Quotes About Culture

When a lot of money comes along before culture arrives, we get the phenomenon of the gold telephone. And when I say culture I don't mean academic knowledge, I mean information: information about what is happening in the world, about the things that make life interesting.

When one studies something characteristic of a people it is wise to look at its best side, at least if one wants to learn anything. Ugly things are ugly in much the same way the world over. Only the best can teach us, and the best of anything is individual. Each country excels in some things, and in the rest is just the same as other countries: mediocre.

Ooh, go ahead and poke fun at my poor queenology, Canada boy.

The Tragedy of the human condition is that the very things that make us interesting and culturally important and progressively brilliant are our differences; and these are also the principle reasons for our prejudices

It was the first time I'd realised that the giant in 'Jack and the Beanstalk' was an Afrikaner.

In Ibuza sons help their father more than they help their mother. A mother's joy is only in the name. She worries over them,looks after them when they are small;but in the actual help on the farm ,the upholding of the family name,all belong to the father.

The fear of everybody was that the man might give in and say, After all, it's her life. However a thing like that is not permitted in Nigeria; you are simply not allowed to commit suicide in peace, because everyone is responsible for the other person. Foreigners may call us a nation of busybodies, but to us, an individual's life belongs to the community and not just to him or her.

The Pastor had spent his boyhood in the old country and was not at all sure that hot water, stall showers and the like were necessary to salvation. In fact it was one of his notions that Americans were too clean. "Rub all the natural protective oils off their skins, they do for a fact.

All these represent humanity in general, totally enraged, demented, vengeful, spiteful, cheap denizens of our culture, vultures, jackals, sharks, suckerfish, stingrays, lice.

You could talk about Prohibition, or Hemingway, or air conditioning, or music, or horses, but in the end you had to talk about the stock market, and that was when the conversation became serious.

A reader of mine is a deluxe reader, not because I'm so great but because in order to get to me you have to take a path through literature, not through some books bought out of curiosity at the bookstore. A reader of mine has to have read other things.

It wasn't that I didn't feel like sharing. Mostly I just figured they couldn't do anything about it, so there was no point in worrying them. I said, 'A wee little bit,' instead, in honor of being in Ireland, where one adjective was never enough if three would do.

Americans and Irish. Separated by a common language.

society dictated foolish amounts of discretion in response to bad behavior, especially for women.

Distinguishing Marks Every land has its distinguishing mark. Particular to Thessaly are horsemanship and horses; what marks a Spartan is war's season; Media has its tables with their dishes; hair marks the Celts, the Assyrians have beards. But the marks that distinguish Athens are Mankind and the Word.

Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?

The history of Vietnam lies in this bowl, for it is in Hanoi, the Vietnamese heart, that ph? was born, a combination of the rice noodles that predominated after a thousand years of Chinese occupation and the taste for beef the Vietnamese acquired under the French, who turned their cows away from ploughs and into bifteck and pot-au-feu. The name of their national soup is pronounced like this French word for fire...

Girls are not passive by nature. They are only so because the culture demands they be.

Camille Paglia

And I found in my study that history is cyclic, and everywhere in the world you find this pattern in ancient times: that as a culture begins to decline, you have an efflorescence of transgender phenomena. That is a symptom of cultural collapse.

Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature.

American feminism has a man problem. The beaming Betty Crockers, hangdog dowdies, and parochial prudes who call themselves feminists want men to be like women. They fear and despise the masculine. The academic feminists think their nerdy bookworm husbands are the ideal model of human manhood. But

Men are the hunters and women are the gatherers. Shopping is a form of gathering.

Sex. It's the biggest sham of all. I mean, your life, all you ever hear is how you're supposed to save yourself for marriage. And how its so special. And then you finally do it. And you're like, that it'? This is what everyone's been raving about?