Quotes About Culture

Everything's bigger better, or worse in London. That's just the way of it.

You go back to your kitchen, woman.

Bishop Asser was an earsling, which is anything that drops out of an arse.

The country's got drunk on God since then, and it don't make for happiness

Both the ethnocentric and anti-ethnocentric extremes arise from the same root, the tendency to make absolute the differences among cultures and traditions.

D. T.] Suzuki's obvious sincerity and his intense yearning for transcendence did not prevent his thinking from being ideologically flawed, informed as it was by his culture, his social status, and his sectarian affiliations. This, of course, raises the questions of the place whence he spoke and whether an enlightened person can assume any privilege with regard to historical determinations. Suzuki claimed this privilege for Zen masters, and by implication for himself.

The artist expresses his love through his works. That is civilization.

The shapes of houses, sometimes transmitted through a hundred generations, seem eternally valid.

Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions--I say the most licentious of human institutions: that is the secret of its popularity.And a woman seeking a husband is the most unscrupulous of all the beasts of prey. The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.

A Frenchman! Where did you pick up that expression? Are these Burgundians and Bretons and Picards and Gascons beginning to call themselves Frenchmen, just as our fellows are beginning to call themselves Englishmen? They actually talk of France and England as their countries. Theirs, if you please! What is to become of me and you if that way of thinking comes into fashion?

Is deviation from the locally approved norms always and everywhere to be taken as disease?

There is a gentleness, a lightness, an element of freedom and, in a word, of civilization, that makes this country one of the few countries in the world where, despite everything, you can still breathe freely.

gender is one of the biggest lies of our civilization

Berg, Sophia may be a Greek name, but that is no reason for you to study your neighbor in a Greek lesson. Translate!

Sin is geographical.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

My own belief is that in most ages and in most places obscure psychological forces led men to adopt systems involving quite unnecessary cruelty, and that this is still the case among the most civilized races at the present day.

The citizens of Athens, like those of other cities in other ages and continents, showed a certain hostility to those who attempted to introduce a higher level of culture than that to which they were accustomed.

In the first place, there is no point whatever in being able to spell anything. Shakespeare and Milton could not spell; Marie Corelli and Alfred Austen could. Spelling is thought desirable partly for snobbish reasons, as an easy way of distinguishing the "educated" from the "uneducated"; partly, like correct clothes, as a part of herd domination; partly because the devotee of natural law feels pain in the spectacle of any sphere in which individual liberty remains.

John Locke invented common sense, and only Englishmen have had it ever since!

The bulk of the population of every country is persuaded that all marriage customs other than its own are immoral, and that those who combat this view only do so in order to justify their own loose lives.

Of all the studies by which men acquire citizenship of the intellectual commonwealth, no single one is so indispensable as the study of the past.

The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep.

The religious element in patriotism is reinforced by education, especially by a knowledge of the history and literature of one's own country, provided it is not accompanied by much knowledge of the history and literature of other countries.