Quotes About Culture

The men who come on the stage at one period are all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air.

in North America, giving your name and talking about your personal life is something you do in public and it doesn't mean anything. In France, name exchanges amount to something of a commitment.

Armand was just dumbfounded by the almost universal habit in U.S. academic circles of signing exchanges with "Best." "Who is best?" he asked us. "Why are they best?")

We're guessing the bonjour ritual is expanding because it underlines equality—a principle the French value much more than either liberty or fraternity.

The French don't value education. They exalt it.

By bringing our daughters to France, we were actually sending them to a boot camp where children learn not just to speak, but to speak a lot, and well.

The last thing a French person will tell a stranger is that she loves her job. It just sounds naïve. At best, if she actually does love her work, she'll tell a close friend, because liking work is a private, almost intimate sentiment in France. It's definitely not something you advertise to the world.

Shame, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder.

It's received wisdom that the English are uniquely child-unfriendly.

It's very hard to imagine the phrase 'consumer society' used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.

When did women whose looks are not their living start conducting themselves like the simpering inmates of an Ottoman empire seraglio?

What I find most upsetting about this new all-consuming beauty culture is that the obsession with good looks, and how you can supposedly attain them, is almost entirely female-driven.

The stewardess stopped beside their seats then and introduced herself. "I'm a full-blooded Apache Indian," she told them. "Barbara Slater is my American name and I was educated in public schools." She slipped into the empty seat beside Di. "My Indian name is too long to remember. So won't you please just call me Babs?

How does knowing where we are from inform who we are now?

For the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the suspension of their own mores when they came in contact with the Indian nations was quite the opposite of battle, bringing not horrors, but the guiltless pleasure of a liaison unlike any in the United States- unlike any, because it didn't have to be arranged, induced, concealed, limited, remunerated, or sanctified.

Etsuko was given the name Esther by her teacher, Mr. Slater, on her first day of school. "It's his mother's name," she explained. To which we replied, "So is yours.

If every member of the human race evinced a fondness for literature and even a moderate level of dexterity with the written word, I would be a happier, if not more well-adjusted, man.

A history of literature, unlike history as such, ought to list only victories, for its defeats are no victory for anyone.

Bom ou mau, aquilo que sai da Paris é Paris, seja uma carta, um pedaço de pão, um par de sapatos ou um poema.

Work-and-spend has become a mutually reinforcing and powerful syndrome-a seamless web we somehow keep choosing, without even meaning to.

The idea that medieval people rarely washed is a nineteenth-century fallacy. Every courtesy book stressed the need to wash one's hands and face daily and it was also customary to wash the hands before eating: guests might be offered water scented with garden herbs or flowers or even, in the wealthiest households, with perfume imported from the east.

In mass culture, imperialist nostalgia takes the form of reenacting and reritualizing in different ways the imperialist, colonizing journey as narrative fantasy of power and desire, of seduction by the Other. This

When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, sexual practices affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the Other.

In 1984, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu explored the social patterning of consumption and taste in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Bourdieu found that family socialization processes and educational experiences are the primary determinants of taste for a wide range of cultural goods, including food, dress, and home decor.