Quotes About Culture

Did you know that the highest form of respect for the Navajo is to call someone Grandfather? In fact, that's how they address God.

The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own.

This had seemed a safe choice, since to be against the Beatles (late-middle period) is to be against life.

People who go to the Opera, they don't go to the toilet, not even at home.

The English feel schadenfreude even about themselves.

It's a funny language, German. For one thing, everybody shouts it.

Whatever junk novels were, however they worked, they were close to therapy, and airports were close to therapy. They both belonged to the culture of the waiting room. Piped music, the language of calming suasion. Come this way--yes, the flight attendant will see you now. Airports, junk novels: they were taking your mind off mortal fear.

barrios; each barrio has two or three gangs, and all the gangs are theoretically

I love words, that's all. And without this - (Holds up pen.) human history would fall into a black pit and there'd be almost no trace of it.

They did not speak until the reception at the Marriott. The walls were edged with tables of blini, fish pie, and piroshki.

The main goal here is to make ourselves "familiar enough" to straight people to win their acceptance. But why should that be of paramount importance? Precisely why would we want to do ourselves over in their image? To become more like them would be to forget our own singular history and the special insights and perspectives that derive from it, giving us, as spies in the culture, a unique perspective for evaluating and critiquing aspects of mainstream culture.

One of the most productive, cultured and creative Jewish communities in the world was almost at an end. President Nasser then ordered Egyptian Jewry's contribution to the life and prosperity of modern Egypt to be erased from all Egyptian history books.14

Jews fled deep into the Sahara and lived there among the Berber tribes, some of whom they later converted to Judaism. Ironically, it was a Cyrenaican Jew, Mark–the St. Mark of the Gospels–who converted to Christianity and founded

One expects philosophy to promote, and even to accelerate, the practical and technical business of culture by alleviating it, making it easier. {9}

The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.

Nietzsche did track down Platonism in its most covert form: Christianity and its secularizations are thoroughly Platonism for the people.

Our thinking today is charged with the task to think what the Greeks have thought in an even more Greek manner.

There is much talk nowadays of blood and soil [Blut und Boden] as frequently invoked powers. Literati, whom one comes across even today, have already seized hold of them. Blood and soil are certainly powerful and necessary, but they are not a sufficient condition for the Dasein of a people.

How many Germans live who speak their mother tongue effortlessly and yet are unable to understand Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or one of Hölderlin's hymns! Hence whoever has mastered the Greek language, or has some acquaintance with it by accident or choice, possess not the least proof thereby that he is able to think according to the thought of a Greek thinker.

A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

I wept for my children and all black children who have been denied a knowledge of their heritage; I wept for all white children, who, through daily miseducation, are taught that the Negro is an irrelevant entity in American society; I wept for all the white parents and teachers who are forced to overlook the fact that the wealth of cultural and technological progress in America is a result of the commonwealth of inpouring contributions.

It hardly sounds like France," he said. "Paris never was France," she said.