Quotes About Culture

I hate France. It's like the whole country's on a diet

Oh, no-" They weren't even on the runway, and Jonah's father was already immersed in his BlackBerry. "Remember those 'Live Large with the Wiz Generation' posters? Well, guess how that translates into Chinese- 'Jonah Wizard Makes Your Ancestors Fat'.

Ian Kabra rolled up his window. "My god, what's that smell?" Behind the wheel, Sinead laughed. "It's called fresh air. Growing up in London, you've probably never breathed it before." "And I hope I never breathe it again.

Both the Beatles and The Rolling Stones broke on the music scene the summer I was in England. I can vividly remember hearing 'She Loves You' in August 1963.

It is a delicate balance, resisting the hypnotic spell of an organization's culture and, at the same time, remaining committed from the heart to the personally relevant goals of the organization.

The escape from habitual culture must always be temporary if you expect to be permitted back into that culture.

We're painted savages, nothing more, in spite of what we like to think of as some thousands of years of civilization. Only our present paint's called clothing and our caves called buildings

Intellectual activity in a culture is not a one-way flow between the great minds and passive recipients; it is a discourse, a complex marketplace-like conglomeration of intellectual exchanges involving many participants all trying to manipulate the ideas available to them in order to explain, justify, lay blame for, or otherwise make sense of what is happening around them. Everyone, not just the great minds, participates in this complicated process.

the country's designation remained "the United States of America," with its people appropriating the name that belonged to all the peoples of the New World—even though the term "Americans" actually had begun as a pejorative label the metropolitan English had applied to their inferior and far-removed colonists.101

In Arizona we salt margaritas, not sidewalks.

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains, — "I don't believe in them, but I am afraid of them, nevertheless."

Only in America do people trample others for sales exactly one day after being thankful for what they already have.

Somewhere at a summer conference, I dropped several books casually on the ground and kicked them out of the way. A German student picked up the books, dusted them off gently. He said how he had worked for years to buy a few books. A book was his blood, and he bled when he saw it mishandled.

Books are embalmed minds.

A book is a sign of the age-old effort to maintain what one generation hands on to another...

A health to books!... Your goblets all refill; When all things mortal are decayed May books be with us still!

The ancient Mexicans used to spend all the day and half the night in dancing with only cacao for nourishment.

Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.

The reputations of the nineteenth century will one day be quoted to prove its barbarism.

I think a civilization is created out of some kind of sublimation of violence. When the violence gets too sublimated, you get a sick civilization.

In America you can buy bucket-sized cups of coffee in any flavor you like other than coffee-flavor.

Coffee in England is just toasted milk.

UNIVERSITY... In the great American universities men are ranked as follows: 1. Seducers; 2. Fullbacks; 3. Boozefighters; 4. Pitchers and Catchers; 5. Poker players; 6. Scholars...

It is in an old kitchen that the best food is made.