Quotes About Culture

The girls had a misguided trust in the circumcised.

The history of every people is also a history of its craziness, and the more science becomes a religion, the more religion must pretend to be a science, desperate for all logical explanations.

A people's legitimacy is derived from its artifacts. Even a relationship isn't a relationship unless it's left behind its trash.

What Chinese parents understand," Chua wrote, "is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up.

Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory.

No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

We are a city that has had Islam for one thousand years. We had the greatest teachers and universities. And now these Bedouins, these illiterates, these ignoramuses, tell us how to wear our pants, and how to say our prayers, and how our wives should dress, as if they were the ones who invented the way?

No, forget it. You people took the village and drove away all our business, it's you who must submit to Shariah.

Do you see a theme emerging? Women like flowers; men like food!

As I see it, dating is a product of our entertainment-driven, disposable-everything American culture...Love and romance became things people could solely enjoy for their recreational value.

In the early nineteenth century, a new culture—a new idea about what to hope for—emerged for many Americans, centered around the independent self, under nation and God.

The proverbs of a nation furnish the index to its spirit and the results of its civilization.

Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilization which they have represented.

Speech has, indeed, its origin in social conformity.

When fatness was an exception, it was part of the canon of beauty. Now that leanness is an exception, its symptoms are canonized.

Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now.

They don't use the word used anymore. With cars it's preowned. With books, preread. With clothes what would you say, preoccupied?

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.

The women congregated in the kitchen or, in warm weather, sat in rocking chairs on the shady porches. The few men present squatted and talked in the yard or sat on a porch on the opposite side of the house.

As this poem illustrates, place is not just location, geography; place is history, family, the shape and context of daily life.

In the 1950s, there was a sense that literature and writing had a burning importance — that you could write a book or paint a painting and change the world. That kind of faith seems to be lacking now. Literature has been pushed toward the sidelines of [modern day] culture. There isn't that sense of centrality or permanence to the written word — everything seems more disposable.

It seems the myth survives in our culture still, that a young girl's worth, measured against that of a great man, may be of lesser consequence… I would say rather that a man who treats those offering up their love and trust as expendable is lesser himself for having done so. There is art, and there are artists. Let's not confuse the two.

Upon comparing BBC News with CNN: Melodrama is something foreigners do.