Quotes About Culture

There are not two cultures, only half-cultured individuals

this women's liberation thing is simply an American fad" and would pass.

My arithmetic is fine, thank you," Nicole snapped. Her arithmetic from what she'd seen was a damn sight better than that of any local without a counting board in front of him. The Romans, naturally enough, used and thought in terms of Roman numerals, and Roman numerals were to arithmetic what cruel and unusual punishment was to jurisprudence.

We poison ourselves and we poison each other. A cruel remark, the turn of a shoulder, the indifference to someone's pain. I remember how often I flinched under my father's comments, but I never realized how much it could fester, infiltrate in its insidious, toxic way, through his life my life, a family. A culture.

England is an empire, Germany is a nation, a race, France is a person.

To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.

Muž nese vinu a žena bolest. Takhle to bylo odjakživa.

In Tuzla, erzählt sie, gebe es Kinder, die noch nie eine Portion Pommes frites gesehen haben. Hach, denke ich, so viel Elend auf der Welt. "Und Sie", frage ich, "schon mal eine Portion Pilav gesehen?" Sie stutzt. "What's Pilav?" "Fastfood"' sage ich. "Landestypisch." Das habe ich von der Menütafel an der Wand in ihrem Rücken abgelesen. Sie wechselt das Thema.

A tradition or societal custom of bowing to one another when meeting, or tipping the hat as gentlemen used to, can be changed. But it is not a morally problematic custom. Customs may come and go through time and the different cultures in a country, city, or state. Still, Christians are called by the Church to look beyond this and discern if whether it pushes the boundaries of Christian morality or is just a harmless custom.

It is interesting to note that immodesty in dress was not solely a problem of the 1960s till today, but it continued through time as other vices which the Church never failed to warn of and condemn. And it was a constant theme in pagan cultures, while Christianity always promoted dignity in dress.

ethnographic

When I got to France I realized I didn't know very much about food at all. I'd never had a real cake. I'd had those cakes from cake mixes or the ones that have a lot of baking powder in them. A really good French cake doesn't have anything like that in it - it's all egg power.

How can a nation be called great if its bread tastes like kleenex?

Just speak very loudly and quickly, and state your position with utter conviction, as the French do, and you'll have a marvelous time!

In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport.

Some people have a great fashion of calling things they do not like yellow. You exclude the yellow man. You fear the yellow peril. I edit a white paper turned out by yellow men, and many white men turn out yellow papers.

My tastes, like my bones, fossilized decades ago. Reach a certain age and you are obliged to become an anthropologist. It's the only way to ignore that the rest of the world regards you as an artifact, that your culture has faded beyond the horizon, leaving you adrift on your tiny, solitary life raft.

I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.

Do not all attempts, in our own cultural sphere at least, at escaping from the Judeo-Christian compound by means of a unilateral call to return to what it has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.), converge on the same Celinian anti-Semitic fantasy? And this is so because, as I have tried to explain earlier the writings of the chosen people have selected a place, in the most determined manner, on that untenable crest of manness seen as symbolic fact—which constitutes abjection.

Or should one recognize that one becomes a foreigner in another country because one is already a foreigner from within?

One who is happy being a cosmopolitan shelters a shattered origin in the night of his wandering.

This culture of pressure and rivalry tended to produce two, highly contrasted species of official: the creatively corrupt libertine, and the puritan. And it was the tension between the two that helped produce the Opium War, with all its unfortunate consequences.

No se puede juzgar a los hombres fuera del contexto en que han vivido [...]. No hay que acercarse a la historia con los ojos de hoy.

el Barrio de las Letras, el barrio en el que habían establecido su residencia estudiantes, artistas, escritores, pintores, el barrio donde Madrid no cierra ni siquiera al amanecer.