Quotes About Culture

Under ordinary circumstances, bad art naturally gets sorted out and disappears. That is how history works when it is left alone to do its job. The paradox of the culture wars is that they have made celebrities out of some artists who would otherwise vanish. Censorship has become a growth industry. This may be the best argument, in the end, for unfettered freedom of expression.

martial people, however, it was not long before Maori began to use muskets in inter-tribal

We do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, traditions or even systems of government. But we do expect all nations to uphold these two core sovereign duties: to respect the interests of their own people and the rights of every other sovereign nation.

different cultures and different dreams not just coexist

The future throws a bridge toward the past, over the gaping abyss of capitalist non-culture.

What Gutfreund said has become a legend at Salomon Brothers and a visceral part of its corporate identity. He said: "One hand, one million dollars, no tears.

The politicians in Ireland speak Gaelic the way the Real Housewives of Orange County speak French.

Anti-intellectual resentment is common in all of American life and it has many diverse expressions

The difference between Strauss and Ranieri?" says one trader still at Salomon. "That's easy. Strauss wouldn't stoop to use the men's room on the trading floor. He'd go upstairs. Lewie would piss on your desk.

How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation? He tried, but his English in-laws just looked at him strangely. They understood that someone else had just lost a great deal of money and Ben had just made a great deal of money, but never got much past that. I can't really talk to them about it, he says. They're English.

This was only one of many recent changes along the capitalist food chain. Wall Street had gone from being the celebrities of the money culture to being its lackeys.

Baseball—of all things—was an example of how an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method. As

He still had the Dutch habit of laughing at whatever you told him, just in case it happened to be a joke.

The idea that everyone is entitled to his/her opinion was a California thing—that's not how we did things in Jerusalem.

Passing one tableau of blood and guts and moving on to the next, I caught myself glancing over my shoulder to make sure some Viking wasn't following me with a battle-ax. The effect was so disorienting that when I reached the end and found a Japanese woman immobile and reading on a bench, I had to poke her on the shoulder to make sure she was real.

They do not share the sentiment about one another: the hardest thing to do in Greece is to get one Greek to compliment another behind his back. No success of any kind is regarded without suspicion. Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating

East Germans are the Greeks of Germany," I say. "Be careful," she says.

The RBC trading floor had what the staff liked to refer to as a "no-asshole rule"; if someone came in the door looking for a job and sounding like a typical Wall Street asshole, they wouldn't hire him, no matter how much money he said he could make the firm. There was even an expression used to describe the culture: "RBC nice.

From the point of view of American culture, the trouble with disease prevention was that there was no money in it. She needed to find a way to make it pay.

All these texts tried in one way or another to explain the strange uniformity of the American businessman. He commuted to work in his immaculate gray suit from his neat suburban tract house. He kept his front lawn and his hair trimmed to lengths tacitly agreed upon by his peers. He avoided high culture, or anything else that smacked of elitism. He worked for some enormous gray corporation such as IBM or AT&T that was more of a home to him than his house in the suburbs.

Page 286: Common sense on this subject tends to be warded off by ritual invocation of the cliché that we are "a nation of immigrants." In fact, the United States is not a nation of immigrants, and never has been. At no point in American history have people born abroad constituted more than a minority of the U.S. population

If we want the world to change, the healing of culture and greater balance in nature, it has to start inside the human soul.

Myth and nature are the two great garments of the world, with nature being the living green garment that covers the planet and myth being the multidimensional, many-colored fabric that continually weaves human culture.

We live in a world where many kinds of regression dignify themselves with the mantle of progress.