Quotes About Culture

The last generations's worst fears become the next one's B-grade entertainment.

Come on, people. Doesn't anybody remember how to take a big old knife, whack open a pumpkin, scrape out the seeds, and bake it? We can carve a face onto it, but can't draw and quarter it? Are we not a nation known worldwide for our cultural zest for blowing up flesh, on movie and video screens and/or armed conflict? Are we in actual fact too squeamish to stab a large knife into a pumpkin? Wait till our enemies find out.

Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.

Isn't it awfully sad to thing that's all history amounts to, just following the next stupid fashion?

Every family's its own trip to China.

The last generation's worst fears became the next one's B-grade entertainment.

After arriving on the ancestral soil I figured out pretty quickly why that [Italian] heritage swamps all competition. It's a culture that sweeps you in, sits you down in the kitchen, and feeds you so well you really don't want to leave.

That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he's forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it's called Monotony.

I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.

My prior experience with young men was to hear them swear 'Christ almighty in the craphouse!' at any dress with too many buttons.

It's a fact of our culture that the loudest mouths get the most airplay, and the loudmouths are saying that in times of crisis it's treasonous to question our leaders.

You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back.

we consume. I think that's just how we have to be." "Of course you think that. When everybody around you thinks the same way, you can't even see what you're believing in.

The way he talked sounded part Yankee, part foreign, like one of those friendly Irish policeman in the old movies: Ouch, mind you!

We're genetically predisposed toward certain behaviors that we've collectively decided are unhelpful; adultery and racism are possible examples. With reasonable success, we mitigate those impulses through civil codes, religious rituals, maternal warnings—the whole bag of tricks we call culture.

Killing is a culturally loaded term, for most of us inextricably tied up with some version of a command that begins, "Thou shalt not." Every faith has it. And for all but perhaps the Jainists of India, that command is absolutely conditional. We know it does not refer to mosquitoes.

At its heart, a genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them. Step one, probably, is to live on the land that feeds them, or at least on the same continent, ideally the same region. Step two is to be able to countenance the ideas of food and dirt in the same sentence, and three is to start poking into one's supply chain to learn where things are coming from.

Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony. Well, I put up with him anyway.

The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners. Our culture is not acquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're juts particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text.

colonial American and Australian schoolchildren once memorized poems about British skylarks while the blue jays or cockatoos (according to continent) squawked outside, utterly ignored. The dominant culture has a way of becoming more real than the stuff at hand.

Pueblo men have to marry out of the clan, and sometimes they go off the pueblo. The land down here stays with the women.

Waar het om gaat is dat als je het hebt over identiteit, je dat niet zomaar uit mensen kunt wegredeneren. Het verdwijnt niet door de minachting van buitenstaanders, het wordt er juist door verhevigd.

Bangala means something precious and dear. But the way he pronounces it, it means the poisonwood tree.

The dominant culture has a way of becoming more real than the stuff at hand.