Quotes About Culture

The Canadian dialect of English . . . seems roughly to be the result of applying British syntax to an American vocabulary.

The immigrant who comes to Canada really sees the country much more as a whole. He doesn't know the nuances which are so important and so dearly beloved by the Torontonian or the Montrealer.

Let us be French as the Americans are English.

You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources.

It is native personality, and that alone, that endows a man to stand before presidents or generals, or in any distinguished collection, with aplomb -and not culture, or any intellect whatever.

The children in Holland take pleasure in making What the children in England take pleasure in breaking.

Beat your child once a day. If you don't know why, he does.

Somewhere, and I can't find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?' 'No', said the priest, 'not if you did not know.' 'Then why,' asked the Eskimo earnestly, 'did you tell me?'

I would say that the single most important conclusion I reached, after traveling through Japan, as well as countless hours reading, studying, and analyzing this fascinating culture, is that you should always tighten the cap on the shampoo bottle before you put it in your suitcase.

Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization.

A civilized society is one that exhibits the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art and peace.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

A savage is simply a human organism that has not received enough news from the human race.

A tablecloth restaurant is still one of the great rewards of civilization.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

Colors speak all languages.

Speech is civilization itself.

I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.

We may live without friends; we may live without books; But civilized man cannot live without cooks.

I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.

Culture is what your butcher would have if he were a surgeon.