Quotes About Culture

Als Leitwissenschaft für eine lebensfähige und lebenswerte menschliche Zukunft kommt mithin nur eine als Humanwissenschaft verstandene Geistes-, Kultur-und Sozialwissenschaft in Frage, die zwar vom Erkenntnis- und Erfahrungsraum der Naturwissenschaften ausgeht, sich jedoch nicht als deren bloßes Anhängsel versteht, sondern vielmehr auf die Selbstdefinitions- und -sublimationsmacht des Menschen als eines Geist-und Sozialwesens vertraut.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

If there is one point on which all authorities on Japan are in agreement, it is that Japanese institutions, whether business or government agencies, make decisions by consensus. The Japanese, we are told, debate a proposed decision throughout the organization until there is agreement on it. And only then do they make the decision.

German greeting

The Song of the Germans

Berlin Stays Red

It is telling that common speech should link humor to such pugnacious acts as biting, slashing, cutting. Using the materials of its culture, humor offers splendid openings for the exercise — and the control — of aggression.

Just as each culture, it seems, has its favorite neurosis, so does each have its favorite impulsions to be amused.

The human mind hungers for reality; except for the largely encapsulated id, which is the depository of the raw drives and of deeply repressed material, the other institutions of the mind, the ego and the superego, draw continuously and liberally on the culture in which they subsist, develop, succeed, and fail. While the mind presents the world with its needs, the world gives the mind its grammar, wishes their vocabulary, anxieties their object.

While the Enlightenment was a family of philosophers, it was something more as well: it was a cultural climate, a world in which the philosophers acted, from which they noisily rebelled and quietly drew many of their ideas, and on which they attempted to impose their program.

And he pointed out that Shona (his native tongue) in its written form was covered with the white man's fingerprints — it was, after all, missionaries who standardized it and rendered it onto the page, largely to facilitate their Christian proselytizing, which often functioned as the Trojan horse leading to full-blown indigenous cultural servitude.

The more Christian you are in this town, the more makeup you wear. I've always thought that it's because if you were to die suddenly, you'd look better for God.

a foreigner often feels most foreign while witnessing the early education of another culture.

a country like China is accustomed to making difficult choices that Americans might not dream of considering

Do you have places like this in your country? Wang Yumei asked. I tried to imagine having a reunion with my friends in America and picking up a random foreigner and spending the day with him, simply out of curiosity and kindness. No,...

Look at America—children are taught to be independent and creative. In China, it's all about discipline. There isn't enough creativity, and if you don't have creativity, then you can't adapt and change. You just follow the same old patterns and you don't get any better. That

In the countryside, traditional parents avoid flattery, and the mother's responses were automatic—it was like knocking her knee with a rubber hammer. She didn't want to spoil the child, but there was also the Chinese superstition that pride attracts misfortune.

In China, much of life involves skirting regulations, and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission.

The Chinese people had invented the compass, paper, the printing press, gunpowder, the seismograph, the crossbow, and the umbrella; they had sailed to Africa in the fifteenth century; they had constructed the Great Wall; over the past decade they had built their economy at a rate never before seen in the developing world. They could return a rental car with exactly three-eighths of a tank of gas, but filling it was apparently beyond the realm of cultural possibility.

Culture is (mostly) information stored in human brains, and gets transmitted from brain to brain by way of a variety of social learning processes.

The key is to focus on the details of individual lives. Kids imitate one another, their parents, and other adults, and both children and adults are taught by others. As children grow up they acquire cultural influences, skills, beliefs, and

It had happened again. I had met another American whose generosity, it began to seem to me, gushed out of the spirit of this land.

Argumentation is a human enterprise that is embedded in a larger social and psychological context. This context includes (1) the total psyches of the two persons engaged in dialogue, (2) the relationship between the two persons, (3) the immediate situation in which they find themselves and (4) the larger social, cultural and historical situation surrounding them.

In an age that has thrown off all tradition, the only rebellion possible is orthodoxy.