Quotes About Culture

The very word, religio—to bind (ligio) back (re)—suggests exactly this. Thus these ancient cultures remained profoundly backward oriented. This ritualized return to a primordial past, the very essence of mythological forms of recollection, is what de Lubac perceptively characterized as a "deliberate (though admittedly still instinctive) refusal of history.

As we shall see below, without that tinge of moral remorse, however, there would have been no catharsis, and therefore no surviving culture.

It is when we ask about the nature of this catharsis that we discover that culture itself represents something like the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.

The fashions of the ages vary in this direction and that, but they vary for the most part from a central road which was struck out by the imagination of Greece.

Probably throughout history the worst things ever done in the world on a large scale by decent people have been done in the name of religion, and I do not think that has entirely ceased to be true at the present day.

le persan Al-Sadjâssi, écrivait il y'a des siècles: Quand la sagesse est descendue des étages du ciel vers le centre de la terre, elle s'est établie en quatre gîtes et s'est installée en quatre demeures: dans le cerveau des grecs, sur la langue des arabes, dans la main des chinois et dans le cœur des perses.

Scotland might as well be a foreign country to one such as myself. But then I often felt like that in England, too, as did many of us who had grown up in the colonies. It was as if we had returned to a home different from the one we had been holding in our heads all that time.

Algerian-born writer Albert Camus elegantly expressed this notion in the famous quotation, "Ma patrie, c'est la langue française" ("My homeland is the French language").

estamos en un ciclo nuevo caracterizado por una relativa desdiferenciación de las esferas económicas y estéticas, por la desregulación de las distinciones entre lo económico y lo estético, la industria y el estilo, la moda y el arte, el pasatiempo y la cultura, lo comercial y lo creativo, la cultura de masas y la alta cultura: desde este momento, en las economías de la hipermodernidad estas esferas se hibridan, se mezclan, se cortocircuitan, se interpenetran.

silos are fundamentally a cultural phenomenon. They arise because social groups and organizations have particular conventions about how to classify the world.

the key point is this: with or without a formal training in anthropology, we all do need to think about the cultural patterns and classification systems that we use. If we do, we can master our silos. If we do not, they will master us.

are culture-vultures; but not in the way this phrase is usually used," as Stephen Hugh-Jones, a British anthropologist, explains. "For anthropologists 'culture' is not a matter of refinement of tastes or the intellectual side of civilization; it is the commonly-held ideas, beliefs and practices of any society of any kind.

wherever you sit, in whatever blend of familiar and strange, it always pays to stop and ask yourself a simple question that the bankers on the Riviera were not asking: If I was to arrive in this culture, as a total stranger, or as a Martian or child, what might I see?

a compartmentalized mental, cultural, and spatial framework that appeared to be widespread.

During the next eight years Bell lived in an Aboriginal community of about six hundred people near Alice Springs.I "I dropped out of school, stopped wearing shoes, and went hunting with people every chance I got," she said. She learned to extract water from desert frogs and snacked on "witchetty grubs," a type of Australian caterpillar that lives among tree roots. "I was very fortunate. I had the most blessed childhood."2

None of the women in the women were eating in the daytime, unless they were pregnant or working, because they were observing the Muslim fast.

With people dying outside on the streets of Dushanbe, studying marriage rituals did sound exotic—if not irrelevant.

Cultural patterns in the media mattered too.

Everybody is messed up and occupied by others! Even if you are not Filipino! We are all creatures of translation, parallel chapters repeating in a universal void!

For her uncles, she realizes, it is as if ever since she left the country for New York City—for nothing! not to send money home but just to "galavant!"—ever since she left she has relinquished her right to her memory of home, and she should not be left to her devices or she will bumble through the nation like a witless tourist who cannot speak its languages, though in fact she code-switches in three of them, puns in five, makes money in two, and dreams in one.

Our beliefs define us. And who wants to be undefined in today's world? So we scrape together convenient truths and build our identities out of them.