Quotes About Culture

Jefferson, who spent his life collecting books, many of which he donated to the Library of Congress, boasted that America was the only country whose farmers read Homer. "A native of America who cannot read or write," said John Adams, "is as rare an appearance . . . as a Comet or an Earthquake.

Could one really concentrate on one's job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Brontë because she appeared to condone adultery?

our true home, our true history, was in our poetry.

We had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure and virtuous, as Nassrin's uncle had said, or dirty and fun. What was alien to us was eros, true sensuality.

Whoever we were—and it was not really important what religion we belonged to, whether we wished to wear the veil or not, whether we observed certain religious norms or not—we had become the figment of someone else's dreams.

All his life had been a struggle for power—not political power, which he disdained, but the power of culture. For him culture and civilization were everything. He had said that the greatest freedom of man was his "independence of thought," which enabled the artist to enjoy the "aggression of infinite modes of being.

Brewing and serving tea is an aesthetic ritual in Iran, performed several times a day. We serve tea in transparent glasses, small and shapely, the most popular of which is call slim-wasted:round and full at the top, narrow in the middle and round and full at the bottom. The color of the tea and its subtle aroma are and indication of the brewer's skill.

I had come to a conclusion: our culture shunned sex because it was too involved with it. It had to suppress sex violently, for the same reason that an impotent man will put his beautiful wife under lock and key.

Because her name is not Lolita; her real name is Dolores, which as you know in Latin means `dolor.' So her real name is associated with sorrow and with anguish and with innocence. While Lolita becomes a sort of lightheaded, seductive and airy name, the Lolita of our novel is both of these at the same time. And in our culture here today, we only associate it with one aspect of that little girl, and the crassest interpretation of her.

Leftists' mustaches covered their upper lips, to distinguish them from the Muslims, who carved out a razor-thin line between upper lip and mustache. Some Muslims also grew beards or what stubble they could muster. The leftist women wore khaki or dull green—large, loose shirts over loose trousers—and the Muslim girls scarves or chadors. In between these two immutable rivers stood the non-political students, who were all mechanically branded as monarchists.

The Islamic Republic has taken us back to Jane Austen's times. God bless the arranged marriage! Nowadays, girls marry either because their families force them, or to get green cards, or to secure financial stability, or for sex—they marry for all kinds of reasons, but rarely for love.

These people," he had said with his inscrutable smile, "are different from us. They don't care about books and such things.

Several months into the class, my girls and I discovered that almost every one of us had had at least one nightmare in some form or another in which we either had forgotten to wear our veil or had not worn it, and always in these dreams the dreamer was running, running away.

He was baffled by Hemingway, felt amibvalent about Fitzgerald, loved Twain and though we should have a national writer like him. I loved and admired Twain but thought all writers were national writers and that there was no such thing as a National Writer.

He also recommended that women dress properly when sleeping, so that if their houses were hit, they would not be "indecently exposed to strangers' eyes.

Wigger: a young white who wants desperately to be down with hip-hop, who identifies more strongly with Black culture than white. (What's disturbing about this expression is its racist implications: if white kids down with hip-hop are wiggers, what does that make Black kids down with hip-hop?)

How does the saying go? When two locusts fight, it is always the crow that feasts.' Is that a Luo expression?' I asked. Sayid's face broke into a bashful smile. We have a similar expression in Luo,' he said, 'but actually I must admit that I read this particular expression in a book by Chinua Achebe. The Nigerian writer. I like his books very much. He speaks the truth about Africa's predicament. the Nigerian, the Kenya - it is the same. We share more than divides us.

And so the world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed.

It wasn't a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks.

the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy ... betrays a poverty of ambition.

No person, in any culture, likes to be bullied. No person likes living in fear because his or her ideas are different. Nobody likes being poor or hungry, and nobody likes to live under an economic system in which the fruits of his or her labor go perpetually unrewarded.

White folks. The term itself was uncomfortable in my mouth at first; I felt like a non-native speaker tripping over a difficult phrase.

Kalau mereka tidak berakar pada tradisi mereka sendiri, mereka tak akan mampu menghargai kebudayaan orang lain.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.