Quotes About Culture

All the foods you regularly eat are the ones that you learned to eat. Everyone starts life drinking milk. After that, it's all up for grabs.

There are signs that the Japanese themselves consider their excellent cuisine as an essential part of what it means to be Japanese.

The imagination is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.

In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.

The plainest row of books that cloth or paper ever covered is more significant of refinement than the most elaborately carved furniture.

A people uneducated is like an iron mountain whose ore is unwrought.

I have never regarded any theater as much more than the conclusion to a dinner or the prelude to a supper.

Literalness, however, is not the substance from which human culture is made.

The development of a country has to start at the foundation of the society, the "family".

Each country has its own manner of telephoning. The Russians, at least, are honest. They say, "It is Ivan Ivanovich who is bothering you." The

I'm Jessica Proot," I said, self-consciously releasing her hand. "Dzhesica?" she savored the awkward name doubtfully. "I call you Lapochka, for small." "What does it mean?" I asked. "Means: hand of cat." "Of cat?

No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.

What happy and successful single people are threatening is not the institution of marriage but the cultural consensus on its special value. Same-sex marriage does not threaten the institution of marriage, either. The sticking point (or at least one of them) is that large numbers of Americans remain unconvinced that gay men and lesbians are the moral equivalent of straight people. To them, keeping marriage pure and sacred means keeping same-sex partners out.

Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have left the vulgar stuff alone.

We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans -- convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.

My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you're born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train's pulled into Piccadilly Circus they've become a Londoner.

sudden attack of culture snobbery is a common affliction among policemen of a certain rank and age; it's like a normal midlife crisis only with more chandeliers and foreign languages.

This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.

For a certain generation of African immigrants cleaning offices became part of the culture like male circumcision and supporting Arsenal.

He was a Parisian,' he said. 'You can never be sure what Parisians believe in – beyond Paris of course.

Fish and chip night was a Kumar family tradition that dated back to when Jaget was courting his wife and they used to meet in the last white English-owned fish and chip shop in Wembley on the basis that none of their relatives would go in there. "It

Never diss somebody's mum, never play chess with the Kurdish mafia, and never lie down with a woman who's more magical than you are. I

Perhaps dragons were a Northern thing, like flat caps and an ingrained sense of grievance.

but the first rule about a black woman's hair is you don't talk about a black woman's hair. And the second rule is you don't ever touch a black woman's hair without getting written permission first. And that includes after sex, marriage, or death for that matter. This courtesy is not reciprocated.