Quotes About Culture

When I began to interview people from the '60s, my first question was always, 'What was your favorite record?'

If we're interviewing someone and they really care about having a certain title, I usually think, 'Let's hire someone else.' You want someone who will say, 'I truly believe in the company's future. I want to own part of this company. I believe I can grow its value.'

It's very easy to stand L.A., which is why it's almost inevitable that all sorts of ideas get entertained.

where I grew up we believed there was such a thing as selling out and that those interested in the arts shouldn't do it.

I've been in fast company, as they call it

Everyone knew the way to dance was like black people did and they all danced that way.

In Los Angeles, the supermarkets all have kosher sections, health food sections, Mexican and Thai shelves. These packages of foreign hungers mirror the city with their bilingual instructions.

From now on, I thought, only French mice will love me.

Culturally, L.A. has always been a humid jungle alive with seething L.A. projects that I guess people from other places just can't see. It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A., anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in L.A., to choose it and be happy here. When people are not happy, they fight against L.A. and say it's a 'wasteland' and other helpful descriptions.

The African specialist Nahid Toubia puts it plain [when speaking of female genital mutilation]: In a man it would range from amoutation of most of the penis, to "removal of all the penis, its roots of soft tissue and part of the scrotal skin.

After all, the Indo-European word cunt was derived from the goddess Kunda or Cunti, and shares the same root as kin and country.

The ability of anyone in the culture to support and honour gay kids may depend on an ability to name them as such, notwithstanding that many gay adults may never have been gay kids and some gay kids may not turn into gay adults.

modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge, it becomes truer and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms the other languages and relations by which we know.

Winthrop was arguing for nothing more than the role expected of any seventeenth-century Englishwoman.

Once you're in a particular country, and you're surrounded by musicians who are so adept at traditional music, you suddenly realize how much there is to explore and digest and learn and experience.

In our society, the pursuit of thinness (whether for health or physique)—has become the battle cry of seemingly every American.

We have become a nation riddled with guilt based on how we eat.

I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.

A fad is an innovation that represents a relatively unimportant aspect of culture, which diffuses very rapidly, mainly for status reasons, and then is rapidly discontinued.

Family planning experts, in calculating the effects of contraceptive campaigns, estimate the number of births averted by calculating the pregnancies that would have occurred if contraceptives had not been adopted; the concept of births averted is not very meaningful to a peasant family in a Third World country that is being urged to adopt a preventive innovation like family planning.

History has taught us time and again that political power always raises its angry fist when timeless principles are lost. We know that without the scale of self-evident truths grounded in the laws of nature and nature's God, every culture eventually finds itself subject to the rule of the gang or the tyranny of the individual. Recognizing this, scholars of all ages have confidently given their hearts and minds to the words, You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.

Take away his guns and he will use a sword. Take away his sword and he will use a club. Take away his club and he will use a rock. When you take away a culture's soul, there is nothing to stop the evil that lurks in human's heart. You can outlaw guns, swords, clubs and rocks but without the Gospel we are all still broken and angry men filled with hatred and rage.

I'm fiercely proud to be Scottish.

Parecia que nada se fazia na Mongólia sem um brinde de vodka. De todas as tradições russas que os sovietes tinham exportado para os seus satélites, era vergonhoso que a que prevalecia fosse a vodka a qual, antigamente, nem sequer fazia parte da sua cultura.