Quotes About Culture

Just Like Canada, with Better Bacon.

Is distinctive black culture the cause of economic disparity between whites and blacks or merely the reflection of it?

Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences.

is still common for a bride's parents to give the groom or his family cash, cars, or real estate. The

51 percent of Indian men said that wife-beating is justified under certain circumstances; more surprisingly, 54 percent of women agreed—

offer an environment that is simply not conducive to learning.

It should also be noted that many girls' names, including Shirley, Carol, Leslie, Hilary, Renee, Stacy, and Tracy began life as boys' names, but girls' names almost never cross over to boys.)

Young women in Cameroon have their breasts "ironed"—beaten or massaged by a wooden pestle or a heated coconut shell—to make them less sexually tempting.

But Engels and Dickens suggested a new twist: that the advance of civilization produced barbarity as an unavoidable waste product, as essential to its metabolism as the gleaming spires and cultivated thought of polite society. The barbarians weren't storming the gates.

Ancient history is always colliding with the present in the most literal sense: our genes, our language, our culture all stamp the present moment with the imprint of the distant past.

Like any other thought, a hunch is simply a network of cells firing inside your brain in an organized pattern. But for that hunch to blossom into something more substantial, it has to connect with other ideas. The hunch requires an environment where surprising new connections can be forged: the neurons and synapses of the brain itself, and the larger cultural environment that the brain occupies.

the technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrate.

high-density liquid networks make it easier for innovation to happen, but they also serve the essential function of storing those innovations. Before writing, before books, before Wikipedia, the liquid network of cities preserved the accumulated wisdom of human culture.

The birth of the civil rights movement was intimately bound up in the spread of jazz music throughout the United States. It was, for many Americans, the first cultural common ground between black and white America that had been largely created by African-Americans.

Shifting culture requires a confluence of inciting incidents. Something directional that leads to a tribal fracturing and reknitting. Often shows up in language first. In music. Fashion. It can feel a little like hope." He points at the images. "This doesn't feel like hope.

The flavor is surprisingly poly-tribe, which is new slang for the global mash-up, the hybridization of signs, styles, and meanings that is somehow now: Liberty International Airport, Newark, New Jersey.

American spirituality has always favored the direct over the inferred, the immediate over the gradual.

The standard explanation of the madness of crowds is ignorance: a mediocre education system has left the populace scientifically illiterate, at the mercy of their cognitive biases, and thus defenseless against airhead celebrities, cable-news gladiators, and other corruptions from popular culture.

Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.

Oscar Wilde's prophecy that "as long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

Feminization is the process in which cultures have increasingly respected the interests and values of women. Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.

The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery.

Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up.

The historical trajectory of violence affects not only how life is lived but how it is understood.