Quotes About Culture

to become a Christian one did not have to become a European. [Jesuit mission philosophy]

If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!

We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck them.

If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em! Don't sleep with people who don't read!

Nothing is more impotent than an unread library.

What one generation tolerates, the next generation will embrace.

Vice does not lose its character by becoming fashionable.

The blame culture that still prevails in the majority of businesses works against this, as it causes "false reality syndrome" or "I will tell you what I think you want to hear, or what will keep me out of trouble.

Unfortunately, this original Christian vision of universal equality and freedom was soon obscured by Christians themselves. What happened, to cut a long story short, is that Christians almost from the beginning lacked the spiritual enlightenment and will of character to break with the existing social systems. Instead of reaffirming people's new freedom in Christ, they gradually fell back into an acceptance of the pagan world views of their own culture.

As for the Homeland, it had another meaning which had nothing to do with geographical place. It concerned not where you lived but how you lived, for, in effect, it defined a way of thinking, of looking at things.

The Great American Novel.

Notah's wife, who wears the traditional excessive mascara of her people

What we do with the product of genius is first of all ram it down to the lowest common denominator and then multiply it by the vulgarest possible fraction. -from "Pawley's Peepholes

don't know whether that would be the zenith or nadir of decadence

Far away in South Kensington Mrs

Culture has lead us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption.

They would be hyphenated people. Somali-American. What a strange thing, Abdikarim thought, to become hyphenated to a country now gratifying itself with the impression that all Somalis were pirates.

People are different in different places,' he thought hazily. 'And if they're all right in one place, it's best to leave them there.

I have also paid some attention to what language can tell us. Messages perish as they are uttered, but language itself is remarkably durable. Sometimes it preserves useful clues to a more abstract and thought-oriented part of the human past than material artifacts do.

Words, as. it happens, sometimes survive the millennia better than material objects, and they do so best in areas in which the culture changed only very slowly - as in the far north, where the intense winter cold discouraged immigrants.

Along the way I kept running across wonderful bits of information about the women - virtually always women - who produced these textiles and about the values that different societies put on the products and their makers. When I talked about my work, people seemed especially eager for these vignettes, stories that told of women's lives thousands of years ago.

Furthermore, material remains tell us little about the intangible parts of culture: about marriage and dinner recipes and how the world was categorized. (Anyone who has ever learned a second language knows that different cultures look at the world differently, from what colors and how many of them form the rainbow to who is counted as kin.)

I, of course, took the opportunity to interpose with pigheaded Wallace pride, 'I am not English, you ignorant Jerry bastard, I am a SCOT.

I need complicated railroad journeys and people speaking to me in foreign languages to keep me happy. I want to see the world and write stories about everything I see.