Quotes About Culture

You know it's going to hell when the best rapper out there is white and the best golfer is black.

I am bored in France, especially as everyone resembles Voltaire.

Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning. It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.

In a relentlessly commercial culture, the communication of our private meanings has been vaguely corrupted around the edges by the toxic idioms of merchandising.

All these buildings of Paris are treasures," said Lucien. "But

was odd that the French were so dignified in death but in life acted like shits squealing on each other.

The punishment for being a Jew in the Reich crossed the line into barbarism. They were being hunted down like wild animals. What made it so sickening was that it wasn't perpetrated by a bunch of ignorant half-naked savages, but the citizens of a nation renowned for its culture and intelligence that had produced men like Goethe and Beethoven.

I can't even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don't even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.

More students have a better knowledge of pop culture than of the Constitution.

I'll have an Irish banquet waiting for you — a bottle of Guinness and a bologna sandwich.

and Russell told me that he comes down to Philly a lot to pick up prosciutto bread. That's bread made with prosciutto and mozzarella baked in it. You

I told him about the macaroni hanging out on the line like laundry to dry on Sunday in Catania. Sometimes he'd invite me to eat with him and we'd talk a little Italian.

For better or for worse, meeting Russell Bufalino and being seen in his company put me deeper into the downtown culture than I ever would have gotten on my own. After the war, meeting Russell was the biggest thing that happened to me after my marriage and having my daughters. I

During the dinner Bill said something to Jimmy I'll never forget. He said, "I've never seen a man walk straight through a crowd of people like the Irishman does and never touch a single person. Everybody automatically parts out of the way. It's like Moses parting the Red Sea." Jimmy

INCEST, n. In many parts of the Bible Belt, the most popular form of dating

A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.

Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence—and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.

Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes—all gone.

Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untravelled minds.

With the nationalist intelligentsia increasingly in conflict with the liberals, the Communist Party came down in favour of the former, who were given greater latitude than the liberals to publish unorthodox views and faced less severe punishment for transgressions. It was the beginning of a new era in the Soviet Union, the introduction of nationalism into the mainstream – an era described by historian Yitzhak Brudny as 'politics by culture'.

I sometimes think that the Russian character is the end of kindness, you know? The end of everything that is nice and good in this world.

Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves.

How can one conceive of a one-party system in a country that has over two hundred varieties of cheese?

How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?