Quotes About Culture

Everything depends on upbringing.

But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.

The only happy marriages I know are arranged ones.

Superstition is something that someone else believes in but you do not. Many of our own beliefs seem superstitious to others, and undoubtedly many of the accepted truths of the twenty-first century will be considered superstitions by the twenty-second century.

The idea of "art for art's sake" is a recent Western cultural phenomenon that in some ways both distracts and diminishes the reality of human creative expressions. If we define art broadly, then it permeates virtually every aspect of our lives. All of us search for and attempt to create that which is aesthetically pleasing; thus, we are all "artists.

In the early 1980s, the authors of this book first heard about a medical practice that involves integrating music into the treatment of both biomedical and psychological disorders. At the time, we thought the field now called music therapy was a new mode of treatment and a new occupation. As the preceding examples illustrate, many other cultures have long recognized the connection between music and healing and have integrated the performance arts into their treatments.

The Indians, they don't reveal nothin less they have a reason behind it. They believe a feller that shares, gives away some of his power.

Nunca he llegado a tener afinidad ni a sentirme realmente cómodo con personas que no leen o que nunca han leído. Para mí es un requisito esencial. De lo contrario echo en falta algo, amplitud de miras, noción de la historia, una sintonía compartida. Los libros son contraseñas.

biographical information needs to be understood within its immediate context, not through the bias of another cultural moment.

The framework within which she imagined the world of the English Renaissance, also typical of her day, was limited to monarchs, courtiers and writers.

As the pages that follow confirm, race may not be a reality, but racial thinking is, and, as such, warrants closer examination.

The proliferation of these self-conscious groups, some of which (such as seniors-only enclaves) virtually excluded others, added to a perception by the early 1970s that the United States was becoming both a claimant society and an ever more openly balkanized culture.

By 1955 thirteen states had passed laws regulating the publication, distribution, and sale of comic books. Leading intellectuals, including C. Wright Mills, praised Wertham's efforts.70

Civilization is knowledge, even more than it is urbanization, for you cannot have the latter without the former. Everything builds on everything else. And the knowledge of civilization is kept in repositories known as...LIBRARIES, and if books burn, civilization burns with them.

The language of Homer lay still further off. Imagine a twenty-first-century Texan reading Chaucer.

Thinking of the hour as a consistent measure was not a familiar concept for most people, while the minute and second didn't exist as common units. (The division of the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds comes from the Babylonians, who used a base-60, or sexagecimal, system of counting for their astronomy. The ancient Greeks later adopted this and divided circular astronomical maps into 360 divisions, which were later transposed on to clock faces.)

As Benjamin Franklin put it, "No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies."48

Coming into repeated contact with the same few others does not have the same consequences as meeting new people, either for human culture or for culturing microbes.

Our culture teaches us to locate overt racism long ago (in the nineteenth century) or far away (in the South) or to marginalize it as the work of a few crazed deviants who carried out their violent works under cover of darkness.

Although each of us comes into the world de novo, we are not really new creatures. We arrive into a social slot, born not only to a family but also a religion, community, and, of course, a nation and a culture.

As one example, David Norman Smith, a sociologist at the University of Kansas, points out that exceptionally intense violence occurs with significantly greater frequency in cultures where children are routinely physically or emotionally abused or denied affection.

Home affairs are not talked about on the public square. ~ African Proverb

Newton's influence on science particularly and on eighteenth century culture in general was profound.  Few scientists after him would deny themselves the identity of being a "Newtonian", while his (apparent) application of rational thought to the solution of scientific problems became the model for the Enlightenment embrace of "rationalism".

One of the results of this has been that American culture increasingly defined those who served as "heroic," a term derived from the act of service rather than any specific circumstance or performance during that service.