Quotes About Culture

You can't change laws without first changing human nature... You can't change human nature without first changing the law.

Funny how morality, which always seems so black and white can be influenced so completely by what you were raised to believe.

You don't go missing in a museum- you just get temporarily absorbed by the walls.

And then there's Texas.

They conformed so closely to their culture of nonconformity that there was a uniformity to them, defeating the whole purpose.

karena tanda pertama adanya peradaban selalu saja sampah. [P. 73]

The girl in green seemed mildly PanAsian

These people were caricatures of themselves, he thought. They conformed so closely to their culture of nonconformity that there was a uniformity to them, defeating the whole purpose.

From the city of Caracas

Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.

These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking.... Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.

How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is.

Nous avons, il est vrai, nations corrompues, Aux peuples anciens des beautés incomnues..

Pukeutumisen moraalinen merkitys. Pukeutumisen tuottamat tyydytykset.

great books are the ones we need

They took all the joy out of fucking by talking about it all the time. I liked to fuck too, but it wasn't my religion.

American women drove hard bargains and the ended up looking the worst for it. The few natural American women left were mostly in Texas and Louisiana.

What were you going to do tonight? I was going to listen to the songs of Rachmaninoff. Who's that? A dead Russian.

She would have been a better fuck in Greece, maybe. America was a shitty place to fuck.

America had been taught that beauty only resided in youth, especially in the female.

People became so used to seeing shit on film that they no longer realized it was shit.

I thought about Nietzsche. There we were: a German stallion and a Jewish mare. The fatherland would adore me.

Not only did the grown-ups get mean, the kids got mean, and even the animals got mean. It was like they took their cue from the people.

The strength of the two cultures was very different too: Japanese women instinctively understood yesterday and today and tomorrow. Call it wisdom. And they had staying power. American women only knew today and tended to come to pieces when just one day went wrong.