Quotes About Culture

Culture was felt to be a fragile achievement, which could always fall prey to the forces of disorder and disintegration.

philosopher Walter Benjamin put it: "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

All religious people in any age have to make their traditions address the challenge of their particular modernity

But it was more than that. Paris represented life, sensuality, freedom, and fun. And that somehow made it impossible.

It is ironic that while environmental activists are busy reifying a notion of nature based on purity, with all its problematic implications, the enterprise of bioengineering is making it crystal clear that the nature-culture dualism is a construction, a point that feminists and other social critics have been trying to get across for some time.

The Kikuyu, when left to themselves, do not bury their dead, but leave them above ground for the hyenas and vultures to deal with. The custom had always appealed to me, I thought that it would be pleasant thing to be laid out to the sun and the stars, and to be so promptly, neatly, and openly picked and cleansed; to be made one with Nature and become a common component of a landscape.

It is more than their land that you take away from the people whose native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to see, and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take out their eyes.

The young (Somali) women were very inquisitive as to European customs, and listened attentively to descriptions of the manners, education, and clothes of white ladies, as if out to complete their strategic education with the knowledge of how the males of an alien race were conquered and subdued.

If I know a song of Africa,—I thought,—of the Giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I had had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me? I

And I had by now become used to the idea of witchcraft, it seemed a reasonable thing, so many things are about, at night, in Africa.

The rich rarely give a black dog for a white monkey, my friend. It's the way of the world.

Was there some fault in English fathers and mothers of the rich and famous?

No one … can entirely step out of his time, that despite his keenness of vision his thinking is in many ways bound to be influenced by the mentality of his time

The fact that compulsive drives for success will arise only in a competitive culture does not make them any less neurotic.

I'm seeing so much of America today," Luya kept telling Lowell in nervously accented English. It became a personal catchphrase for him — whenever things were not to his liking, he'd say that — I'm seeing so much of America today.

in Chinese, the character for woman was a man on his knees

Have you ever noticed," Rosalie asks, "that the coloreds are always singing of the coming glory and the Irish are always singing of the glory lost?

Whatev was the first hand sign I learned at college, but there were several popular then. There was the thumb-and-index-finger L held against the forehead, which meant Loser. The whatev W could be flipped up and down, W to M to W to M, in which case it meant Whatever, your mother works at McDonald's. 'Cause that's the way we rolled back in '92.

The white culture rewarded cruelty with honor and friendship.

If you can't take a joke, you shouldn't have joined.

And he explained that there was no Mandalorian word for "hero." It was only not being one that had its own word: Hut'uun.

Kig-Yar didn't think like humans, though. They'd tried imperial culture once and decided it wasn't for them. Maybe they were right: humans were constantly in denial about their ape-sized social circles, always pretending they could think on a global scale when history proved every time that they really couldn't.

The two women switched to their native tongue. Kate tuned them out. She understood only half of what they were saying. As with most Americans, Dutch sounded to her more like a disease of the throat than an actual language

There was one lone Caucasian in the bunch. With her hemp sandals, batik dress and the long, gray ponytail hanging down her back, she radiated white guilt like a cheap space heater.