Quotes About Culture

The western mind is linear, the eastern mind is circular.

All these things have been created in your mind by conditioning, by programming; that's what the society has done to you. We have lived the whole of history in an ugly way.

Humor's the hardest thing to translate.

How could we have allowed the instinct bred within us over the centuries to draw lines and never cross them, an infinity of lines, ever-smaller lines, ever-sharper distinctions? I grieved for Didi's generation of "girls of good family," who put caste, duty and family reputation before self-indulgence.

Where, in Heaven's name, could anyone even be alone in Calcutta? What hanky-panky business, in my mother's words, could go on? Everyone knew the rules and the rules stated caste and community narrowed the range of intimate contact.

English attitudes saw Islam as a shallow kind of sophistication; Hinduism a profound form of primitivism.

In India, it takes a classic apprentice five years to learn how to sit at the sitar before he's allowed to play a note. It's not just the reaction that says How dare you know? It's something deeper: How dare you presume to say you know?

She finally accepted how inappropriate it was in India—how fatal—to cling.

She saw that her native New World forgetfulness would be forever in conflict with Old World blood-memory.

Deccani Hill Fort, Devgad, says the guidebook. Vandals and colonials have gouged the jewels from mosaic work: Victorian Englishmen whitewashed the murals, then plastered them over.

Our criminal class grew out of good religious native soil.

The mind alike, Vigorous or weak, is capable of culture, But still bears fruit according to its nature. ?Tis not the teacher?s skill that rears the scholar: The sparkling gem gives back the glorious radiance It drinks from other light, but the dull earth Absorbs the blaze, and yields no gleam again.

America's experience -- and that of many other nations ... teaches that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educational curriculum. It's about creating a free political climate in which ideas and innovation can flourish. Simply put, governments that protect liberties, embrace transparency allow for vibrant civil societies, give women equal opportunity, they are the ones that pave the way for thriving cultures.

MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.

For nearly all that is good in our American civilization we are indebted to the Old World; the errors and mischiefs are of our own creation.

MAYONNAISE, n. One of the sauces that serve the French in place of a state religion.

I'm English, and as such I crave disappointment. I actively seek it out.

Ostentation is roughly the divide between old and new money.

Opium? No! Cocaine? No! The Great American Brain Killer Is Dance Music!' – Portland Oregonian, 1932 T

And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food?

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

A leader's job is to create an environment of mutual respect and trust.

Or, said another way, Native Americans, unlike the people of more modern cultures, don't believe talking is the same thing as thinking.

Two years outside the country, and not much had changed. Still, more people watched the Super Bowl than voted; budgets for defense outweighed education, medicine, and everything else combined....