Quotes About Culture

Now it must be taken for granted that simplicity of life and thought is the highest and sanest ideal for civilization and culture, that when a civilization loses simplicity and the sophisticated do not return to unsophistication, civilization becomes increasingly full of troubles and degenerates. Man then becomes the slave of the ideas, thoughts, ambitions and social systems that are his own product.

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as child? Variant: What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?

my formula for the Chinese national mind is: R4D1H3S3 There

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?

For a Westerner, it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

Most people in our culture have been treated like objects all their lives. This is the source of the wound to the soul underlying most of the human misery that therapists encounter. Because people have come to experience themselves as objects, they in turn objectify other people and commodify the world. They feel alienated, isolated, and empty, believing their lives hold no meaning.

Me, I always thought the international art world was for the elegant and elite. Classy, calm, sedate, cultured, I'm tellin' you, there are more lowlifes in this business than all the Hannibal Lecter wanna-bes in the world.

You cannot have a taste for minimalist décor if you seriously read books.

If you want to understand the life of a foreign city, how people go about their day-to-day business, what they buy and what they look like, go to the supermarket. I rarely have the need to purchase a box of breakfast cereal or a loaf of bread while abroad, but watching others do it tells me more about a place than being led around in a crocodile behind a tour guide's umbrella.

Lord Malquist and Mr Moon was the literary equivalent of the Wonderbra for intellectually pretentious students of the seventies.

The drumbeat in your blood is the voice of your ancestors. Let the drum speak.

It is hardly surprising that the wizened, androgynous, admittedly prudish little lady in the tricorne would come to seem irrelevant, even embarrassing, within the youth culture of the late 1960s and '70s.

Dictionary of Native American Mythology

The father-daughter wound is not only an event happening in the lives of individual women. It is a condition of our culture as well.² Whenever there is a patriarchal authoritarian attitude which devalues the feminine by reducing it to a number of roles or qualities which come, not from woman's own experience, but from an abstract view of her—there one finds the collective father overpowering the daughter, not allowing her to grow creatively from her own essence.

We still spoke Korean at home, but on the streets we always had to speak Japanese.

It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.

At the heart of such a view of authenticity is a belief that indigenous cultures cannot change, cannot recreate themselves and still claim to be indigenous. Nor can they be complicated, internally diverse or contradictory. Only the West has that privilege

Western education precludes us from writing or speaking from a 'real' and authentic indigenous position

MacKenzie defines imperialism as being 'more than a set of economic, political and military phenomena. It is also a complex ideology which had widespread cultural, intellectual and technical expressions.'8

Philosophy. Culture. Time. These are all borrowed concepts.

I travel around the world, experiencing every language, every religion... some places where there's just no reason to smile, because their lives are so difficult.

Remember that nutty little story I told you about the first time I ever went overseas for my junior year abroad at Green Bay, and I stepped onto the airstrip in Madrid to be obscurely disheartened that Spain, too, had trees. Of course Spain has trees! you jeers. I was embarrassed; of course I knew, in a way, it had trees, but with the sky and the ground and the people walking around--well, it just didn't seem that different.

Bur Armenians have a talent for sorrow.