Quotes About Culture

This was Oxford, after all

The food in the South is as important as food anywhere because it defines a person's culture.

There is no longer any class outside the class of character, and no history to put your faith in. You can actually live as if you have no culture, no perspective particular to a date in time. You are an individual whose prime and solitary property is your own body. Dying becomes a hell beyond all reason or justice in this ahistorical context.

This country was built by refugees. And yet look how it has advanced, look how it has developed! ... Here, where people from many cultures, many religions, and many parts of the planet have come together, they have built such an advanced society. It amazes me. ... Why has America done so well?

Oddly, Leon Stover, in Robert A. Heinlein, one of the best close readers in other ways, comes away with the idea that Heinlein 'defends the traditional ethics of Christian civilisation' (p. 61) which is a hard argument to make given the amount of out-of-wedlock sex in his work and the satirisation of so much Christian practice in Stranger in a Strange Land and Job.

The great drama of Russian history has been between its state and society. Put simply, Russia has always had too much state and not enough society.

Death will find me long before I tire of contemplating an evening spent in his company during which he enthralled a mixed audience consisting of a fur trader, a Cree Indian matron, and an Anglican missionary, with an hour-long monologue on sexual aberrations in female pygmy shrews. (The trader misconstrued the tenor of the discourse; but the missionary, inured by years of humorless dissertations, soon put him right.)

The reason that the all-American boy prefers beauty to brains is that he can see better than he can think.

According to Jannenga, "WebPT hires for culture first and skill set second. I can train someone to be a better product manager, but your core values and how you approach your job is more important.

When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, Ours.

There is a lot of strength and intelligence in Hollywood.

Judaism has a lot of rituals, a lot of nonnegotiable behaviors. But we also allow for a great deal of personal freedom. Personal freedom and its sister trait, personal responsibility, are what make the religion so hard. But they are also what make the religion so satisfying.

Besides, I could never spit in my parents' faces and suddenly declare myself a Jew, like my 'real' parents. It would upset them tremendously.

Chaque langue voit le monde d'une manière différente.

Nadie se da cuenta al tener un libro en las manos, el esfuerzo, el dolor, la vigilia, la sangre que ha costado. El libro es, sin disputa, la obra mayor de la humanidad. — Dime qué lees y te diré quién eres

Creo que los toros es la fiesta más culta que hay en el mundo. Es el drama puro en que el cual el español derrama sus mejores lágrimas y su bilis. Es el único sitio a donde se va con la seguridad de ver la muerte rodeada de la más deslumbradora belleza (...)

Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.

Las costumbres de una nación tienen repercusión en su lengua y, a su vez, la lengua es la que en gran medida hace a la nación.

On a soutenu que le christianisme avait mis fin à l'art antique. Dans une certaine mesure cette opinion peut se justifier. Le christianisme, et aussi l'Islam, à l'imitation de leur père le Judaïsme, répugnent par essence à ce qui fait la beauté de l'Art antique, la plastique.

A lot of times on tour it's about, 'OK, where am I today? Wow, I'm in Costa Rica. What is their famous dish?' And it's about trying the food, and really experiencing it.

The past," as the British novelist L. P. Hartley wrote, "is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

A culture is a civilization that has not yet achieved maturity, its greatest potential, nor consolidated its growth. Meanwhile--and the waiting period can be protracted--adjacent civilizations exploit it in a thousand ways, which is natural if not particularly just.

Une civilisation 'seconde': comme le christianisme a hérité de l'Empire romain qu'il prolonge, l'Islam se saisira, à ses débuts, du Proche-Orient, l'un des plus vieux, peut-être le plus vieux carrefour d'hommes et de peuples civilisés qui soit au monde.

L'apogée, la splendeur de l'Islam se situent entre VIIIème et XIIème siècles. Mais la perte très dangereuse de vitesse n'a guère commencé pour lui qu'avec le XVIIIème siècle, c'est-à-dire, à l'échelle lente des civilisations.