Quotes About Culture

We need to distinguish between a home that is considered Christian primarily because cultural Christianity happens there and a home that is Christian because Christ is alive and present in perceptible ways. Here's the reality that needs to be affirmed: A distinctively Christian home can never be defined only by what the children are doing; it must be defined by what the parents are doing.

Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don't even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.

The conditions that created the modern American public library are still relevant to any discussion about contemporary and future issues facing those who care about libraries, specifically trustees. To serve as a trustee of a public library places a citizen on an even higher ground shaped by the better part of modern American history. To be a trustee of a public library places one very close to major transformations in American life and culture.

The opera is like a husband with a foreign title: expensive to support, hard to understand, and therefore a supreme social challenge.

Preservations are working to save neon signs for future generations, either on-site or in museums. After all, what would America be without a few giant doughnuts around.

The quipu is significant because it dispels the notion that mathematics flourishes only after a civilization has developed writing; however, societies can reach advanced states without ever having developed written records.

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.

All ethnography is part philosophy and a good deal of the rest is confession.

Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures.

A good read is one of the amazing pleasures offered to us by civilization.

The only thing the English have left is their past.

Love is a word the English don't use except when they talk about their horses and dogs.

It is a curse not speaking languages and in a broken world more important than ever before.

Sorry is what the English say when they don't know what to say.

A few words in a stranger's language reminds us of our shared humanity.

There are no diverse cultures in any land, only acceptance and unacceptance.

Learn how to bow. It is an old gesture of respect, honor and pride.

Cheese — milk's leap toward immortality.

Cheese - milk's leap toward immortality.