Quotes About Culture

Across the street, Mitla Cafe's mascot stares directly at the former Bell's Burgers, stares with a smile, just next to the slogan "Real Mexican Food." Mitla might not have the riches, might never have capitalized on its tacos, but it gets the last laugh. The Taco Bell taco is dead. Long live the taco.

Ellos acostumbran a embadurnarnos de trago por todas partes. Les encanta beber trago de nuestras vaginas.

Poverty means death," Gustavo writes. This death, however, is not only physical but mental and cultural as well. It refers to the destruction of individual persons, peoples, cultures, and traditions.

But the culture that a teacher creates acts like a magnetic field that attracts, stimulates, and rewards certain habits of mind and not others.

How can I shake and dispel the awful reputation of being an "erudite" writer? I'm about as erudite as a traffic cop. I like to know things; what's so two-headed peculiar about that?

Olson's Maximus and Zukofsky's 'A' are too symbolically and verbally complex, respectively, to command large audiences especially in an age when a college degree is becoming a certificate of illiteracy.

I also wish I knew why millions of bright American children turn overnight into teenage nerds. The substitution of the automobile for the natural body, which our culture has effected in the most evil perversion of humanity since chivalry, is one cause; narcosis by drugs and Dionysian music is another.

Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

capitalism could appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely in the form of harmless ideologies.

there is an inverse correlation between the complexity of society and of word structure!

Language is mankind's greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never invented.

There are four tongues worthy of the world's use," says the Talmud: "Greek for song, Latin for war, Syriac for lamentation, and Hebrew for ordinary speech.

Why should color, of all things, be at the center of so much crossfire? Perhaps because in meddling with such a deep and seemingly instinctive area of perception, culture camouflages itself as nature more successfully there than in any other area of language. There is nothing remotely abstract, theoretical, philosophical, hypothetical, or any other -cal, so it seems, about the difference between yellow and red or between green and blue.

Gender thus provides our second example of how the mother tongue influences thought.

the Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson encapsulated Boas's insight into a pithy maxim: "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey." The crucial differences between languages, in other words, are not in what each language allows its speakers to express—for in theory any language could express anything—but in what information each language obliges it speakers to express.

Much of a language's complexity is not necessarily for effective communication.

In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has.

The wheels of language run so smoothly that one rarely bothers to stop and think about all the resourcefulness and expertise that must have gone into making it tick. Language conceals its art.

within two to three generations at least half the world's six thousand or so languages will have disappeared,

Mankind's perception of color, he says, increased "according to the schema of the color spectrum": first came the sensitivity to red, then to yellow, then to green, and only finally to blue and violet. The most remarkable thing about it all, he adds, is that this development seems to have occurred in exactly the same order in different cultures all over the world. Thus, in Geiger's hands, Gladstone's discoveries about

For just like the rainforests and the coral reefs, the languages of the world are vanishing. At an estimated death-rate of one language every two weeks, it seems that before this century is out, between half and three-quarters of the world's six thousand or so languages will have disappeared, and among them almost all the languages of small preliterate societies.

The real differences between languages, he argued, are not in what a language is able to express but rather in "what it encourages and stimulates its speakers to do from its own inner force.

word that is not actively used by one generation will not be heard by the next generation and will then be lost forever.