Quotes About Culture

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

And, unlike British and American women, we do not go around with a hatchet in our hand trying to chop the balls off every man we meet. Because we want—and need—our men to be men. Real men. Not macho assholes, not gorillas, men. Fathers in peace, lions in war.

Westerners think with their stomachs, Jews think with their hearts, Muslims think what they are told to think.

Students seemed to be willing to behave better and pay more attention when there was somebody in the room who could kick their butts. In classes with younger children, corporal punishment was reinstated, because even though Americans had started thinking that spanking a kid was some kind of child abuse, many other countries knew better. Their kids still got spanked, and their crime rates were a lot lower than ours.

Noah, Noah," Monique said. "Crime is nothing. Crime is something that will always be a part of society.

We live in a culture now where impact is more important than intent; where how things are taken is more significant than how they are meant.

A study by the non-partisan wealth research firm New World Wealth found that 56.2 percent of the 13.1 million millionaires in the world were Christian, while 6.5 percent were Muslim, 3.9 percent were Hindu, and 1.7 percent were Jewish. In the U.S., 48 percent of Hindus have a yearly household income of $100,000 or more, and 70 percent have at least $75,000, which makes them the highest-earning ethnic group. But

We live in a culture now where impact is more important than intent; where how things are taken is more significant than how they are meant. You have to listen to the people being talked about rather than the talker – and the power, throughout history, has tended to be with the talker, the person with the platform, rather than the talked-about, who are usually the ones affected.

being white is not about skin color, but security. It means you are protected because you are a member of the majority culture.

In New York, everyone's desperate for success, desperate for money and desperate to be accepted, but in London they're more laid back about things like that.

Photography is more about money now but then so are most things.

If you're curious, London's an amazing place.

If you want to learn about patriarchal families, you don't ask the father, you ask the mother; then maybe you will learn something.

The great enemy of the salvation of man, in my opinion, never invented a more effectual means of extirpating [extinguishing] Christianity from the world than by persuading mankind that it was improper to read the Bible at schools.25 Dr.

And while a hundred civilizations have prospered (sometimes for centuries) without computers or windmills or even the wheel, none have survived even a few generations without art.

As Adam Gopnik remarked in The New Yorker, "Post-modernist art is, above all, post-audience art." In

To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.

It is translation, more than speech itself, which provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought. We should do more of it.

Translation is another name for the human condition.

But a world in which all intercultural communication was carried out in a single idiom would not diminish the variety of human tongues. It would just make native speakers of the international medium less sophisticated users of language than all others, since they alone would have only one language to think with.

Translation is the opposite of empire

Would we have ever asked what it is that a translator 'carries across' the 'language barrier' if he or she were called a 'turner', 'tongue-man', or 'exchanger'? Probably not.

The real story is the other way around. Without translators, Western dictionaries would not exist.

The natural way to represent the foreignness of foreign utterances is to leave them in the original, in whole or in part.