Quotes About Culture

Um eine fremde Sprache recht gut sprechen zu lernen, und würklich in Gesellschaft zu sprechen mit dem eigentlichen Akzent des Volks, muß man nicht allein Gedächtnis und Ohr haben, sondern auch in gewissem Grad ein kleiner Geek sein.

George Armstrong Custer

America is a country in which the velocity of history is especially great, in which each succeeding decade wipes it's immediate predecessor out, a phenomenon that had moved some observers to remark that America has no history but only an eternal present.

1. Churches seem restrictive and overprotective. Self-expression has become one of the foundations of our postmodern culture. There is less concern about truth than about freedom to express feelings, ideas, and experiences. The demand for expressive liberty has certainly threaded its way into the realm of spirituality, as well—which poses a problem for many churches, since many young adults say their experience of church feels stifling, fear-based, and risk-averse.

We have wandered so far from fundamental spiritual knowledge in our culture that literally tens of millions of people—many of whom have long-term ties with the Christian church—have no clue how to even describe a true spiritual experience.

On ne comprends rien à la civilisation moderne, si l'on n'admet pas d'abord qu'elle est une conspiration universelle contre toute espèce de vie intérieure.

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

Where there is no religion, hypocrisy becomes good taste

The English are not very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.

If any religion had the chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.,

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

The 100% American is 99% an idiot.

We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

Freshman year, kissing and deep French kissing. Then sophomore year, I'd want to be making out with her. By sixteen we should be having oral sex, and by seventeen or eighteen, full frontal sex. Of course, it could go faster than that, but basically, he said, that was the standard progression. Before I finished high school, I should be having full frontal sex with her.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world

When you stress individualism, as this country does; materialism, as this country does; personal weaponry, as this country does; and racial hatred, which is part of our heritage as white Europeans; and then you add the volatile ingredient of "nothing".

I have seen so many of these, and lived with them, and travelled with them, and oftentimes felt as if I should starve to death on an equal allowance, that I am fully convinced I am correct in saying that the North American Indians, taking them in the aggregate, even where they have an abundance to subsist on, eat less than any civilized population of equal numbers, that I have ever travelled amongst.

There is evidently a set song and sentiment for every dance, for the songs are perfectly measured, and sung in exact time with the beat of the drum; and always with an uniform and invariable set of sounds and expressions, which clearly indicate certain sentiments, which are expressed by the voice, though sometimes not given in any known language whatever.

God bless… Chocolate City… and its vanilla suburbs.

The last real movie stars were probably Redford and Newman. And things were different then. There wasn't this amazing amount of magazines and information about them.

I'm really white trash.

Indeed, it required a nose both subtle and unprejudiced to understand and appreciate and thoroughly enjoy that Paris—not the Paris of M. le Baron Haussmann, lighted by gas and electricity, and flushed and drained by modern science; but the "good old Paris" of Balzac and Eugène Sue and Les Mystères—the Paris of dim oil-lanterns suspended from iron gibbets (where once aristocrats had been hung);