Quotes About Culture

That wasn't the way that things was supposed to be. And all because the so-called culture that I thought was right, that I thought it was cool, and I thought it was fun, and it was exciting at the time. It all led to me laying in a prison bunk by myself with no one to talk to but myself.

I talk about race and culture, and that's what my fans respond to. If you grew up in an environment where race and culture were never an issue for you, or where you don't see the humor in our so-called differences, then you might not respond to what I'm doing.

I think that people in the Bible Belt are far less monolithically religious than many people imagine. There are lots and lots of people who are free-thinking, secularists, or atheists in the so-called Bible Belt.

This ambivalence about the value of cooking raises an interesting question: Has our culture devalued food-work because it is unfulfilling by it's very nature or because it has traditionally been women's work?

To savor food, to conceive of food as an aesthetic experience, has been regarded as evidence of effeteness, a form of foreign foppery.

To say "I'm hungry" in French you say "J'ai faim"—"I have hunger"—and when you are finished, you do not say that you are full, but "Je n'ai plus faim"—"I have no more hunger.

A meme is simply a unit of memorable cultural information. It can be as small as a tune or a metaphor, as big as a philosophy or religious concept. Hell is a meme; so are the Pythagorean theorem, A Hard Day's Night, the wheel, Hamlet, pragmatism, harmony, "Where's the beef?," and of course the notion of the meme itself.

Certainly the extraordinary abundance of food in America complicates the whole problem of choice. At the same time, many of the tools with which people historically managed the omnivores dilemma have lost their sharpness here or simply failed. As a relatively new nation drawn from many different immigrant populations, each with its own culture of food American's have never had a single, strong, stable, culinary tradition to guide us.

People eating a Western diet are prone to a complex of chronic diseases that seldom strike people eating more traditional diets.

EAT MORE LIKE THE FRENCH. OR THE ITALIANS. OR THE JAPANESE. OR THE INDIANS. OR THE GREEKS.

REGARD NONTRADITIONAL FOODS WITH SKEPTICISM

Foods that lie to our senses are one of the most challenging features of the Western diet.

As a culture," Pollan writes, "we seem to have arrived at a place where whatever native wisdom we may once have possessed about eating has been replaced by confusion and anxiety.

Few people put veal stock in the same category as, say, the Goldberg Variations or Plato's cave allegory, and this lack of understanding amazes me.

the study of psychophysics proves that it is impossible to bore a German." Thankfully

The arts are not frosting but baking soda.

Whatever the variations by race, class, age, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, being a man means not being like women. This notion of antifemininity lies at the heart of contemporary and historical conceptions of manhood, so that masculinity is defined more by what one is not rather than who one is.

But what is good and what is bad? That has become increasingly confusing in this age of relativity. There seem to be no mores that are considered universal. Can that be so? Look at the Ten Commandments.

Thomas Macaulay's History of England

Sex does not need to be primordial in order to be legitimate. Civilization doesn't just repress our original sexuality; it makes new kinds of sexuality. And new sexualities, including learned ones, might have as as much validity as ancient ones, if not more.

Women are not entirely wrong when they reject the moral rules proclaimed in society, since it is we men alone who have made them.

In our time the most warlike nations are the most rude and ignorant.

In general I ask for books that make use of learning, not those that build it up.

Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.