Quotes About Culture

carrying their Yemeni walking sticks, a.k.a. AK-47s.

Tad and Alison, according to the itinerary, would be giving lectures on Cuban culture, time and place TBA, which I think means To Be Avoided.

It's getting harder to tell the difference between art and vandalism.

Americans lived in the moment, without history and thus without prophecy.

One can be a product only of one's own era, not anyone else's.

The Irish are beautiful bullshitters. I mean, you know they're lying, they know you know they're lying, but they do it with so much charm, conviction, and energy that everyone feels kind of good about it.

fast-food places, discount stores, car dealers, and what passes for nightclubs hereabouts.

Do you know why Italians don't like Jehovah's Witnesses?" "No… why?" "Italians don't like any witnesses.

O brasileiro é um feriado.

Nem toda mulher gosta de apanhar, só as normais.

Cada um de nós, individualmente, pode não ter o sexo na cabeça; mas o povo o tem.

Language, any language, has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture

The English language is the one thing the Commonwealth still has in common.

The biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity — and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.

The English were luckier in their drugs, too: long habituated to alcohol, they were roused from inebriation in the seventeenth century by American tobacco, Arabic coffee and Chinese tea. They got the stimulation of the coffee house, part café, part stock exchange, part chat-room;47 the Chinese ended up with the lethargy of the opium den, their pipes filled by none other than the British East India Company.

No tenemos ningún interés en Sudamérica; no sentimos ninguna simpatía políticamente fundamentada hacia ellos. Venimos de orígenes distintos... Ni todos los tratados que pudiéramos hacer, ni los comisionados que pudiéramos enviar, ni el dinero que pudiéramos prestarles, transformarían a sus Bolívares... en Washingtons'. —Edward Everett

Niall Ferguson

The Emperor and his ministers might dance Western dances and even, in violation of traditional Japanese propriety, smile Western smiles. But their underlying and deadly earnest aim was always to wipe the smiles off European faces.

Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate Governor of Aden, once told Labour politician Denis Healey that 'when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression Fuck off.'   

aunque el liberalismo económico y político anglófono sigue siendo las más atractiva cultura del mundo, tiene el reto de hacer frente, como ha ocurrido desde la revolución iraní, a una seria amenaza procedente del fundamentalismo islámico.

Los profesores que otrora habían abrazado las doctrinas nazis ahora abrazaban las de la OTAN; la mayoría conservó su trabajo. La primera evidencia importante de cambio cultural fue el surgimiento de una prensa liberal, pero fue tanto obra de los ciudadanos del país ocupado como de los ocupantes, cuyo papel fue permisivo en lo fundamental.

Por la lengua, la religión, la tenencia de la tierra y la estructura social, Irlanda era otro mundo.

la noción de un «choque de civilizaciones» es tan caricaturesca como la idea de que Estados Unidos solo está interesado en el petróleo de Oriente Próximo. Es

why should one expect what had worked on one occasion to work on another? Machiavelli stressed that if the political culture of a community had changed—if it had become corrupt, or virtuous—then strategies that had once failed would now work, and vice versa.