Quotes About Culture

A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one's self from the tyranny of any of them.

Culture is not life in its entirety, but just the moment of security, strength, and clarity.

The Mediterraneans, who do not think clearly, do see clearly.

Conversation is the socializing instrument par excellence, and in its style one can see reflected the capacities of a race.

I am a Spaniard, that is to say, a man without imagination.

When a people holds onto its language, it holds onto a semblance of freedom, like a man who holds onto his independence when he retains his own way of thinking. Language is the thought of a people.

In the Philippines you are not considered to be honorable unless you have been to jail.

Maria Clara did not faint, simply because the Filipinos do not know how to faint.

Native gods, called anitos, were often not abandoned, but instead were transformed into saints and were often venerated in small chapels attached to private homes.

The hustle and bustle everywhere, so many carriages and cabs at a dash, Europeans, Chinese, and natives, each dressed after their own fashion, fruit pedlars, messengers, porters stripped to the waist, foodshops, inns, restaurants, shops, carts pulled by philosophical carabaos, the noise, the incessant movement, the sun itself, a certain smell, the riot of colours—he had almost forgotten what Manila was like.

I assumed you knew . . . but you must be brave. In the Philippines you are not considered to be honorable unless you have been to jail.

In Mexico we have a word for sushi: bait.

Pride in a man is confused with dignity; in a woman, with self-love.

To the Nahuas, words were flowers, metaphors that gave birth to thoughts and actions.

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

The negative side of football. The negative side of our society. People sometimes go to football and bring to it the negative aspects of our society.

Para el hombre de la generación novísima, el arte es una cosa sin trascendencia.

He who does not love his own language is worse than an animal and smelly fish.

Americans have discovered fear.

The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.

I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet.

Social conscience is a fashion, it changes every year.

Leisure, it must be remembered, is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preserve of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole.

La visión del mundo que pretendían establecer los norteamericanos se basaba en la convicción de la superioridad del «modo de vida americano»,[35] asociada a la idea de que su componente religioso era una garantía de su ventaja moral sobre «el comunismo ateo».