Quotes About Culture

DISCLAIMER: A society where such disclaimers are needed is saddening.

Socrates seems to be the philosophical napkin with which the ensuing cultural thinkers of history wipe their mouths of pedantic ooze.

Every culture has its distinctive and normal system of government. Yours is democracy, moderated by corruption. Ours is totalitarianism, moderated by assassination.

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

I have found more fist bumps and handshakes and high fives until someone shouts, wassup my nigga, because drunk white kids think imitating black people is hilarious.

knížka Podivná doba] Michnik: V existenci ateistických civilizací v?bec nev??ím. Dokud existuje civilizace, trvá i potÃ…â"¢eba metafyzického. Mohou existovat ateisté, ale nem?že existovat ateistická civilizace.

En la historia humana, los vestidos, herramientas, armas y tradiciones, toman el lugar de las pieles, garras, colmillos e instintos, para la búsqueda de alimento y abrigo. Las costumbres y prohibiciones, condensando siglos de experiencia acumulada y transmitida por la tradición social, ocupan el lugar de los instintos heredados, facilitando la supervivencia de nuestra especie.

Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.

In no other city can one so cheerfully enjoy the accidents of bad art.

The past of a place survives in its poor.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Let us keep ever in our minds the fact that it is the Ramayana and the Mahabharata that bind our vast numbers together as one people, despite caste, space and language that seemingly divide them.

We are the first atheistic and global, all-embracing civilization. You cannot tell whether you are sitting at an airport in Hong Kong or in a hotel in Alaska. Everything is instrumentalized, subjected to a short-term purpose. It is quite possible that in such a situation any sense of a deeper meaning gets lost."

At one time, the state of culture in Czechoslovakia was described, rather poignantly, as a 'Biafra of the spirit'. . . I simply do not believe that we have all lain down and died. I see far more than graves and tombstones around me. I see evidence of this in . . . expensive books on astronomy printed in a hundred thousand copies (they would hardly find that many readers in the USA) . . .

A society gets the criminals it deserves.

It's still not tea without a samovar. Just water, that's all.

Of course, drinking is an art, like lots of other things.

Western culture does not encourage validating someone's emotional responses, as emotional awareness of daily interactions is counterintuitive to how we normally react. In today's fast-paced society we often do not take the time to notice or acknowledge people's feelings or the efforts they are making to do their jobs. We tend to notice these things even less with the people who are closest to us.

Ethnographer Clifford Geertz says: "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."93

RUSSEL. When he grows up I want to be able to point to him and say: "There goes my son -- the man". I want to live in a masculine culture. BONGI. That's a contradiction in terms.

We live in an age of globalisation, but also one of identity politics. It is as if our world is expanding and contacting at the same time.