Quotes About Culture

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.

The human soul can always use a new tradition. Sometimes we require them.

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.

South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.

I have built a city from the books I've read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me.

Good taste is not something you can be taught. It's not something you obtain in a store or go to college to learn.

My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.

A nation of unhappy teachers makes for a sadder and more endangered America.

Among the peoples of the world I am not universally admired for the bell-like clarity of my diction. Words slide out of my mouth like fat fish. Having lived my life in various parts of Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas and having been sired by a gruff-talking Marine from Chicago and a grits-and-gravy honey from Rome, Georgia, what has remained is an indefinable nonspeech, flavored subtly with a nonaccent, and decipherable to no one, black or white, on the American continent.

The South's got a lot wrong with it. But it's permanent press and it doesn't wash out.

The language of grief is an impoverished one in the South. It is admired only if it's done in silence.

The language of grief is an impoverished one in the South. Sorrow is admired only if it's done in silence.

Every time I eat grits, it becomes perfectly clear to me why the South lost the war.

Jack Welch of GE introduced many to his description of four types of employees based on their contribution to organizational goals and their alignment to corporate values:12 Delivers on commitments/shares our values—upward and onward Misses commitments/shares our values—second chance Does not meet commitments/does not share our values—out Delivers on commitments/does not share our values—this call demands managerial courage and for Welch, that answer is out!

What writer Audre Lorde says to black men and women is true for all of us: If we do not define ourselves, we will be defined by others for their use and to our detriment. Our country and perhaps all human history is a pattern of oppression, repression, suppression, subjugation. Racism is part of our heritage, reminding us that not all aspects of a culture should be preserved.

All human cultures, from hunter-gatherers to city slickers, share certain universals in the ways that we, as primates, interact with one another. This social destiny has a profound influence on the way that we relate to our dogs.

It was customary for the uncle of the groom to hide a bowl of sheep's blood in the marriage hut. If the bride was not a virgin, the groom could stain her white body-garment and show it to the wedding party. In this way he saved face and spared his wife's life.

While visiting Mali's capital, Ibn Battuta was received by the king, who was at that time Mansa Musa's son. Ibn Battuta was offended by the king's lack of generosity. The traveler complained that the king was miserly and instead of giving him "robes of honor and money," he offered Ibn Battuta … three cakes of bread, a piece of beef fried in native oil, and a calabash of sour curds.

we are here confronted with an irreducible oddity about all human societies: all are strung around figments of the human imagination.

They were from different generations, culture, nations. But even these things did not divide them so much as their separate conceptions of what it meant to be a woman.

Starbucks itself is a product of diverse global cultures: "Starbuck's customers, whether in Zurich or Beirut, are drinking an American version of an Italian evolution of a beverage invented by Arabs brewed from a bean discovered by Africans."71

Egyptians built pyramids; Americans, skyscrapers; the megalithic Irish, mountain cairns. And while I admit it is impossible to be certain what Danu's people believed, the obsessive topping of Munster Hills with navel and nipples suggest they saw the land as a woman's body, the earth as feminine. And if so, what then? Did they imagine the earth acting like a woman, laughing, singing, weeping, taking a lover, nursing a child?

There has never been only one religion of the goddess. Every continent, every culture, had its own vision of the way that divine feminine should be pictured. Each culture pictured her as one of their own. She was black in Africa, blonde in Scandinavia, round-faced in Japan, dark-eyed in India. For the goddess was the essence of woman's strength and beauty to each one of her daughters, so she had to look like them. When ancient women looked at their goddess, they saw themselves.

He had further narrowed his mind by a considerable amount of travel abroad, where he had again always made his way to the small hotels.