Quotes About Culture

You need only to add balalaikas, sonorous songs of the Volga, a disorderly dance and there you have it--the Russian emigration.

in the US and the UK we'd fought for more money at work, Scandinavians had fought for more time – for family leave, leisure and a decent work-life balance.

Being too thin isn't particularly desirable here. Women eat.

Psychologists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, found that the better educated and wealthier a nation is, the less likely its population is to believe in a higher being.

Danes are blunt and direct and trusting and secure

smushi' – a combination of the famous Danish smørrebrød open sandwiches and sushi

and a sense of being part of something bigger than yourself, like religion, or just being Danish for folk round these parts.

The Danes, I've noticed, love an emoticon, especially to dilute the impact after saying something that could be construed as confrontational, critical or rude.

Just as London is not really England, Copenhagen is not, I am reliably informed, 'the real Denmark'.

I Google 'new country, Denmark, culture shock' on my phone and drink coffee furiously. I learn that Danes drink the most coffee in Europe, as well as consuming eleven litres of pure alcohol per person per year. Maybe we'll fit in just fine after all.

It becomes clear that cleanliness is next to Danishness ... from an early age they develop an understanding that functional yet beautiful design is essential to realising the good life.

The more people explore the world, the more they realize in every country there's a different aesthetic. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.

better dead than ugly. And don't French women know it.

This is reflected in the fact that Ladakhis measure land according to how long it takes to plough it. The size of a plot is described as "one day," "two days," and so on.

Re America & the UK] we are two countries divided by a common language

Por qué será que personas a las que jamás se les pasaría por la imaginación robar nada encuentran perfectamente lícito robar libros?

Londres, por las cartas que escribí, ¡han colocado, en el emplazamiento de la librería, una placa de cobre con mi nombre! Sigo pensando que soy un escritora sin cultura ni demasiado talento, pero a pesar de todo ¡me han dedicado una placa en un muro de Londres.

Anachronism' implies something long dead, and nothing is dead here. History, as they say, is alive and living in London.

Re America & Britain] we are two countries divided by a common language

In London you shoo them away by talking to them. In New York talking to them would just get you their life stories

He could inhale a dozen pierogi in less than sixty seconds.

It is no accident that, of the early Jesuit scholars who were pioneers in making China's culture known in Europe, those who concerned themselves with the Book of Changes were all later declared to be insane or heretic. Indeed, to the Chinese themselves the study of the I Ching is not to be taken lightly. By an unwritten law, only those advanced in years regard themselves as ready to learn from it. Confucius is said to have been seventy years old when he first took up the Book of Changes.

You don't know what the Chinese expect in the way of beauty. The presentation is just a farce. You come into a room filled with 50 people and they don't talk to you. There's very little interaction.

these instances bore none of the harrowing features of racially motivated torture, mutilation, and cruelty endemic to Euro-American lynching of African Americans. In Germany, the ritual did not culminate as it did in roughly five thousand cases in the United States between the end of the American Civil War and 1968—in actual human sacrifice.