Quotes About Culture

For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.

At the market I ate a piece of a grilled monkey—it looked like a naked child.

MR. MOUSTAFA There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once know as humanity... He was one of them. What more is there to say?

Characteristic of the overall difference between Boston and New York, the population at the Acropolis was far less forlorn. Its customers were just those who, for whatever reason, wanted to eat coffee-shop food at very strange hours.

a machine cannot be understood aside from its end-user and the cultural ambience in which it works. The role of the end-user is to insert that part of the iceberg of cultural knowledge that cannot be programmed. Progress

caravanserai. It was almost certainly they who

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

There are three things that none of the young men of the present generation can do. They can't sit over their wine, they can't play at whist, and they can't pay a lady a compliment.

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks of the river.

It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type.

In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.

The older Romans used temples as their banks, as we use banks as our temples;

This is the tragedy of almost every civilization—that its soul is in its faith, and seldom survives philosophy.

Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.

The form of Christianity that developed in Europe and later spread to America and the rest of the world was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.

centripetal organization unifying a culture in all its phases into a unique, coherent, and artistic form; the other a period of centrifugal disorganization in which creed and culture decompose in division and criticism, and end in a chaos of individualism, skepticism, and artistic aberrations.

I thank God," he used to say, "that I was born Greek and not barbarian, freeman and not slave, man and not woman; but above all, that I was born in the age of

Society is founded not on the ideals but on the nature of man

Three meals a day are a highly advanced institution. Savages gorge themselves or fast."2 The wilder tribes among the American Indians considered it weak-kneed and unseemly to preserve food for the next day.3 The natives of Australia are incapable of any labor whose reward is not immediate; every Hottentot is a gentleman of leisure; and with the Bushmen of Africa it is always "either a feast or a famine.

privately he composed—in French—a poem expressing his pleasure at having given the French a kick in the cul, which Carlyle delicately translated as "the seat of honor.

Water is the usual drink, but everyone has wine, for no civilization has found life tolerable without narcotics or stimulants.

A disintegrating individualism had weakened the Athenian character, and left the city a prey at last to the sternly-nurtured Spartans.

The fount and breeding-place of the Semites was Arabia.

Some primitive peoples, like the Veddahs of Ceylon, had no dwellings at all, and were content with the earth and the sky; some, like the Tasmanians, slept in hollow trees; some, like the natives of New South Wales, lived in caves; others, like the Bushmen, built here and there a wind-shelter of branches, or, more rarely, drove piles into the soil and covered their tops with moss and twigs.