Quotes About Culture

We said that mere judgment would probably suffice in a primitive society. It is easy for a society to live without mathematics—

You can easily tell a Northener: he/she feels guilty doing nothing. Even doing nothing for them is programmed, labeled, and has to be learned using some Yoga instructor.

Before the "enlightenment" and the age of rationality, there was in the culture a collection of tricks to deal with our fallibility and reversals of fortunes. The elders can still help us with some of their ruses.

The Discovery of France

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.

Only in recent history has working hard signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura.

Ninety-five percent of the employee's mind will be on company politics…

These food recipes are embedded in cultures. Cooking schools are entirely apprenticeship based.

Il mio mestiere è scrivere delle storie, cose inventate o cose che ricordo della mia vita ma comunque storie, cose dove non c'entra la cultura ma soltanto la memoria e la fantasia. Questo è il mio mestiere, e io lo farò fino alla morte

Paris has always seemed ... the only city where you can live and express yourself as you please.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

In any culture, subculture, or family in which belief is valued above thought, and self-surrender is valued above self-expression, and conformity is valued above integrity, those who preserve their self-esteem are likely to be heroic exceptions.

So far as we can ascertain, in primitive cultures the idea of romantic love did not exist at all.

The concept of romantic love as a widely accepted cultural value and as the ideal basis of marriage was a product of the nineteenth century.

It is said that the successful organization of the future will be above all a learning organization. It can equally be said that it will be an organization geared to self-esteem.

There's a lot of work, a lot of writing, to be done, and there's no telling when the results will begin to show. But if Atlas Shrugged sells 50,000 copies, this culture's cooked.

America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women

No longer mindful of the debt they owed the Pokanokets, without whom their parents would never have endured their first year in America, some of the Pilgrims' children were less willing to treat Native leaders with the tolerance and respect their parents had once afforded Massasoit.

Three Village Historical Society

Here the oppression of women is very subtle. If we take female circumcision, the excision of the clitoris, it is done physically in Egypt. But here it is done psychologically and by education. So even if women have the clitoris, the clitoris was banned; it was removed by Freudian theory and by the mainstream culture.

because television had become the primary means through which people appropriated the world, it promulgated an epistemology in which all information, whatever the source, was forced to become entertainment.

the first sign of civilization is always trash.

People can read anything, but no one does. All they do is play games and watch cat holograms.

We're this big melting pot, but someone turned up the heat too high, and the stew started to burn. Gangs, crime, fights, and fear are now a regular part of our local stew.