Quotes About Culture

One cannot quarrel with religious beliefs, especially of a strange, remote, half-understood culture. But when the beliefs become a delusion maintained against natural evidence to the point of losing the independence of a people, they may fairly be called folly.

Proper society did not think about MAKING money, only about spending it.

I found it interesting that as people become more technically oriented all over the world, at the same time people are becoming increasingly spiritual. The success of the Da Vinci code - even though it was a great yawn - also showed people's interest in religion.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature is dumb, science is crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.

Europe slipped back into savagery and paganism.

Colombian humor is very black, very sarcastic.

I won't leave forks in the dish rack overnight because I believe that the tines attract demonic energy.

The idea so prevalent that man without woman, or woman without man, is an imperfect being, was the cause of the great repugnance with which the Jews and other nations of the East regarded celibacy.

In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence. But if you try that line in Europe, especially in France, they say, Oh, no! You're so English! I think I'm probably anchored somewhere in the Channel.

In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of the state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.

In ancient Greece, adolescence was a time when young men left their biological families to become the lovers of adult men. Sexuality was but one element of an affectional and educational relationship in which youths learned the ways of manhood

We travel because, no matter how comfortable we are at home, there's a part of us that wants--that needs--to see new vistas, take new tours, obtain new traveler's checks, buy new souvenirs, order new entrees, introduce new bacteria into our intestinal tracts, learn new words for "transfusion," and have all the other travel adventures that make us want to french-kiss our doormats when we finally get home.

Social and cultural change, however desirable, should not be effected by the engines of national power. Let us, through persuasion and education, seek to improve institutions we deem defective. But let us, in doing so, respect the orderly processes of the law. Any other course enthrones tyrants and dooms freedom.

The problem with 'the crown jewel of Chinese literature' [Dream of the Red Chamber] is that it has two thousand pages and an equal number of characters, and the hero is an effeminate ass who should have either been spanked or decapitated, both ends being equally objectionable.

Az egyiptomiak számára ugyanis az isten nemcsak távoli volt és sokféle formájú, hanem egyben a személyiség része is.

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one's own culture but within oneself.

For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.

Yes," Howie said solemnly. "I can teach you how to be more 'street'". "For God's sake…" "Or is it 'urban'? I can't remember. Anyway, I can teach you, grasshopper. Or hip-hopper.

We have forgotten that the proper function of the school is to transmit the cultural heritage of one generation to the next generation, and to so train the minds of the new generation as to make them capable of absorbing ancient learning and applying it to the problem of its own day.

For a Jewish guy, I've recorded a lot of Christmas albums.

Scratch the thin veneer of what man called culture or civilization and in most cases you would find a barbarian waiting to be set free.

Charles de Gaulle once said, "The French will only be united under the threat of danger. Nobody can simply bring together a country that has 265 kinds of cheese.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.