Quotes About Culture

America is a such a melting pot, I'm not sure if roast chicken is the classic comfort food for everybody.

Indeed, it seems the prescription for highest software productivity is almost a Zen paradox; if you want the most efficient production, you must give up trying to make programmers produce. Handle their subsistence, give them their heads, and forget about deadlines. To a conventional manager this sounds crazily indulgent and doomed — but it is exactly the recipe with which the open-source culture is now clobbering its competition.

Twenty years ago, teenage boys in the United States drank twice as much milk as soda; now they drink twice as much soda as milk.

Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music—combined.

In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2000, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music—combined.

Americans already drink soda at an annual rate of about fifty-six gallons per person – that's nearly six hundred twelve-ounce cans of soda per person.

Popper is philosophically so uncultured, so fully a primitive ideological brawler, that he is not able to even approximately to reproduce correctly the contents of one page of Plato. Reading is of no use to him; he is too lacking in knowledge to understand what the author says.

In 1978 Jurgen Honscheid came over from West Germany for the first Hawaiian World Cup and discovered jumping, which was new to him, although Mike Horgan and I were

Honscheid came over from West Germany for the first Hawaiian World Cup and discovered jumping, which was new to him, although Mike Horgan and I were jumping in 1974 and 1975. There

the twenty-first century might be termed a Ludic Century, an epoch in which games and play are the model for how we interact with culture and with each other.

Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.

Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.

When I met my husband, I refused to invite him home for Passover because I was embarrassed my mother might serve all the catered dishes in the wrong order.

Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.

Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

People become librarians because they know too much. Their knowledge extends beyond mere categories. They cannot be confined to disciplines. They bring order to chaos. They bring wisdom and culture to the masses. Librarians rule. And they will kick the crap out of anyone who says otherwise.

Monsieur Ibrahim: To find out if a country is rich or poor, look at the bins. If there are bins and no rubbish, it's rich. If there's rubbish by the bins, it's neither rich nor poor... it's touristy. And if there's rubbish but no bins, then it's poor.

Vico, who looks at the whole of human history and says, "mind made all this

The way in which we view human life and society is the same whether we are concerned with things of the past or things of the present.

Man's nature, his passions and anxieties, are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of what we call history.

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.

The fabric of archetypal canon which used to support the average man has given way... [p. 439]