Quotes About Culture

In a Pyongyang restaurant, don't ever ask for a doggie bag.

There is almost no country in Africa where it is not essential to know to which tribe, or which subgroup of which tribe, the president belongs. From this single piece of information you can trace the lines of patronage and allegiance that define the state.

Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed; Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired. But if horses or lions had hands, or could draw and fashion works as men do, horses would draw the gods shaped like horses and lions like lions, making the gods resemble themselves. Xenophanes

The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it's your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you

The holy book in the longest continuous use—the Talmud—commands the observant one to thank his maker every day that he was not born a woman.

New forms of the artistic register are one of the infallible signs of an authentic moment.

In the early days of the December that my father was to die, my younger brother brought me the news that I was a Jew. I was then a transplanted Englishman in America, married, with one son and, though unconsoled by any religion, a nonbelieving member of two Christian churches. On hearing the tidings, I was pleased to find that I was pleased.

Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers.

I am always and at once on the defensive, for example, when people speak of races and nations as if they were personalities and had souls and destinies and such like.

The tribe that confuses its totems and symbols with reality has succumbed to fetishism and may be in more trouble than it realises.

why has the blowjob had a dual existence for so long, sometimes subterranean and sometimes flaunted, before bursting into plain view as the specifically American sex act?

The great cultural project... may very well be to rescue what we have of the art and aesthetic of religion while discarding the supernatural.

George Bush is a WASP. George Wallace may have been a white Protestant of Anglo-Saxon descent, and even rather vocal on all three points, but a WASP he was not.

The various forms of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people to be equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful. —EDWARD GIBBON, DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

Las niñas novias de la India son azotadas y en ocasiones quemadas vivas si se considera que la lastimera dote que aportan al matrimonio es demasiado irrisoria.

The barbaric vernacular word for roasted human in New Guinea and elsewhere was long pig: I have never had the relevant degustatative experience myself, but it seems that we do, if eaten, taste very much like pigs.

The argument that religious belief improves people, or that it helps to civilize society, is one that people tend to bring up when they have exhausted the rest of their case.

Billy Wilder, Lenny Bruce, Saul

La loi pakistanaise permet de condamner une femme à subir un viol collectif afin d'expier la honte d'une crime commis par son frère.

be dire not just for the "holy German Fatherland." As he wrote, at the eleventh hour, "today, not only in peasant homes but also in the city sky-scrapers, there lives alongside the twentieth century the tenth or thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms…. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!")

English muffin, a confection so grim that it could not have been sold in England even in wartime.

The two most obvious English mutations to have occurred in America in the last decade go by the names punk and skinhead.

the gore-soaked landscape of the Old Testament.

I was very pink and young and English; and quite prepared for a Continent complete with poisonous drains, roast frogs, bedbugs and vice.