Quotes About Culture

Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.

If you are going to think black, think positive about it. Don't think down on it, or think it is something in your way. And this way, when you really do want to stretch out and express how beautiful black is, everybody will hear you.

We make our own criminals, and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share. It has been said that a people get the kind of political leadership they deserve. I think they also get the kinds of crime and criminals they themselves bring into being.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

He who never leaves his country is full of prejudices.

This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.

Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?

Oats, n.s. A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

We travel to learn; and I have never been in any country where they did not do something better than we do it, think some thoughts better than we think, catch some inspiration from heights above our own.

Whatever good I have accomplished as an actress I believe came in direct proportion to my efforts to portray black women who have made positive contributions to my heritage.

The grandeur that was Rome.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

Definition of a Jewish nymphomaniac: A woman who will make love the same day she has her hair done.

In opposition to sex education: Let the kids today learn it where we did - in the gutter.

Shame is an ornament to the young; a disgrace to the old.

It is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.

Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.

Football combines the two worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

I have never been able to understand why pigeon-shooting at Hurlingham should be refined and polite, while a rat-killing match in Whitechapel is low.

States are as the men are; they grow out of human characters.

There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.

Religion is not removed by removing superstition.

The pursuit of the perfect, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.