Quotes About Culture

My brother, being an English gentleman, possesses a library in all his houses, though he never opens a book. This is called fidelity to ancient tradition.

Harriet agreed that intellectual women should marry and reproduce their kind; but she pointed out the English husband had something to say in the matter and that, very often, he did not care for an intellectual wife.

Young people today seem to be positively pickled in gin.

The whole question is extraordinarily complicated because of the gulf that has grown up between art on the one hand and on the other hand both the Church and secular society, so that the artists tend to be out of touch with the common man, while the latter, whether Christian or not, has only a very fumbling critical judgment to rely on.

Have some Oxford marmalade - and then I'll show you my Dante.

Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilisation that made them.

Well-bred English people never have imagination, Bunter.

How true it is that men live for Things and women for People!

The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity; the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous — tedium.

The Swiss are a neat and an industrious people, none of whom is under seventy-five years of age.

LINSCOTT: Well, I don't like it. Man works damn hard, leaves his wife all his money, and some pretty boy comes along and gets it. Sometimes I think those old East Indians had the right idea about widows. Cremate the husbands and burn up the wives along with them. CONNIE: Maybe it would be simpler to burn up the money.

It seemed to me,' said Wonko the Sane, 'that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.

Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially.

The truth of the matter is, that most English people don't know how to make tea anymore either, and most people drink cheap instant coffee instead, which is a pity, and gives Americans the impression that the English are just generally clueless about hot stimulants.

When we told our guide that we didn't want to go to all the tourist places he took us instead to the places where they take tourists who say that they don't want to go to tourist places. These places are, of course, full of tourists.

The people of New Zealand are generally terribly nice. Everybody we had met so far had been terribly nice to us. Terribly nice and eager to please. I realised now that all this relentless niceness and geniality to which we had been subjected had got to me rather badly. New Zealand niceness is not merely disarming, it's decapitating as well, and I had come to feel that if Just one more person was pleasant and genial at me I'd hit him.

We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts, and began to realize what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English Dictionary is. It simply doesn't recognize huge wodges of human experience.

And that's why the American habit of bringing a teacup, a tea bag, and a pot of hot water to the table is merely the perfect way of making a thin, pale, watery cup of tea that nobody in their right mind would want to drink.

IT CAN HARDLY be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport." Airports

They believe in "peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms".

I think media are at their most interesting before anybody's thought of calling them art, when people still think they're just a load of junk.

On the way back they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.

Well, what you have to understand, young lady, is that the Greeks, not content with dominating the culture of the Classical world, are also responsible for the greatest, some would say the only, work of true creative imagination produced this century as well. I refer of course to the Greek ferry timetables. A work of the sublimest fiction. Anyone who has traveled in the Aegean will confirm this. Hmm, yes. I think so.

The socially correct way of pouring tea is to put the milk in after the tea. Social correctness has traditionally had nothing whatever to do with reason, logic, or physics. In fact, in England it is generally considered socially incorrect to know stuff or think about things. It's worth bearing this in mind when visiting.