Quotes About Culture

Plus there was the standard French insult of ignoring your French and answering in English.

Every time I saw Muslim masses bowed in prayer or the Catholic faithful gathered all I saw was fear. Moronically nodding Hasidim, paint-throwing Hindus, shimmying and jabbering Evangelicals, they were all scared shitless this was all there was. Even the Buddhists (whose crinkled tee-heeing lamas always made me want to slap them) were terrified of their own flesh and blood, needed some disembodied desire-free fairyland to shoot for.

How could one engage the world and yet not be cheapened by the aggressive dumbing-down that was the lifeblood of the commercial culture, the festering underbelly of the polity he sought to lead?

A country is made not by policy alone, but by its music, its entertainment shows, all of it.

I'm the whitest guy you will ever meet. The first time I saw an African-American, my dad had to tell me to stop staring.

Hollywood, Woodstock, nor the hippie culture was the source of power of the 1960's freedom movement. God was.

It must be frustrating for decent parents to watch their children fall under the influence of radical educators, and sometimes make foolish decisions based on the predominant cultures in their schools. But no one should be surprised it happens—far too many educators are moral relativists who reject the notion of absolute right or wrong.

American political culture quickly and always outpaces any attempt to satirize it.

The perceptions and pronouncements of human beings are inherently subjective. Every news article is the product of all sorts of highly subjective cultural, nationalistic, and political assumptions. And all journalism serves one faction's interest or another's. The

It can be argued that doo-wop is a great, unequivocal uniter of white men of a certain age and temperament.

Rather than seeking inspiration and meaning in life from the Bible, our culture has symbolically replaced it with the dictionary, a symbol of knowledge, learning, and enlightenment. I am committed to excellence in academics and intellectual pursuits, but this innocent mistake illustrates how so many people have replaced a vital relationship with their Creator (symbolized by the Bible) with a worship of knowledge and the mind (symbolized by the dictionary).

To be German is simply the way we live; it is a love of government and orderliness, for one thing, and confidence in ourselves and in each other.

We are all trained to be female impersonators.

Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.

To transform inequality in the outside world, we have to start inside the home. We have to get rid of the old idea that what happens to men is political, and therefore subject to change, but what happens to women is cultural, and therefore can't, or shouldn't, be changed.

I'm not sure we can understand another country if we don't understand our own.

Will we get to the point that learning sign language is a part of literacy? That knowing both an audible and a physical language is routine?

Because we tend to treat others as we have been treated, a trustworthy system leads to more trust, corruption leads to more corruption, violence to more violence.

Altogether, I can't imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there.

No wonder the romance of Wuthering Heights endures—as do romantic myths in almost every culture. Indeed, the more patriarchal and gender-polarized a culture is, the more addicted to romance. These myths embody our yearning to be whole. No wonder romance so often begins at a physical distance or across a psychic chasm of class and race,* and thrives on death and separation. Projecting our lost qualities onto someone else can be done more easily from a distance.

I began to sense that a big part of our problem is simple ignorance of what the oldest cultures have to teach.

White people should have sued for being culturally deprived in a white ghetto. When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.

Altogether, I can't imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there. Wherever

In thirty years or so, the majority will no longer be European Americans; the first generation of mostly babies of color has already been born. This new diversity will give us a better understanding of the world and enrich our cultural choices, yet there are people whose sense of identity depends on the old hierarchy.