic fullness of creativity, which mark the fully integrated maturity of the 'enlightened self.' "116

He did not like Europe, which he regarded as a lesser continent, populated with people significantly greedier and more materialistic than Americans. It was a place, he noted, where

The multiple human needs and desires that demand privacy among two or more people in the midst of social life must inevitably lead to cryptology wherever men thrive and wherever they write. Cultural diffusion seems a less likely explanation for its occurrence in so many areas, many of them distant and isolated.

Englishmen learn Christ's law best in English. Moses heard God's law in his own tongue; so did Christ's apostles.

It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what 'tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

Comedy [deals] with a lot of the same areas where our defenses are the strongest - race, religion, politics, sexuality.

Australians, we've got a very healthy sense of humor in us. God forbid we take ourselves too seriously so it's kind of a cultural trait.

God is back and Europe as a whole still doesn't get it. It is our biggest single collective cultural and intellectual blind spot.

For example, Americans seem reluctant to take on Shakespeare because you don't think you're very good at it - which is rubbish. You're missing out here.

But my Arabic is pretty good. It's good enough to have conversations with people, to understand what they say, to understand what they're feeling.

The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.