Quotes About Culture

The new anthropology required each culture to be understood on its own terms, as a product of its own evolution rather than as merely an earlier stage in the ascent toward Western civilization.

we see in essence not with two eyes but with three: with the two eyes of the body and with the eye of the mind that is behind them. And it is in this eye of the mind in which the cultural-historical progressive development of the color sense takes place.

The parts of the body are the closest and most immediate things in our physical environment, and are thus most deeply imprinted in our cognition, so it is no wonder that body-parts are the sources of terms for all kinds of more abstract concepts in so many languages.

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.

Needless to say, genders cheer up the everyday life of ordinary mortals too.

Some languages, for example, have a gender distinction that is based only on "animacy," the distinction between animate beings (people and animals of both sexes) and inanimate things.

The German starts by claiming: 'German is off course ze best language. It is ze language off logik and philosophy, and can commuicate viz great clarity and precision even ze most complex ideas.' 'Boeff,' shrugs the Frenchman, 'but French, French, it ees ze language of lurve! In French, we can convey all ze subtletees of romance weez elegance and flair.

Another area where languages often display erratic behaviour is what linguists call 'gender',

Linguistic "technology" in the form of sophisticate grammatical structures is not a prerogative of advanced civilization, but is found even in the languages of the most primitive hunter-gatherers. As the linguist Edward Sapir memorably put it in 1921, when it comes to the complexity of grammatical structures "Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam".

The conventional predictions are that within two to three generations at least half the world's six thousand or so languages will have disappeared, especially those remote tribal tongues that are really different from what seems natural to us.

Language is mankind's greatest inventiom… that it was never invented.

He turned to the king of Valledo. "Make your country—all of Esperaña if you can unite it—into a land that understands more than only war and righteous piety. Allow space in your lives for more than battle chants to inspire soldiers. Teach your people to . . . understand a garden, the reason for a fountain, music.

The world was full of things one needed to know to survive; he didn't have the time to fill his brain with the useless chaff of a patently silly culture.

To be a person who loves books is to be half in love with the idea of New York.

Mocho was a Spanish word that meant maimed or referred to something that had been lopped off like a stump. To call Homer el mocho was, essentially, to call him "Stumpy" or "the maimed one." It doesn't sound particularly flattering, but among Spanish speakers the giving of nicknames is tantamount to a declaration of love. Things that would sound insulting outright in English were tokens of deep affection when said in Spanish.

be a person who loves books is to be half in love with the idea of New York. After

They walk down Westheimer, a long, long street that always smells of burnt rubber and carbon monoxide, occasionally interrupted by the aromas of foods from all over the world: Mexican, Japanese, Indian, Brazilian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Guatemalan, etc.

What makes the Arabs suitable candidates for democracy is their heritage as human beings, not their specific cultural or historical antecedents.

Civilization and culture in North America are more menaced, more strongly threatened, by internal disorders than by external pressure.

The Brandreth Rule is: when in Rome, do as the Romans do—speak English.

Some people believe that it was while studying the niceties of British and American spelling that the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch painted his masterpiece, 'The Scream'.

Perhaps of all the creations of man, language is the most astonishing.

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

Desacuerdo número no: los mexicanos no estamos de acuerdo en cumplir la ley, ni en las leyes que queremos cumplir.