Quotes About Culture

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

nunna daul Tsuny in the Cherokee language

One of the consequences of printing is that it tends to standardize language

When a peasant has a baby girl, the family puts up a vegetable every year and gives the jars to her when she's married. This

In Welsh tradition, a plate was put on the coffin with bread and salt, and a local professional sin eater arrived to eat the salt.

A world without fishing would be sad.

AFTER THE FALL of Rome in the fifth century, garum was often thought of as just one of the unpleasant hedonistic excesses for which Rome was remembered. Leaving fish organs in the sun to rot was not an idea that endured in less extravagant cultures. Of course when garum was made properly, the salt prevented rotting until the fermentation took hold. But it became increasingly difficult to convince people of this.

Nobody can easily bring together a nation that has 265 kinds of cheese.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND QUENTIN FIORE, The Medium Is the Massage, 1967

Infants who were suckled by the same wet nurse were regarded as milk siblings and were forbidden by the Assyrians from intermarrying.

Segundo's best friend Silvio traded appliances for clothes, designer clothes—well, not really, but he thought they were—Chinese-made Armani suits and Italian silk shirts from Vietnam, all with designer labels occasionally misspelled. As in the "Versache" pants.

The church is meant to lead the world in hearing God's voice and shaping culture.

Multicultural societies are so invested in "tolerance" that they'll tolerate the explicitly intolerant (and avowedly unicultural) before they'll tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance.

In his book Men to boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity, Gary Cross asks simply: Where have all the men gone? Like George Will, Victor David Hanson, and others who've posed that question, Professor Cross is no doubt aware that he sounds old and square. But in a land of middle-aged teenagers somebody has to.

Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. Atheistic humanism became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumanism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction.

Demographically and psychologically, Europeans have chosen to commit societal suicide, and their principal heir and beneficiary will be Islam.

Applied globally, political correctness obliges us to forswear sovereignty.

You can live as free men, but if you choose not to, your society will surely die.

But that's Islam in the third millennium: they want the certainties of seventh-century society with the conveniences of the twenty-first century.

You can't help noticing that since abandoning its faith in the unseen world Europe seems also to have lost its faith in the seen one. Consider this poll taken in 2002 for the first anniversary of September 11: 61 percent of Americans said they were optimistic about the future, as opposed to 43 percent of Canadians, 42 percent of Britons, 29 percent of the French, 23 percent of Russians, and 15 percent of Germans. I wouldn't reckon those numbers will get any cheerier over the years.

much of the western world has a big hole where its sense of identity ought to be.

Having done an impressive job of demolishing the basic societal building block of the family, the ambitious liberal is now moving on to demolishing the basic building block of the sexes.

Multiculturalism is really a suicide cult conceived by the western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own. And that's particularly unworthy of the British, whose language, culture, and law have been the single greatest force for good in this world.

Nixon's avowedly 'square' White House was, in fact, less cheesy than Clinton's Lite FM programming and more confident than the Kennedys' culturally craven collect-the-set approach.