Quotes About Culture

Sigmund Freud was the apostle of disbelief. He was the one who made psychoanalysis a part of our culture, and in so doing he kicked out a flying buttress that had been essential for holding up our cathedral of faith.

I am not suggesting that all those missionary organizations working in Haiti should pack up and go home, but I am urging them to understand that Haiti does not need clever Americans with newly contrived schemes for saving their country.

Perhaps because our culture and politics have gone so off course, with values so contrary to those of Jesus, more and more people intuitively recognize that His vision of God's kingdom-a new world of compassion, justice, integrity and peace- is the Good News they've been searching and waiting for.

It is not good to be so much away from one's own people. It is the sort of thing known to make one strange.

The single greatest reason why we are losing a generation is because the home is no longer the place of the transference of the faith. We live in a day of 'outsourcing'…Today, we have a generation of people that outsource their kids.

Obeying the will of God takes priority over satisfying cultural expectations.

Always good to have slept with at least one person on any committee on which one sits. It's the British way.

I was born into the wrong generation. How I would have loved to have been a dashing young man in the 1930s and 1940s when dance bands and orchestras played at dancehalls, and you could hold your partner close and whisper sweet nothings as you waltzed into her heart.

Or, at least, he wasn't sure she was willing to marry Jim Chee as he currently existed—a just-plain cop and a genuine sheep-camp Navajo as opposed to the more romantic and politically correct Indigenous Person.

I never start one of these books in which they appear without being motivated by a desire to give those who read them at least some insight into the culture of a people who deserve to be much better understood. —Tony Hillerman

She was a young woman with that pink complexion which made Jimmy Chee wonder why the white men called Indians redskins.

You're not playing the game,' Mary Landon said. 'I told you about me. You're just telling me about your family.' The statement surprised Chee. One defined himself by his family. How else? And then it occurred to him that white people didn't. They identified themselves by what they had done as individuals.

country bumps into the Jicarilla Apache

this further example of Irma Onesalt in the role of busybody, to use the belagana term for it. His mother would have called her, in Navajo, a "one who tells sheep which weed to eat.

Beyond meeting simple immediate needs, the Navajo Way placed little worth on property. In fact, being richer than one's clansmen carried with it a social stigma. It was unnatural, and therefore suspicious.

Leaphorn didn't comment. It was the decision he would have made. Handle it on Navajo time. No reason to rush in there.

Navajos did not kill with cold-blooded premeditation. Nor did they kill for profit. To do so violated the scale of values of The People. Beyond meeting simple immediate needs, the Navajo Way placed little worth on property. In fact, being richer than one's clansmen carried with it a social stigma. It was unnatural, and therefore suspicious.

Did he expect to be in a hurry coming down? Maybe, Leaphorn thought. Maybe that was it. Time. But Navajos didn't hurry. In fact, there was no word in the Navajo language for time.

By whiteman's standards, Leaphorn thought, Bowlegs had a net worth of maybe one hundred dollars. The white world's measure of his life. And what would the Navajo measure be? The Dinee made a harder demand—that man find his place in the harmony of things.

I hear you're a medicine man. I heard you are a singer of the Blessing Way. Is that right?" Chee looked slightly stubborn. "Yes sir," he said. "I would like to ask you to sing one for me," Leaphorn said.

If there was an overriding message in his journals, it was that people, the world over, were alike in their essential nature—even if they ate their enemies, made love in public, worshipped idols, or, like Aborigines, cared not at all for material goods.

There's tense applause. Some of the black guests bow; most aren't sure how to respond.

It's a depressingly masculine world we live in, Dolores.

We aren't in an information age, we are in an entertainment age.