Quotes About Culture

It is perhaps dangerous to conclude too much about the character and intentions of a nation based on the snacks menu in a railway carriage, but I couldn't help wonder if Scottish nationalism hasn't gone a little too far now. I mean, these poor people are denying themselves simple comforts like KitKats and Cornish pasties and instead are eating neeps and foot medication on grounds of patriotism. Seems a bit unnecessary to me.

Slowly it dawned on me what's going on here. The Natural History Museum can't afford to be a museum anymore, so the directors are stealthily turning it into a food court.

The French have become professional, scientific, and urban. The Italians are improvising amateurs, following rustic preparations handed down for generations. The Italians, it could be said, were still playing with their food.

the table is among the most important activities in civilization. It is about intimacy, convivium, creativity, appetites, desire, euphoria, culture, and the joys of being alive.

Saint Sulpice had only been granted protective status as a national treasure in 1994. But it was now officially a monument, in the fullest sense of the word: It marked a place where something happened which now was gone.

stripped to the waist; their two fingers jabbing the air; the vicious expressions on their faces as they hurled back the objects that had been thrown at them. Italians behaving like hooligans?

A culture of forgiveness makes any community irresistible.

Isn't it time we asked ourselves, are we willing to accept any behavior codified within religious or cultural practice? Is there no line to be drawn? If honor killings are okay, then why not virgin sacrifices or cannibalism or sex with children outside the church? We have perversely taken our notion of tolerance to such extremes that we've become tolerant of intolerance.

New Rule: If one of your news organization's headlines is about who got kicked off Dancing with the Stars last night, you're no longer a news organization. Sort of like, if you were on Dancing with the Stars last night, you're no longer a star.

In America, there's no idea so patently absurd that it can't catch on.

this was one of those rare "Wow, maybe these black guys aren't all on drugs; they actually seem like normal people" moments that the NBA needed so desperately in order to connect with secretly-still-a-little-racist America

You feelin' me? Word. This is one phat book I'm writing, yo. Recognize.

Oh look, yet another Christmas TV special! How touching to have the meaning of Christmas brought to us by cola, fast food, and beer.... Who'd have ever guessed that product consumption, popular entertainment, and spirituality would mix so harmoniously?

It's going to be a grim day when the world is run by a generation that doesn't know anything but what it's seen on TV.

In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.

Instead of asking what's wrong with rampant consumerism, we ought to be asking, 'What justifies it?' Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

This is the typical fallacy on which all of CONSUMER AMERICA is based. Some piece of useless crap will make people like you.

What was a foreigner, anyway? Is the place you're born the only place you really belong? At what point do you stop being from away and start being from here?

Keeping the team small also relieved Maytag of some management chores. New people who weren't working out didn't have to be fired. They would leave of their own accord. They simply couldn't last in a small group of people without the support of their peers. Conversely, those who meshed with the culture were embraced by the group and given more responsibility, with Maytag scarcely having to say a word.

songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with.

You've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books, you're very well read, it's well known.

bob dylan new orleans

Not that there's anything wrong with commercialism but like all things monetary, it's based on a leap of faith; more abstract than Frank Stella's geometrics. The only reason money is worth anything is because we agree it is. Like religion, these agreements can change according to country and culture, but those changes are merely cosmetic, usually only name and denomination. The basic tenets remain constant.