Quotes About Culture

Natasha's dance is an emblem of the view to be taken in this book: there is no quintessential national culture, only mythic images of it, like Natasha's version of the peasant dance.

Here, then, were the roots of the monarchy's collapse, not in peasant discontent or the labour movement, so long the preoccupation of Marxist and social historians, nor in the breakaway of nationalist movements on the empire's periphery, but in the growing conflict between a dynamic public culture and a fossilized autocracy that would not concede or even understand its political demands.

Petersburg did not grow up like other towns. Neither commerce nor geopolitics can account for its development. Rather it was built as a work of art.

Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.

The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

Rigg) had often complained that all these languages were useless, and Father had only said, A man who speaks but one language understands none.

The piggies were not to be disturbed-

In Russia you learn patience, said Ivan. In America you learn action.

Europe was already Europe.

In America, film is the highest form of art that the public aspires to. People will come to me and say 'Oh, your book was so good, they ought to make a movie out of it!' To which I reply 'Well, why? It's already a book.

We're Americans," said Ezekiel. "Nothing is close enough we don't need a car.

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court, my ass. American ingenuity amounted to squat in this place.

Wang-mu was surprised to hear Peter sound so oriental. The American way was to make excuses, to stay and argue.

Anthropology is never an exact science; the observer never experiences the same culture as the participant. But these are natural limitations inherent to the science. It is the artificial limitations that hamper us—and, through us, you.

Do the gods of different nations

but this is the culture of China. There is no nation other than China, no society and traditions worth preserving other than those found in China, no people more important than the Chinese.

Most communities attempting to survive under irresistible pressure from a dominant culture develop a myth that allows them to believe they are somehow a special people. Chosen. Favored by the gods.

You're Greek and I'm Armenian. Of course we need to raise our children to speak Portuguese.

Perhaps those who grew up among these people might somehow sublimate their ambition, or perhaps there was something in the racial genotype that suppressed it or replaced it

In Russia you learn patience," said Ivan. "In America you learn action.

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.