Quotes About Culture

It didn't matter whether "football" for you was soccer or the American sport played by men in helmets.

Eventually the visitors were treated to a thoroughly non-ironic dinner at an Applebee's.

But the Owners really valued the Crow's Nest partly as a cultural institution and partly because it gave them access to the sort of information about the lives, thoughts, and deeds of important persons that could only be had in a bar.

Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV—which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite—the people who go into the Metaverse, basically—who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.

Every culture can be kind of defined by what they drink in order to avoid dying of diarrhea. In China it's tea. In Africa it's milk or animal blood. In Europe it was wine and beer.

Then, just for a blessed few hours, he had climbed out of that chopper into the high, cold, piney air of Bhutan, and gone for a ramble in the king's Land Rover, and hiked up a misty mountain that had struck him as being straight from a 1970s album cover. And he had done some introspection about the fact that he couldn't even take such a lovely place at face value but only liken it to such pop culture references.

Juanita refused to analyze this process, insisted that it was something ineffable, something you couldn't explain with words. A radical, rosary-toting Catholic, she has no problem with that kind of thing. But the bitheads didn't like it. Said it was irrational mysticism. So she quit and took a job with some Nipponese company. They don't have any problem with irrational mysticism as long as it makes money.

In most of the world, Magellan is thought of as the first guy who went around the world. Here, everyone knows he only made it as far as Mactan Island, where he was killed by Filipinos.

And when horny, well-paid American flyboys are dropped into a culture defined half by cannibals and half by Frenchmen, you get a hell of a civilian economy.

All the Chinese people Richard had ever met had been sophisticated urbanites, so he had been half expecting that he would end up carrying the girl Yuxia on his back. But it became clear almost immediately that she was half mountain goat, or whatever the Chinese equivalent of a mountain goat was.

All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units.

THE LAY OF WALMART TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: "The Lay of Walmart" comprises two parts. Handwriting analysis confirms that both were written by the same author, self-identified as Tóki Olafsson, a skald

The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it, we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture.

Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of drugs.

Stand-up peeing in a long flowing garment could lead to various mishaps.

What do you think of her?" Csongor asked. "Is she your girlfriend?" "For a while I was thinking maybe," Marlon admitted, "but then I decided she was my sister." "Huh." "China is funny. One child per family, you know. We are all looking for siblings.

The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong:

Yes, I am, but I'm also referring to certain white men in suits. It only takes a single generation to revert to savagery.

She was of West Indian ancestry, wearing her hair in finger-length dreadlocks that had adapted pretty well to zero gravity—better than white-people hair, for sure.

because class is more than income—it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships.

amística, un término acuñado hacía eones por un antropólogo moirano para referirse a las elecciones que hacían las diferentes culturas en cuanto a qué tecnologías formarían parte de su vida y cuáles no.

Finkle-McGraw began to develop an opinion that was to shape his political views in later years, namely, that while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed. It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those days, never voiced.

But even if they did have that kind of money rattling around in their pockets, actually spending it would offend their native frugality.

Now, there was a time when we believed that what a human mind could accomplish was determined by genetic factors. Piffle, of course, but it looked convincing for many years, because distinctions between tribes were so evident. Now we understand that it's all cultural. That, after all, is what a culture is—a group of people who share in common certain acquired traits.