Quotes About Culture

He said : Not to know the decree is to be without the means of being a proper man. 2. Not to know the rites is to be without means to construct. 3. Not to know words is to be without the fluid needful to understand men.

7.25 The Master taught under four categories: culture (wen ), proper conduct (xing ), doing one's utmost (zhong ), and making good on one's word (xin ).

Our own thesis was sketched in the Introduction: the classical written Chinese language—the language in which the Analects was composed—is unique, being sharply distinct not only from all non-Sinitic languages but from spoken Chinese as well (ancient and modern), and that the differences between the two Chinese languages are of greater linguistic and philosophical significance than has been generally noticed.

This is the Victorian era, she said. Women didn't have to make sense.

After all, Americans can be terrifying.

Translation work involves knowing not just the structure of the language to be translated, but the cultural framework that surrounds it.

It starts when you begin to overlook good manners. Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight...

They came to know the night skys well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients.

We none of us knew him to speak [Dutch]. Asked him where he'd learned it you know what he said? What did he say. Said off a Dutchman.

Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.

There's always been narcotics. But people don't just up and decide to dope theirselves. By the millions.

He saw men killed with guns and with knives and with ropes and he saw women fought over to the death whose value they themselves set at two dollars. He saw ships from the land of China

We are like primitive tribes that have been driven from their culture and have lost their orientation, their identity, their capacity to live.

Suttree reached across the little space and took his uncle's willowing hands and composed them. I dont blame you, he said. I just want to tell you how some people are. I know how people are. I should know. Why should you? You think my father and his kind are a race apart. You can laugh at their pretensions, but you never question their right to the way of life they maintain.

The political triumph of Donald Trump is a symbol and symptom—not cause or origin—of our imperial meltdown. Trump is neither alien nor extraneous to American culture and history. In fact, he is as American as apple pie. Yet he is a sign of our spiritual bankruptcy—all spectacle and no substance, all narcissism and no empathy, all appetite and greed and no wisdom and maturity.

To be bad is good not simply because it subverts the language of the dominant white culture but also because it imposes a unique kind of order for young black men on their own distinctive chaos and solicits an attention that makes others pull back with some trepidation. This young black male style is a form of self-identification and resistance in a hostile culture; it also is an instance of machismo identity ready for violent encounters.

Hence, for liberals, black people are to be included and integrated into our society and culture, while for conservatives they are to be well behaved and worthy of acceptance by our way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitutive elements of that life.

He had lived in Venice for more than fifteen years and he still didn't know all the city's nooks and crannies — but then again no one did.

Dude, estoy aqui por loco, no por pendejo, which was the punch line to the funniest Spanish joke I knew. Okay, the only one. Google it.

When in doubt about who's to blame. Blame the English.

It's only pre-marital sex if you plan on getting married.

The second-century satirist Juvenal calculated that "musicians and popular athletes earn more in a day than the teacher does in a year (Sat. 7.175-177, 240-243).

Santería was traditionally an unacknowledged and underappreciated aspect of what it meant to be Cuban. Yet the syncretism between the Yoruban religion that the slaves brought to the island and the Catholicism of their masters is, in my opinion, the underpinning of Cuban culture. Every artistic realm--music, theater, literature, etc.--owes a huge debt to santería and the slaves who practiced it and passed it on, largely secretively, for generations.

In Cuba, everything seemed temporal, distorted by the sun.