Quotes About Culture

professional mourners

There's always a Starbucks around.

In a sense, he thought, all we consist of is memories. Our personalities are constructed from memories, our lives are organized around memories, our cultures are built upon the foundation of shared memories that we call history and science.

In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees.

You can't get decent Mexican food in DC.

People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But

En cierto sentido, no estamos integrados más que por recuerdos. Nuestra personalidad se estructura a partir de recuerdos, nuestra vida está organizada en torno a recuerdos, nuestras culturas se erigen sobre los cimientos de los recuerdos compartidos, a los que denominamos historia y ciencia. Y desistir de un recuerdo, desistir del conocimiento, desistir de los pasado no es fácil.

The Japanese have a saying: fix the problem, not the blame. In American organizations it's all about who fucked up. Whose head will roll. In Japanese organizations it's about what's fucked up, and how to fix it. Nobody gets blamed. Their way is better.

Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion? Professional sports, perhaps. Grown men swatting little balls, while the rest of the world pays money to applaud. But, on the whole, I find fashion even more tedious than sports.

then they had pollo con ajillo, chicken with garlic, and a bottle of portuguese red wine. my god, we're going to stink after this, angela said.

He had a term for people like this: temporal provincials—people who were ignorant of the past, and proud of it.

If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.

was reinforced by her education, and many well-bred women probably were the simpering, tittering, pathologically delicate fools that populate the pages of Victorian novels.

refurbished warehouse district below London's

This is a Southern gift, isn't it - tremendous self-regard diluted with humor and modesty. That's what they mean by Southern charm, right?

It seems that she can survive, she can prosper, if she has London around her.

Do you imagine, Peter, that your Carpe Diem boots would look any less deluded to them than that guy's Tony Lamas do to you? There's a comeuppance for everyone, wherever you are, and the farther you go from your own fiefdom, the more ludicrous are your haircut, your clothes, your opinions, your life. Within easy walking distance of home are neighborhoods that might as well be in Saigon.

Corny as it sounds, I believe that unless we try to familiarize ourselves with the best that human beings have thought and accomplished, we doom ourselves to be little more than mindless consumer-wraiths, docile sheep waiting to be shorn by corporation or government, sad and confused dwellers on the threshold of a palace we never enter.

Loose management practices dominate agency cultures, just as they did during the high-profit past. Client heads are not held accountable for depressed fee levels, unmanaged workloads or insufficient resources for client work. Office heads are not held accountable for the varied performance of their client heads.

When a population is distracted by trivia," wrote Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, "when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk. Culture death is a real possibility.

The almost egregiously English couple, Cedric and Rosamund Chailey, had slipped quietly away when the conversation turned to God. It had not seemed polite to be present when anything so American was being discussed.

envy is the one deadly sin that no American can ever admit to...

To belong is to understand the tacit codes of the people you live with; it is to know that you will be understood without having to explain yourself.

Social well-being Ã¢â'¬Â¦ depends upon cohesion and solidarity. It implies the existence, not merely of opportunities to ascend, but of a high level of general culture, and a strong sense of common interests.… Individual happiness does not only require that men should be free to rise to new positions of comfort and distinction; it also requires that they should be able to lead a life of dignity and culture, whether they rise or not.4