Quotes About Culture

Pero los judíos, además, son conocidos por la forma en que estimulan los logros intelectuales en sus hijos.

Il moque l'accent américain, « ils disent champagne comme John Wayne ».

We don't have anything like that here. War masks and so on.

The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization... Why we do things will not change, but how we will do them will... If the Library is to fulfill its purpose in the future, librarians must commit to a culture of continuous operational change, accept risk and uncertainty as key properties of the profession, and uphold service to the user as our most valuable directive.

This is the culture your raising your kids in, don't be suprised when it blows up in your face.

The key to changing the way people think is to change what's popular. That's why rather than submit to the mainstream, you have to become it—and then overcome it.

I find that the hardest work in the world—it may in fact be impossible—is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.

We are culturally predisposed to sheltering criticism from criticism; we have enshrined the iconoclast

If these laws [in the Bible] belonged to any other ancient culture we would approach them very differently. We need not bother to reject the code of Hammurabi. Presumably it is because Moses is still felt to make some claim on us that this project of discrediting his law is persisted in with such energy. The unscholarly character of the project may derive from the supposed familiarity of the subject.

We are in the process of disabling our most distinctive achievement - our educational system - in the name of making the country more like itself.

I am not the first to suggest that anthropology arose in Western thought in an inauspicious period, one characterized by colonialism and so-called racial science. But I seem to be more or less alone in my conviction that, in all its primitivity, this anthropology continues to color the ways in which we conceive of human nature.

The willingness to indulge in ideological thinking - that is, in thinking that by definition is not one's own, which is blind to experience and to the contradictions that arise when broader fields of knowledge are consulted - is a capitulation no one should ever make. It is a betrayal of our magnificent minds and of all the splendid resources our culture has prepared for their use.

It is true for everyone that the experience that society gives to us, or denies us, is profoundly formative.

Ideological thinking - that is in thinking that is by definition not one's own, which is blind to experience and to the contradictions that arise when broader fields of knowledge are consulted - is a capitulation no one should ever make. It is a betrayal of our magnificent minds and of all the splendid resources our culture has prepared for their use.

I suspect Scottishness is another name for predestination. It explains everything, more or less.

The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency.

I'm only interested in an art which can change the ideology of society....Art which is only committed to aesthetic values is incomplete.

Theories about world literature, of which fairy tale is a fundamental part, emphasize the porousness of borders, geographical and inguistic: no frontiercan keep a good story from roaming. It will travel, and travel far, and travel back again in a different guise, a changed mood, and, above all, a new meaning.

Behind every book for young people and every global product of family entertainment, the hum of boardroom discussion about the politics of the work can be heard.

L'architecture transforme un état de nature, en état de culture.

In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns.

Don Croce immediately led him into the garden, for like all Sicilians he ate his meals out of doors when he could.

Why couldn't he get a straight answer from any of them? Because this was Sicily, he thought. Sicilians had a horror of truth.

After all, education is the key to a higher civilization.