Quotes About Culture

The Aztecs invented the wheel, but didn't know how to use it except as a children's toy. Even though they built roads that to us scream out to have a wheel put on them, nonetheless they continued to drag things around. The society itself was blind to the possibilities.

It's really sad that the kids today can only relate to Beethoven via a rock version of his music.

America was living off the canned foods of art, the things held over from years before. It knew, vaguely, that there was fresh fruit, fresh meat on the tables of Paris, and it wanted its share.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

La filosofía antiemoción sigue vigente en infinidad de lugares y subculturas

Desde un punto de vista psicosocial, vivimos en una sociedad coadicta a los desmanes del amor.

Everybody heard the gospel in their own language: you have a place.

Spanish encouraged racial intermarriage with the indigenous peoples of America. Anglo-Americans were usually intolerant of it. they were generally able to secure wives of English descent, whereas the Spanish American colonies were extremely unattractive to Spanish women.

I think the worst one [indian mascot] is the Cleveland Indians' Big Chief Wahoo. It's just a red face on a baseball with a big, toothy grin. It's the Sambo of all other offensive mascots. I have never seen a Native American smile that hard before, not even at a casino opening.

It would be good for us Africans to accept ourselves as we are and recapture some of the positive aspects of our culture.

You would see me there now, cultivating the earth and carrying firewood on my back up the hills to my home, where I would light a fire and cook the evening meal. I would not tell stories, because they have been replaced by books, the radio, and television

The people celebrate with our traditional dancing: the women clapping their hands and chanting, their low sweet voices humming across the desert night, and the men leaping high into the air. Everyone contributes food, and we eat

There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.

In the past, most of us would have imagined that daughters would be more likely to move back in with their parents as adults than sons. Because that was reality. No longer. Today, young men between twenty-five and thirty-one are 66 percent more likely than their female counterparts to be living with their parents.

For the first time in US history, more than half of children born to mothers under thirty were born outside marriage.

When you have a Thai girlfriend you never lose her - you just sometimes lose your place in the queue

Nineteen eighty-two is as good a year as any to mark the threshold of a future we're still negotiating. It's been called the information age, the digital age, the new media age. It was the beginning of the "digital turn" that would, in fits and starts, transform music culture . . . .

The almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion throughout our land.

Poetry had breathed over and sanctified the land.

what is it to know a variety of languages, but merely to have a variety of sounds express the same idea? Original thought is ore of the mind; language is but the stamp and coinage by which it is put into circulation.

Roast beef and plum pudding are also held in superstitious veneration, and port and sherry maintain their grounds as the only true English wines; all others being considered vile, outlandish beverages.

Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an art that is still-born. It is impossible for us to live and feel, as did the ancient Greeks.

Captain Thomas Walduck in 1708 neatly summarized the development of the West Indies: "Upon all the new settlements the Spaniards make, the first thing they do is build a church, the first thing ye Dutch do upon a new colony is to build them a fort, but the first thing ye English do, be it in the most remote part of ye world, or amongst the most barbarous Indians, is to set up a tavern or drinking house.

Our culture confuses the pain of isolation with some impossible ideal of "self-sufficiency," and then celebrates it.