Quotes About Culture

Many people pursue a regular and uninterrupted course of idleness in the evenings because they think that there is no alternative to idleness but the study of literature; and they do not happen to have a taste for literature. This is a great mistake.

France is the land where dalliance is so passionately understood.

Americans are just beginning to regard food the way the French always have. Dinner is not what you do in the evening before something else. Dinner is the evening.

The irony of our culture is that people are constantly telling other people to go to hell, but no one tells them to go to heaven.

Even the few serious crimes that did occur received no particular attention in the news. For well-bred people do not, after all, care to read about the social gaffes of others.

The existence of so much leisure would have created tremendous problems a century before. Education had overcome most of these, for a well stocked mind is safe from boredom.

It was such a nuisance that men were fundamentally polygamous. On the other hand, if they weren't… Yes, perhaps it was better this way, after all.

For well-bred people do not, after all, care to read about the social gaffes of others.

Afrikaans is one of the world's best languages in which to curse; even when spoken politely, it can bruise innocent bystanders.

My father always said that you cannot graft a culture of science and engineering onto an Iron Age society. And so it's proving.' Bisesa studied him. 'You'll have to tell me about your father.

But you must remember you're dealing with human beings. You can transport them to another world and give them a paradise, but they still come equipped with their fears and insecurities and cultural predilections.

The French produce the best second-raters in the world.

You must know that the English people would never accept a half-black woman as their queen.

Miraculous though they were—perhaps the supreme triumph of the science that had produced them—they were the creations of a sick culture, a culture that had been afraid of many things.

Kalevala, whereas

You see," Nicole added, "the mythological Eden was a beginning, the start of what we might call our modern Western culture.

Western man had relearned—what the rest of the world had never forgotten—that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.

Though unmusical, German is the most expressive of all languages

I am an Irishman, sir. Irish Irish? Yes, sir.

In rapid succession we passed through the fringe of fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical London, literary London, commercial London, and, finally, maritime London, till we came to a riverside city of a hundred thousand souls, where the tenement houses swelter and reek with the outcasts of Europe.

The second step in incarnation is to accept the host culture as a valid, albeit imperfect, way of life. It is useful to remember that culture is basically a set of conceptual tools and social arrangements that people use to adapt to their environment and to order their lives in the pursuit of food, shelter, and family and community relationships.

No matter how far diverged by their singular histories, every human culture in the Thousand Suns resonates to its tragic echoes.

We are a race of artists. What are we doing about it?

In a period of international crisis, the doctor said gently, when you find, for instance, cultural patterns rapidly disintergrating... International crisis, Mrs. Arnold said. Patterns. She began to cry quietly. [...] Reality, she said, and went out.