Quotes About Culture

Of course, talking only in proverbs would be impossible. Proverbs are full of poetry and twists. They are made up of words that have been molded for centuries, if not milleniums, until a minimum of words carry an extraordinary potential for meaning.

The quotation-business is booming. No subdivision of the culture seems too narrow to have a quotation book of its own.... It would be an understatement to say that these books lean on one another. To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism.

Radio is for those not famous, or infamous, enough to make The Tube.

Most Texans think Hanukkah is some sort of duck call.

Safety isn't just a slogan, it's a way of life.

I don't think America will have really made it until we have our own salad dressing. Until then we're stuck behind the French, Italians, Russians, and Caesarians.

We don't need a melting pot in this country, folks. We need a salad bowl. In a salad bowl, you put in the different things. You want the vegetables — the lettuce, the cucumbers, the onions, the green peppers — to maintain their identity. You appreciate differences.

I dined at the Cocoa Tree with Holt... That respectable body, of which I have the honour of being a member, affords every evening a sight truly English. Twenty or thirty, perhaps, of the first men in the kingdom in point of fashion and fortune, supping at little tables covered with a napkin, in the middle of a coffee-room, upon a bit of cold meat, or a sandwich, and drinking a glass of punch.

Sex. In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact.

Coffee and tobacco are complete repose.

I'm afraid that this is me getting on my high horse now but we have yob television, yob newspapers, and funny enough whereas it was my mum and dad, school, police, church who used to set the standards, now it's tabloids and yob television who set the standards by which people live.

If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America painfully brief.

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race.

Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back towards the future.

Meiguoren! Meiguoren!

whatever tongue we speak the old ghost asserts itself in dusky echoes

While Islam indeed established a new political order, we are not talking about a brand-new religion, new gods, or new perceptions of morality. If there had been no Islam, the world would have been less rich culturally and intellectually, but the cultural and theological groundwork of thinking in the Middle East might not have been vastly different.

Yet of course nationalism is always "imagined"; identity is what you think you are.

If there was never any Islam, if there was never a prophet Muhammad, that the relationship between the west and the middle east today would probably not be all that different.

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Everything we've been taught about the origins of civilization may be wrong," says Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, PhD, senior geologist with the Research Center for Geotechnology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

many adults continue to do animistic things even in cultures that do not vigorously encourage them to do so. Naming cars and swearing at recalcitrant computers are common examples of the personalizing of the world – even if, when pressed, people insist they do not really expect a positive response from inanimate machines