Quotes About Culture

The paysans had no flags or written histories, but they expressed their local patriotism in much the same way as nations: by denigrating their neighbours and celebrating their own nobility.

highly codified and formal foreign language known as French – a language which, according to many French-speakers, almost no one speaks correctly. In the land of a thousand tongues, monolingualism became the mark of the educated person.

I beg your pardon," Philip interposed stiffly, now put upon his mettle. "We have no taboos at all in England. ... England, you must remember, is a civilized country, and taboos are institutions that belong the lowest and most degraded savages.

Now, nothing annoys an angry savage or an uneducated person so much as the perfect coolness of a civilized and cultivated man when he himself is boiling with indignation. He feels its superiority an affront to his barbarianism.

Rock and roll was not just a revolution in musical style; it was a primary embodiment of a transformation in the way many people, in America and elsewhere, lived, felt about, and thought about their lives and their relation to immediate experience.

People who escape familiar groups and make contact with unfamiliar ones becomes smarter and more creative. They have what Ronald Burt calls a "vision advantage." They are no longer captives of their cultures.

Culture matters for reasons good and bad. First, it is the place to discover advantage, opportunity, and innovation.

Second, culture is the breeding ground of cataclysmic change, a North Sea out of which commotion constantly storms. Without a working knowledge of culture, the corporation lives in a perpetual state of surprise, waiting for the next big storm to hit.

Smarter viewers encouraged smarter culture. Smarter culture encouraged smarter viewers. For Generations X and Y, this development had become a badge of pride. Being good at popular culture became a generational marker. For boomers, popular culture might have been a guilty pleasure. For younger generations, it was a rich, more complicated joy.

In all of these cases, someone can act as a CCO not because he has studied contemporary culture but because he comes from that culture. He knows it in his bones.

Ah, I feel a sadness on me, Dane. That's how the Irish people say it. In their language, you can't say, "I am sad," or "I am happy". They understood what we English have long forgot. We're not our sadness. We're not our happiness or our pain but our language hypnotizes us and traps us in little labelled boxes.

I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa.

Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.

Francesca said, "But don't you see? We talk about God for the simple reason that we still want to. There's a deeply ingrained human compulsion to keep using that word, that concept – to keep honing it, rather than discarding it – despite the fact that it no longer means what it did five thousand years ago.

Science has been abused for every conceivable purpose under the sun. Which is all the more reason to deliver the power it grants to as many people as possible, as rapidly as possible, instead of leaving it in the hands of a few. It is not a reason to retreat into fantasy – to declare: knowledge is a cultural artifact, nothing is universally true, only mysticism and obfuscation and ignorance will save us.

Inhabiting this universe is not a cultural prerogative, or a lifestyle decision. And I don't have to forgive or forget a single act of enslavement, theft, imperialism, or patriarchy, in order to be a physicist – or to approach the subject with whatever intellectual tools I need. Every scientist sees further by standing on a pile of corpses – and frankly, I don't care what kind of genitals they had, what language they spoke, or what the colour of their skin was.

We'll shape them through their memes," he said. "We'll kill off the bad memes, and help spread the ones we want to succeed.

The scholarship of Christian academics isn't recognized as scholarship at all unless it conforms to the prevailing rules of scholarship in the academic disciplines. This forces Christian scholars to accommodate and blend in; even when their work is excellent, it isn't identified as Christian.

They pushed the evangelical movement not only to fight what would become known as the culture wars—the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, gay rights, and so forth—but to get more involved in foreign affairs as well.

Clinton was Reagan's greatest achievement. He carried forward the Republican agenda by combining a postindustrial fatalism—regulation wasn't possible, austerity was unavoidable, budgets had to be balanced, crime was a condition of culture, not economic policy—with a folksy postmodern optimism.

What do you suppose Thrawn would make of the Yuuzhan Vong sir Ground Vong probably if he had a few examples of their art. Lt. Cel Wedge

The tune was too ingrained for Mortenson to consider the novelty of this moment- an American, lost in Pakistan, singing a German hymn in Swahili.

The Balti had as many names for rock as the Inuit have for snow.

Abdul brushed the dirt from the American's forehead, where it had been pressed to the cool ground. "Not Pakistan man," he said. "But if you say Bosnia, I believe.