Quotes About Culture

We dress the way we think.

Many people felt much closer to their own sex than to what was seen as the literally "opposite"—and alien—sex. In letters and diaries, women often referred to men as "the grosser sex.

Certainly people fell in love during those thousands of years, sometimes with their own spouses. But marriage was not fundamentally about love. It was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love.

On the North American plains in the 1930s, a Kiowa Indian woman commented to a researcher that "a woman can always get another husband, but she has only one brother.

During the rule of the Southern Dynasties (A.D. 317-589), one Chinese princess argued that she, like her brother the emperor, was entitled to a harem. Her wishes prevailed, and she was assigned thirty male "concubines."10

What about traditional Chinese and Sudanese ghost or spirit marriages, in which one of the partners is actually dead? In these societies a youth might be given in marriage to the dead son or daughter of another family, in order to forge closer ties between the two sets of relatives.

A date took place in the public sphere, away from home. It involved money, because when you moved from drinking mother's lemonade on the front porch to buying Cokes at a restaurant, someone had to pay. And because in the context of women's second-class economic status, the boy would have to pay, a girl could not ask a boy to take her out. The initiative thus shifted from the girl and her family to the boy.

Certainly people fell in love during those thousands of years, sometimes with their own spouses. But marriage was not fundamentally about love.

In Europe and the United States today such an arrangement would be a surefire recipe for jealousy, bitter breakups, and very mixed-up kids. But among the Bari people this practice was in the best interests of the child. The secondary fathers were expected to provide the child with fish and game, with the result that a child with a secondary father was twice as likely to live to the age of fifteen as a brother or sister without such a father.32

I was completely flummoxed a couple of years ago in Minnesota when a group of teenage girls told me that several of them were having oral sex with their boyfriends so they could still be virgins when they graduated from high school.

More than half of Spanish women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine are single. The rate of marriage in Italy is much lower than in the United States. Japan shares with Scandinavia the distinction of having the highest percentage of unmarried women between age twenty and forty of anywhere in the world.44

The renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead said that what marks the beginning and assures the continuity of civilization is compassion.

while many of the absolutes we cling to are social constructs (varying across cultures and over time), behind these changing constructs we also find some universal human constants.

A cultura ocidental já não tem qualquer mitologia viável para sustentá-la. Em qualquer cultura, o mito sempre atua com uma realidade maior, mais universal. As pessoas sempre tiveram necessidade de um modelo para servir de guia äs suas vidas coletivas e para dar significado à sua experiência individual.

Nowadays, the tendency to be preoccupied with having, at the expense of losing touch with the dimension of being, is becoming ever more pronounced. In times such as ours, when secular and material values dominate social and cultural life to an extreme degree, the intensity of the urge to have creates an ever widening gulf from the awareness of who and what we are.

Much of what animated me in those days I now recognize as the romantic yearnings of an idealistic, alienated, and aimless young man. I endowed these strange, exotic people, about whom I knew little, with all the virtues that my own culture seemed to lack.

Even though we are the most privileged and richest human beings there have been so far, in terms of the stability and length of our lives and the cultural resources available to us, we're not as happy as we should be. I'd like to see politics more oriented toward the question of happiness; certainly I'd like to see religion more concerned with making integral, happy people and raising the quality of personal life in our culture.

But this is an instance where we also have to allow for some creative licence. Avatar is about a clash of cultures, the heavy handed technological human civilisation versus the gracef Navi, living lightly in their world.

The mass of people was ignorant, driven by fashions, fads, and the tongues of orators...

Just like the Spanish on Earth in pursuit of gold, the twenty-second-century conquistadors of RDA, are here in pursuit of unobtainium, and have come face to face with hunter-gatherers of the forest

Fortasse accipio oratio stridens vestri. Sum Quintus Fabius, centurio navis stellae 'Malleus Jesu.' Quid estis, quid agitis in hac provincia? Et quid est mixti lingua vestri? Germanicus est? Non dubito quin vos ex Germaniae Exteriorae. Cognovi de genus vestri prius. Bene? Quam respondebitis mihi?

Harlem was the area between 130th Street and 143rd Street, between Madison and Seventh avenues. In the late nineteenth century, as huge migrations of Russian and Polish Jews flooded into the city, fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe, Harlem became primarily Jewish. Russian Jews dominated the 1910 census figures of the area, and next came the Italians, the Irish, the Germans, the English, Hungarians, Czechs and others from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Blacks did not arrive in New York in large numbers until after World War I, and, following the lead of the foreign immigrants, they moved to Harlem. Most were from the rural South, and most were poor. As the blacks moved in, the Jews moved out—north into the Bronx or, if they could afford it, to the South Shore of Queens and Long Island.

The old differentiation between the German "uptown" Jew and the Russian of the "Lower East Side" has become a difference between the "quiet, cultivated Wall Street type" and the "noisy, pushy, Seventh Avenue type"—who do not mix any more easily than oil and water. And out of all this has come the impression that Jews "dominate" both these fields in the city.