Quotes About Culture

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

justice. Can you imagine how wicked society would be if the fear of God and the fear of civil law were completely removed? Imagine how our culture would be if a man could rape and murder with no concern about being punished in the slightest. A scenario like that would reveal to everyone the true heart of humanity.

Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it—life begins in slime and ends in intelligence—whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts the matter: "We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else takes it for granted that they are descended from gods." —HUSTON SMITH16 Some philosophers hold

As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts the matter: "We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else takes it for granted that they are descended from gods." —

About then I remembered I was a hungover Jew who was now on drugs at a mosque in a place where the only law was Islam.

La pobreza en América es de colores

De los libros que ella me dio a leer mientras trataba de instruirme saqué la conclusión de que no hay cosas muy distintas en ningún lugar del mundo y que por eso la gente se viste de colores diferentes y canta canciones distintas para soñar por un segundo que algo distintos son.

Tea: was there ever a more universal and life-sustaining beverage.

This traditional woman grew up in a world where respect for the animals hunted was of paramount importance. A concept that, in many cases, differentiates the native from the non-native hunter.

The development of an informal public life depends people finding and enjoying one another outside the cash nexus.

We have become a suburban nation—the only one in the world.

Although some common folk might enjoy a sip now and again, the major consumers of tea participated in a ritual activity which was prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of colonists.21

Americans in the 1770s were sharply divided according to religion, national origin, location, and even language. Scots Irish Presbyterians in North Carolina, English American Anglicans in Virginia, Dutch and German Mennonites in Pennsylvania, Scottish Highlander Catholics in New York, native-born Congregationalists in Massachusetts—each group had its own culture, its own beliefs, its own set of interests.

The need of our times is nothing less than the re-Christianization of our churches, according to the gospel alone, in both doctrine and culture, by Christ himself

When the doctrine is clear and the culture is beautiful, that church will be powerful. But there are no shortcuts to getting there. Without the doctrine, the culture will be weak. Without the culture, the doctrine will seem pointless.

Gospel doctrine – gospel culture = hypocrisy Gospel culture – gospel doctrine = fragility Gospel doctrine + gospel culture = power

The publishers and others should quit worrying about losing customers to TV. The guy who can sit through a trio of deodorant commercials to look at Flashgun Casey or swallow a flock of beer and loan-shark spiels in order to watch a couple of fourth-rate club fighters rub noses on the ropes is not losing any time from book reading.

The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called significant literature will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.

Social justice is about freeing people from the clutches of witch doctors and superstition....

It's amazing, isn't it? Here we are, two thousand years later, with everything we've accomplished, everything we know, and yet this little talisman still rules the way billions of people live…and die.

Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged, as astrophysicists would say, on a decaying orbit.

Sichuan food would not be Sichuanese without the hot chilies that arrived before 1700 from South America.

Consequently, no matter how they try, immigrants cannot prevent their children from becoming cultural products of the adopted country. Through their efforts at preservation, they can only accentuate the gap between the two cultures and prevent harmonization.

I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter "Nike" and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker.