Quotes About Culture

Nick explained that an aperitif was an pre-dinner drink. Nick came from an aperitif-drinking family. Alice came from a family with one dusty bottle of Baileys sitting hopefully in the back of the pantry with the tins of spaghetti.

She found it soothing to get caught up in a brightly colored, plastic world where all that mattered was how much you ate and exercised, where pain and anguish were suffered over no greater tragedy than push-ups, where people spoke intensely about calories and sobbed joyfully over lost kilos. And then they all lived happily, skinnily ever after.

Nick explained that an aperitif was a predinner drink. Nick came from an aperitif-drinking family. Alice came from a family with one dusty bottle of Baileys sitting hopefully in the back of the pantry behind the tins of spaghetti.

Her darling little tech-savvy, consumerist savages.

if it were part of a systematic approach they were taking to being well-rounded, self-actualised people: We exercise regularly, we go to the theatre, we read the right novels, not just the Man Booker shortlist but the Man Booker longlist, we see the right exhibitions and we take a real interest in international politics, social issues and our friends' cute children.

People would consider it excessive and rather Italian if you started wailing at the death of an elderly person. Instead, you say things like, 'Well, he had a good innings, didn't he!' No

Men often used that phrase: "drop some weight." They said it without shame or emotion, as if the weight were an object they could easily put down when they chose. Women said they needed to "lose weight," with their eyes down, as if the extra weight was part of them, a terrible sin they'd committed.

Clementine learned to feel bad about her white middle-class privilege long before it became fashionable.

We must either reduce the Library to the stinted and specific wants of Congress alone, or permit it to advance to national importance, and give it room equal to the culture, wants, and resources of a great people. The higher education of our common country demands that this institution shall not be crippled for lack of room.

The broader unquestioned premises upon which my own culture founded its view of the human condition, such as the one that Unhappiness is as legitimate a part of experience as happiness and necessary in order to render happiness appreciable, or that it is more advantageous to be young than to be old: those still took me a long time to pry loose for reexamination.

The funny thing is that I write and I act a lot about being Jewish, but I don't really think about it as a regular person.

Part of what I enjoy about the theatre and acting is that sense of history.

It's not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don't count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.

I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary. There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race. There is a cultural diversity that's very valuable, and it's valuable to have different ways of looking at the world.

I believe that music is another form of news. Music is another form of journalism to me so I have to cover all the areas with my album.

For most American women, culture has defined anything beyond walls and social protections as wild and dangerous.

We, the Hawaiian people, who are born from the union of Papahanaumoku and Wakea, earth mother and sky father, and who have lived in these islands for over 100 generations, will always have the moral right to the lands of Hawai'i now and forever, no matter what any court says.

I am happy to see that more and more young people are once again taking up theatre.

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I'd become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong.

When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?

Sometimes you just find a culture that breaks your heart," she said finally.

Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.

There is something about finding the balance to one's nature - perhaps a culture that flourishes is a culture that has found a similar balance among its people.