Quotes About Culture

religion stands, and philosophy accompanies it to the grave. In the beginning of all cultures a strong religious faith conceals and softens the nature of things, and gives men courage to bear pain and hardship patiently; at every step the gods are with them, and will not let them perish, until they do. Even then a firm faith will explain that it was the sins of the people that turned their gods to an avenging wrath;

And finally there must be education—some technique, however primitive, for the transmission of culture. Whether through imitation, initiation or instruction, whether through father or mother, teacher or priest, the lore and heritage of the tribe—its language and knowledge, its morals and manners, its technology and arts—must be handed down to the young, as the very instrument through which they are turned from animals into men.

No es la raza la que crea la civilización, es la civilización la que crea el pueblo: las circunstancias geográficas, económicas y políticas crean una cultura, y la cultura crea un tipo humano.

The oldest written records known to us are Sumerian;

todos nacemos sin libertad y desiguales: sujetos a nuestra herencia física y psicológica y a las costumbres y tradiciones de nuestro grupo; conformados de forma distinta en cuanto a salud y fuerza, capacidad mental y cualidades de carácter.

I don't as a rule hold much of a brief for television. In my experience, all too often it bowdlerises as much as popularises.

We build our understanding of the emotional world through the myths and legends of our culture. We are all, in part, made of fairy tales.

Without Puccini, there is no opera; without opera, the world is an even drearier place than the evening news would have us think.

When nations grow old the Arts grow cold And commerce settles on every tree

The Classics, it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars.

Old Testament prophets. 'You savvy dis fetish thing?

In my mind Greece is reduced to one vast pile of shattered marble, shimmering in a heat aze.

with a bias toward individualism that affects our conceptualization of the social. Smelser (1997: 29) says: "We live in the Western cultural tradition, which has exploited the cultural values of individualism. As children of that tradition, we are most comfortable taking the individual person as the starting point of analysis. Put another way, that cultural tradition 'tilts' us toward assuming that the natural unit for the behavioral and social sciences is the individual.

Dr Jaffery said that very few people in Delhi now wanted to study classical Persian, the language which, like French in Imperial Russia, had for centuries been the first tongue of every educated Delhi-wallah. 'No one has any interest in the classics today,' he said. 'If they read at all, they read trash from America. They have no idea what they are missing. The jackal thinks he has feasted on the buffalo when in fact he has just eaten the eyes, entrails and testicles rejected by the lion.

what young men in our colleges learn through those of Greek and Latin—that is grammar, rhetoric, and logic. After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford—he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna; (alias Sokrat, Aristotalis, Alflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus and Bu Ali Sena); and

All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.

It's a curious thing, this thing we call civilization...we think it is an affair of epochs, and nations. It's really an affair of individuals. One brother will be civilized and the other a barbarian...All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.

It's the whole country that makes or breaks a thing like this. New York has very little to do with it. Now if it were a play, it would be different. New York does make or break a play; but it doesn't make or break a book; it doesn't make or break a magazine. The great mass of the readers are outside of New York and the rural districts are what we have got to go for. They don't read much in New York; they write and talk about what they've written. Don't you worry.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

Civilization begins with distillation

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

when she spoke even now, after forty years, among the slurred consonants and the flat vowels of the land where her life had been cast, New England talked as plainly as it did in the speech of her kin who had never left New Hampshire

in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings.