Quotes About Culture

Wayne Garth, marriage is punishment for shoplifting in some countries.

specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

The more local and settled a culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert a man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

Today, local economies are being destroyed by the "pluralistic," displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

New Orleans, more than many places I know, actually tangibly lives its culture. It's not just a residual of life it's a part of life. Music is at every major milestone of our life: birth, marriage, death. It's our culture.

The culturalization of politics analytically vanquishes political economy, states, history, and international and transnational relations. It eliminates colonialism, capital, caste or class stratification, and external political domination from accounts of political conflict or instability. In their stead, "culture" is summoned to explain the motives and aspirations leading to certain conflicts

Norway ~ Both Roald Dahl's parents were from Norway. They spoke Norwegian to each other, and Roald and his sisters learned Norwegian before English. Roald visited Norway many times and took his own family there for holidays. They spent their time boating, fishing, snorkeling, and visiting a never-ending stream of Norwegian relatives. Do you know what this says? Jeg er en Roald Dahl vifte.

many priests and scholars can speak Sanskrit, but no one ever spoke only pure Sanskrit.

But Sanskrit, the language of power, emerged in India from a minority, and at first its power came precisely from its nonintelligibility and unavailability, which made it the power of an elite group.

This is a history, not the history, of the Hindus.

In their ambivalent attitude to violence, the Hindus are no different from the rest of us, but they are perhaps unique in the intensity of their ongoing debate about it.

People are not merely the product of a zeitgeist; Shakespeare is not just an Elizabethan writer.

In any case, whether or not there really is a Hinduism, there certainly are Hindus.

But how golden was the Gupta age even in its prime?

The Guptas' use of Sanskrit and patronage of Sanskrit literature also contributed to the Euro-American identification of their age as classical.

James Joyce, in his novel Finnegans Wake, in 1939, punned on the word "Hindoo" (as the British used to spell it), joking that it came from the names of two Irishmen, Hin-nessy and Doo-ley: "This is the hindoo Shimar Shin between the dooley boy and the hinnessy."30 Even Joyce knew that the word was not native to India.

intrareligious and interreligious. Hinduism interacted

As recently as the fifties, respectable women were given the sexual choice of marriage or celibacy. Anything else meant ostracism. Women who demanded pleasure in sex were condemned as "nymphomaniacs," much as they are pitied today as "victims of male culture" by anti-porn feminists.

One step toward defining anything is to determine what it is not. A popular approach to the word pornography is an appeal to its ancient Greek roots. This approach should be discarded. The word pornography originally meant "writing about harlots or prostitutes." But its meaning has evolved over centuries of use through dozens of different cultures. Like the Greek word gymnasium, which originally meant, "place of nakedness," the word pornography has lost its connection with the past.

Here in Germany they respect that I'm strong and independent. But I've also realized how Syrian I am. The way I enjoy human interaction, the way I let people into my life—this is our Syrian, our Arab culture.

In the future, I will have grandchildren who speak Dutch, Swedish, and Spanish. If they don't learn Arabic, they will be strangers to each other. They won't have any traces of where we came from. They won't be Syrian. And I will live in exile and die in exile.

Then another ISIS fighter stopped me on the street one day. He said, "You can't look like that here." He was from Belgium. To me it was funny. You come here and are going to tell me what to wear? He said, "This is Islamland." I said, "No, this is Syria.

A society which sees her modesty or her "hang-ups" as a problem is necessarily a society which will not be able to get him to commit. Conversely, a society which respected modesty, or what now goes by "hang-ups", was one in which men were obligated.