Quotes About Culture

Thinking 'economistically', as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans.

Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation; thus the progress of historical studies is often a danger for national identity . . . The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things'. Ernest Renan

East and West, Asia and Europe, were always walls in the mind at least as much as lines on the earth

Our disability is discursive: we simply do not know how to talk about these things any more. For the last thirty years, when asking ourselves whether we support a policy, a proposal or an initiative, we have restricted ourselves to issues of profit and loss - economic questions in the narrowest sense. But this is not an instinctive human condition: it is an acquired taste.

But for enlightened Austrians, 'Asia' nevertheless began at the Landstrasse, the high road leading east out of Vienna. When Mozart headed west from Vienna en route for Prague in 1787, he described himself as crossing an oriental border. East and West, Asia and Europe, were always walls in the mind at least as much as lines on the earth.

in an Apparently Godless Era.

between 1983 and 2001, mistrustfulness increased markedly in the US, the UK and Ireland—three

But as one Hungarian who had worked for some years in California explained to an interviewer: 'America is the place to come when you are young and single. But if it is time to grow up, you should return to Europe'.

The narcissism of student movements, new Left ideologues and the popular culture of the '60s generation invited a conservative backlash.

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?

By the late '60s, the culture gap separating young people from their parents was perhaps greater than at any point since the early 19th century.

Margate's never been easy, always hard. 'If you want a dirty weekend, go to Margate,' I always say. You can be as dirty as you like. Van Gogh and Turner, Ronnie Biggs and the Krays all went there. Romans, Vikings, Hell's Angels, teds, mods, rockers and punks, they all fought there.

What was wrong with being a girl? Was it really a man's world like my mom said? And if so, where did that leave us?

The impossibility in the present day and age of combining Christianity and any public sense is underlined most strikingly in Zarathustra. The first person Zarathustra meets is a pious hermit. Zarathustra does not tell him that God is dead. The social message is clear; as with Socratism, implicit in Christianity and its liberal offshoots are elements that make society and the public weal impossible. Its epistemology endlessly destroys the horizons that make all culture and life possible.

We Indians know about silence," he said. "We aren't afraid of it. In fact, to us it is more powerful than words.

No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers. . . . Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Didn't the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children? — Tecumseh Shawnee This

I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning.

I remind my American readers that biscuits in England and Australia are crispy flat things such as you call cookies, and the soft doughy things you call biscuits are what we call scones. And they say we speak the same language…

His voice was heavy with Slavic fatalism.

country that doesn't grow its own wine grapes has no claim to civilisation.

The last bastion of conservatism,' she commented, 'is food.

I think the church and the religion right now have a lot more to be worried about than SLAYER.

The contemporary needs of North American Jews are directly tied to the trajectory of the immigrant experience in North America. The generation now coming of age is the first generation we may call fully American, American Jews.

If my face is uncovered, a man—even someone I do not know—may fall into sin. Consequently, the scarves are necessary, essential. For life, I am wrapped as if in death. Why not have the man cover his eyes instead?