Quotes About Culture

Santa is our culture's only mythic figure truly believed in by a large percentage of the population. It's a fact that most of the true believers are under eight years old, and that's a pity.

By around 480, as he put it, 'now that the old degrees of official rank are swept away . . . the only token of nobility will henceforth be a knowledge of letters'; the official hierarchy had gone, only traditional Roman culture survived.

Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which was the largest roofed building to be built in Europe until the thirteenth century.

The veneration of sacred portraits – icons – has been an essential element of Orthodox Christianity ever since, and marked Byzantine religious culture until the empire's end.

the appearance of Scandinavian Vikings in Ireland, Britain and Francia.

Ich glaube, daß jener Apparat, der die Aufnahme und Verarbeitung von Wirklichkeit zu tätigen hat, von Literatur geformt wird

Gift giving is part of the culture no matter where you are and no matter how long you stay.

So I'm still in my romantic stage with London, I love it as a place.

In Hamburg sind alle Mädchen barbourgrün, in Berlin ziehen sie sich betont schlecht an, damit sie so aussehen wie Künstler, und in München haben die Mädchen wegen dem Föhn so ein seltsames inneres Leuchten. Aber in Frankfurt, da sind die Mädchen einfach lässig.

French design hardly exists, except as artificial modernism.

Partial culture runs to the ornate; extreme culture to simplicity.

Evangelicals come from all ethnic and racial backgrounds, but nearly 90 percent of Americans who call themselves evangelicals are white.

I'm not an American but I have always had the outsiders' respect for the American people and the American way.

The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don't belong to English though I belong nowhere else, if not here in English. —GUSTAVO PÉREZ FIRMAT, "BILINGUAL BLUES

I found it a condescending expectation—that my words and mannerisms would meld into the mainstream around me—but it was also a fair question: how do you retain so strongly strands of somewhere or something you have never lived? - Nour Malas

Syria: never the country I called home, but certainly my homeland. - Nour Malas

Well," she says, "I'm a Penobscot Indian on my father's side. When I was young, we lived on a reservation near Old Town." "Ah. Hence the black hair and tribal makeup." Molly is startled. She's never thought to make that connection—is it true?

That's not true! Turtles mean something very specific in my culture." "Oh yeah, warrior princess?" he says. "Like what?" "Turtles carry their homes on their backs." Running her finger over the tattoo, she tells him what her dad told her: "They're exposed and hidden at the same time. They're a symbol of strength and perseverance.

But finally we found the place—an Irish pub, as seedy as the roughest ones on the backstreets of Galway.

It has always been believed that the woman has a power of perception beyond what is literally seen and heard. Whether it is called sixth sense or woman's intuition, it is a highly developed, extra sensitive ability to see what is behind and forward in time. The culture of the Goddess appears to have developed this natural ability and made it into a source of power and prestige for thousands of years.

But being a boy is not a social disease.

The vast majority of American boys and girls are psychologically healthy. On the other hand, there is strong evidence that they are morally and academically undernourished.

I think people are learning to actually aspire to be objectified.

Every language is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined.