Quotes About Culture

Another wonderful product from our sneaky little Jap friends." Intense movement and color blossomed on all six of the monitors. This crack about the Japanese

a culture medium for a medium culture.

Entire sections of them simply cannot be translated—the characters are legible and well-known, but when put together they do not say anything that leaves an imprint on the modern mind." "Like instructions for programming a VCR.

Of course, happy is a concept for fat Americans. Immigrants don't seem to care about happy very much. Healthy, wealthy and wise, yes, but happiness alone is something their children worry about, maybe.

We change the script a little," Madame Ping said, "to allow for cultural differences. But the story never changes. There are many people and many tribes, but only so many stories.

He has passed into the realm of irrational things that you must simply accept, and in the Philippines this is a nearly infinite domain

A man is talking on the phone in Cantonese, which means that he is, in fact, shouting.

Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process.

he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process.

The Comanches were originally Shoshones who had come down out of the north speaking a language that, of course, had no word for "pig." When they had encountered this alien species in what was now Texas, they'd had to invent a new term for them. The term was muubi pooro. Different bands of Comanches pronounced it in slightly different ways. The first of those words meant "nose" and the second meant something like a "tool" or a "weapon.

This was a bit like running into a clan of kilted Scotsmen in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

Neal Stephenson

As you probably know, the Vikings invaded France, were bought off with Normandy, settled there, then used it as a base for invading Britain and many other places. The most bad-ass Normans crossed the Channel with William the Conqueror; the ones that stayed behind in Normandy spawned the generations who mostly enjoyed jousting and courtly love, etc. . .

one (everything looks the same in America, there are no transitions now).

There are many people and many tribes, but only so many stories.

Music, like violence, crossed all languages. These were the oldest and most complete ways of communicating that people possessed.

bimbo boxes with license plates from all the Burbclaves.

vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture.

All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral—a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next.

That many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we've evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious, and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands.

An overnight train ride delivered him to Persia, his 153rd country, where he drank beer for breakfast and began mapping a route home.

You have created sexual embarrassment, repression, and shame—which has led to sexual inhibition, dysfunction, and violence. You will, as a society, always be inhibited about that over which you are embarrassed; always be dysfunctional with behaviors which have been repressed, and always act out violently in protest of being made to feel shame about that over which you know in your heart you should never have felt shame at all.

In what you have called your nonbarbarian societies, children (and wives, and husbands, for that matter) are thought of as property, as personal possessions, and child-bearers must therefore become child-raisers, because they must take care of what they "own.

The difference between human cultures and the civilizations of Highly Evolved Beings is that HEBs actually apply the law of reciprocity in their lives, rather than just giving it lip service.