Quotes About Culture

Blindur er boklaus madur - Blind is the bookless man.

An idiom is a set phrase of two or more words that means something different from the literal meaning of the individual words.

I'm sad to say that stardom is a commodity in our culture.

Një nga paragjykimet, që kultivojnë burrat për ne, është se ne vdesim për shampanjë. Sikur zona, ku gudulisemi më shumë të ishte gjuha.

in Japan, buying a lot of stuff for your children is considered indulgent. Wastefulness was frowned upon. Shopping bags should be saved to reuse many times, not recycled after one purchase.

Immigrant families aren't, he notes, "a threat to America's moral culture." Rather, "America is a threat to immigrant children's moral development.

The Simple Art of Feeding Kids: What Italy Taught Me About Why Children Need Real Food,

The Post articles consistently referred to me as "he," "Jorgensen," or "the Bronx man," as though I were some anthropological missing link.

It is extremely unlikely that anyone in the twenty-first century does not have some consanguinity in his or her family within the last three hundred years. Yet according to Feldman, more than half of all human populations today still engage in consanguineous marriage, and up to 10 percent of all humans are in first- or second-cousin marriages.

Today there are about six thousand languages in the world, and half of the world's population speaks only ten of them. English is the single most dominant of these ten.

The world loses one of its six thousand languages every two weeks, and children have stopped learning half of the languages currently spoken in the world. It's been argued that languages are under greater threat than any endangered bird or mammal.

Or, as Razib Khan, a geneticist and science blogger, put it, culture is chunky, whereas genes are creamy.

At the time that the sagas were written, however, names were not passed down in families, and recall that English surnames only came into being seven hundred years ago.

While Smith is, unsurprisingly, the most common name in England, any English surname that is held by at least ten thousand people is effectively a Smith-type name. (This includes the Kings, the Brays, and the Steads, for example.) No doubt, if surnames were just coming into general use now, Smith would be one of the rarer names, and we would perhaps be encountering more John Analysts, Jack Realtors, and Susan Hackers.

We are increasingly abandoning Aristotle's view of paideia—learning and habituating virtues for personal flourishing and the common good—in favor of technical-instrumental education leading to private wealth for some, argues philosopher Richard Eldridge: "to abandon the cultivation of virtues and instead to teach only in order to produce measurable outcomes is to capitulate to an individualist culture of instrumental control and private satisfactions."44

There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.

IT HAD BEEN ONLY a little more than a year since the world pulled out to celebrate the nuptials of the future king and his strikingly beautiful wife—eventually to become England's first working-class, university-educated queen. Now, in 2012, Great Britain

Here I'd been thinking that just because someone spoke English we'd understand each other. But I guess there are languages within languages, and those can be foreign, too, even when you think you're understanding each other.

Philip K. Dick could have been Japanese. He seemed to know a lot about how the world is never what it looks like. That's pretty much Japan through and through.

A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having "such a representative life". And it's true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.

There's five million people a year standing in the spot where we are now simply because this is the most famous painting in the world and therefore you just have to go and see it. Doesn't matter if you're more naturally drawn to landscapes, battle scenes, religious paintings, whatever: you have to go see the Mona Lisa, so it remains the most famous and popular painting in the world by virtue of being the most famous and popular painting in the world.

You could drink hard liquor in the middle of a school day without people assuming you were an alcoholic underachiever. Strange how in America in the 1950s, at the height of its industrial and imperial power, men drank double-martinis for lunch. Now, in its decline, they drank fizzy water. Somewhere something had gone terribly wrong.

Modern cultures restrict personhood to human beings, a selfish and dangerous contraction of awareness and sympathy. Primal cultures distribute personhood throughout nature. In such societies, animals and plants, even mountains and rivers, are spoken of as being people-beings with status equal to the status of human beings. Everything in nature has sentiment and purpose.

The two Christians met on the way many people who were going to their towns, women and men, with a firebrand in the hand, [and] herbs to drink the smoke thereof, as they are accustomed.