Quotes About Culture

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government

hot vit lon, a local favorite, a duck embryo boiled and served inside the shell—

Instead of being assembled by genes, the worm was assembled by "memes," a word coined by British scientist and polemicist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Memes are original ideas. Dawkins argued that they play the same role in cultural evolution as genes play in biology, getting passed along from person to person, surviving and adapting as they move.

As far back as man's history goes the growth of police powers immediately preceded and caused the fall and destruction of each culture.

Too many churches today have preachers who look to the culture around them not simply for the most effective methods of communicating their message but for the most effective message to be preached.

Churches don't need programs so much as they need cultures of discipling, cultures where each member prioritizes the spiritual health of others.

Contextualization is about showing the relevance of the gospel, not making the gospel relevant. That's the essence of contextualization.

Today, we live in a culture that is less concerned with excellence and more concerned with authenticity. That's why there are more than two hundred reality TV shows.

Now more than ever God's people must be committed to being gospel centered. Jesus can no longer be out there somewhere on the horizon as we look to culture, religion, politics, spirituality, or morality for our true north.

Travel, though it broadens the mind, narrows the life expectancy.

He had dreadlocks, which is what some black people have, but he was white, and dreadlocks is when you never wash your hair and it looks like old rope.

These are some of my behavioral problems... P) Hating France

Humankind, or at least American-kind, will lose its edge as we produce more and more pipsqueaks and everyone gets nicer. Whole generations of pipsqueaks will be so fucking nice you won't be able to tell a man from a woman...And it will get worse and worse as people mistake nice for good. HItler was nice, supposedly, most of the time. A lot of good that did...

I've never touched a woman, Nicolò said, in deep despair. You will. It'll take you years to learn what to do—not because it's a matter of technique, but precisely because it isn't. It's a matter of deep understanding, and of love. Nowadays, people have a problem with sex, I think. Popular culture is obsessed with it. It has become almost a sickness. It never was when I was a boy, and when I was in my prime.

THE ROMANS SALTED their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted.

Were it not for their aversion to pigs, the Egyptians would probably have invented ham, for they salt-cured meat and knew how to domesticate the pig. But Egyptian religious leadership pronounced pigs carriers of leprosy, made pig farmers social outcasts, and never depicted the animal on the walls of tombs.

ONCE I STOOD on the bank of a rice paddy in rural Sichuan Province, and a lean and aging Chinese peasant, wearing a faded forty-year-old blue jacket issued by the Mao government in the early years of the Revolution, stood knee deep in water and apropos of absolutely nothing shouted defiantly at me, "We Chinese invented many things!

Nobody can easily bring together a nation that has 265 kinds of cheese' (Charles de Gaulle, 1961 speech)

Writing beautifully—calligraphy—was China's first graphic art form. Although elsewhere in the world people drew first and learned to write later, in China, the reverse was true. First you learned to write beautifully, and then you painted. After mastering those twin skills, you could move on to writing poetry, but many chose to remain just calligraphers, a highly appreciated art form in China. Another

In Middle English, cod meant a bag or a sack, or by inference, a scrotum, which is why the outrageous purse that sixteenth-century men wore at their crotch to give the appearance of enormous and decorative genitals was called a codpiece.

Where there are Norwegian communities, there are cod clubs.

Don't you sense the enormity of your mistake – you invade a country without understanding its music. – Norman Mailer

while every major language has a word for violence, there is no word to express the idea of nonviolence

The guardians of Celtic culture, the Druids, did not leave written records. So most of what we know of them is from Greek and Roman historians who described the Celts as huge and terrifying men in bright fabrics.