Quotes About Culture

iv. who was it who invented size zero? who was it who promised that if you got to a certain point you would no longer be?

What's the big deal with France? How come everyone wants to go there? Let me tell you about France. Their music sucks. Their movies suck. Their berets suck. Their croissants are pretty good, but the place overall still sucks.My family went there once on the way to visit Dad's homeland family. EuroDisney. Need I say more?

avant-garde , adj. This was after Alisa' show, the reverse-blackface rendition of Gone With the Wind , including songs from the Empire Records soundtrack and an interval of nineteenth-century German poetry, recited with a lisp. What does avant-garde mean, anyway? I asked. I believe it translates as favor to your friends , you replied.

Mostly I was spending time in the Strand, that bastion of titillating erudition. Not so much a bookstore as a collision of 100 different bookstores, with literary wreckage strewn over 18 miles of shelves.

People in Ohio are late all the time.

If you're not a flaming Filipino dancing queen, they never, ever expect the Asian guy to be asking about gay sex. They always figure you want to talk about math. Or the violin.

But have them tell us that every person needs to be with another person in order to be happy, and we nod along like it's the most obvious thing in the world. But there's no reason for it, is there? It's not a proven truth. It's just some thing that our culture has come to spin itself around, mostly so we'll procreate, and we're the dupes who fall for it over and over and over again.

Whether keenly striking or laughably awful, contemporary art is rarely unentertaining.

the common Greek term for "slave," andrapodon, "man-footed creature," was built on the foundation of a common term for cattle, namely, tetrapodon, "four-footed creature.

Men worldwide want physically attractive, young, and sexually loyal wives who will remain faithful to them over the long run. These preferences cannot be attributed to Western culture, to capitalism, to white Anglo-Saxon bigotry, to the media, or to incessant brainwashing by advertisers. They are universal across cultures and are absent in none.

Women today continue to want men who have resources, and they continue to reject men who lack resources.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long survive. (A. Lincoln.) But we are not met upon a battlefield of that war. The battlefield for the culture is, of course

When a person comes from a family or a group that has been marginalized, when she is one of the subalterns, the silence such a person confronts about herself and her experiences within the greater culture is a political condition. In such cases the very act of writing about herself and her experiences becomes a political act.

Judah were settled in Babylonia in 586, where they developed new rituals that allowed them to survive the absence of the Temple. In fact, because of their rapid absorption of Babylonian culture, only a minority of the exiles opted to return to Jerusalem when afforded the opportunity

Alexander the Great established the Egyptian city of Alexandria, which become the world center of Hellenistic culture. It was also the site of the largest Jewish urban concentration in the world in antiquity; estimates range from 500,000 to 1 million Jewish residents in the first century ce. Alexandria was not only significant in demographic terms. It was also a site

Jerusalem, as the site of the Second Holy Temple, had grown dramatically since Hasmonean times, boasting a Jewish population of perhaps a half million out of an overall population in Palestine that ranged between 1 and 2.5 million. Josephus reported that the

journeying over the course of a millennium through North Africa and Italy before ascending to Germany.

In 1700, the largest number of Jews in the world, more than a half million out of 1.1 million, lived in eastern Europe. From this point forward, the Jewish population in eastern Europe would grow exponentially over the next two and a third centuries until the Holocaust.

But Jewish history is far more than the static tale of antisemitism. It is also a story of constant motion that kept Jews lithe

it's not necessarily helpful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone. Rather, it would be useful to talk about poetry as if it were, for example, Belgium

The logic underlying the truism that one should always travel on a plane with a book is also precisely why bed-and-breakfast culture is to be avoided if at all possible. Namely, you might have to talk to someone.

For most of Western civilization low sexual desire has been considered a goal rather than a problem.

It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.

I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling, yet it still manages to amaze me. It's as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge saying, "Fuck this. I'm going to Los Angeles!