Quotes About Culture

I think appreciating Dickens goes with ten thousand in the bank.

For if one should propose to all men a choice, bidding them select the best customs from all the customs that there are, each race of men, after examining them all, would select those of their own people; thus all think that their own customs are by far the best.

I believe that the women were called by the Dodonaeans "doves" because they were barbarians, and so they seemed to the people of Dodona to talk like birds.

THE HISTORY OF HERODOTUS

It was the casual rudeness that spoke of a long, long British male friendship.

los bárbaros construyen sus casas separadas, y los hombres civilizados, juntas.

Christian Europe should be by nature one; but it has forgotten its nature in forgetting its religion.

economics are but an expression of the mind and do not (as the poor blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the mind.

Por qué el desayuno difiere de las demás cosas, hasta el punto de que los griegos lo llamaron lo mejor del mundo?

The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for 'Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter.' He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on.

Flushed with the explosive shit of a sumo wrestler who ate Mexican food.

What if it isn't so much Indianapolis trying to be Brooklyn, as Brooklyn wanting to capture something of Indianapolis?

It's my first time in this place. Maybe like you, though, I've been here before—anyone who's walked through Williamsburg or seen an episode of Girls has. It's a landscape of under-35s, bristling with locally brewed IPAs, restaurant pop-ups, and new kinds of mustard. And everybody—literally everybody—is flaunting freestyle forearm ink. But tonight I'm not in Williamsburg. I'm in Indianapolis.

the real achievement isn't getting out of the place where you were born to build a new identity for yourself. It's better to stay put and change the culture—genuinely transform—where you are.

A young man is embarrassed to question an older one.

around the country, fill your belly well Ã¢â'¬â€

For the more literal approach would seem to be too little English, and the more literary seems too little Greek. I have tried to find a cross between the two, a modern English Homer.

For I have seen the cities of men; and learned their manners.

estos maratones de baile guardan bastante parecido con las corridas de toros.

As time went on, the meaning of "tribe" was no longer clamped entirely to birth. Newcomers to a Greek city were often assigned a tribe at random—no matter who their forefathers might have been. But once you had your tribal label, it was unchangeable. Despite vocational liberties, preordained identities still stuck to you like glue.

Conquest is the needle which stitched together virtually all of the "great nations" which we know today—allowing such multitribal hodgepodges as Germans, Russians, Arabs, Japanese, English, and French to convince themselves that they have always been ein Volk—one folk with a unique bloodline and history.

During the last 3,000 years, long-distance trading cultures have steadily conquered, displaced, absorbed, or erased indigenous clans less enthusiastic about peddling wares across wide stretches of both sea and land.

In any event, whether a supernatural tale remains altogether fantastic or eventually modulates to the uncanny or the marvelous, the reader is faced with disconcerting ontological and perceptual problems. Indeed, the disorienting effect of the supernatural encounter in fiction seems to reflect some deeper disorientations in the culture at large.

The fact is, John Chapman might well be the best-known figure from our national past about whom most people know almost nothing at all.