Quotes About Culture

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

To put it in the contemporary vernacular, Baal and Asherah were in effect the patron saints of sex and guns and rock 'n' roll, promising to deliver a potent mixture of satisfaction to the desires for power, success, and pleasure. This

Even though I decided to leave Japan, I knew that Japan would never leave me. I arrived in Tokyo when I was still unformed, callow and eager for experience. I can only hope that this eagerness will never be entirely dissipated. To be fully formed is to be dead. But Japan shaped me when the plaster was still wet.

The city] somehow managed to wear its decadence with a certain amount of grace; the anomaly of high culture in the midst of squalor is a kind of dandyism.

A Greek has twenty-five centuries of painful history to keep is dreams in check, but there's nothing more dangerous than to give an American hope.

This volume should clear up much of the confusion regarding events of the last millennium—artistic, geopolitical, philosophical, et al.

Like a new nation, Wikipedia inspires not only fanatic loyalty but also moral and civic dogmatism. Just as the U.S. uses its "Peace Corps" to rehabilitate imperial depredation with a bushy-tailed front group who teach ancient cultures how to take a dump, Wikipedia gives the radio-active bacteria mound of the Internet a fresh coat of paint.

She said being inside a language was like being in a person's house - after a while you came to see why the teapot was where it was.

Katya talked about how the Russian language is being destroyed by poor education and by the sloppiness of nonnative speakers who ignore case endings and have no conception of verb aspects and don't care. You find the worst speech in the street markets, she said. She called the new, bad Russian that's spreading everywhere "market language" (bazarnii yazyk).

You foreigners, you're all the same! You come here to find out about Fredrico's death, yet you don't know a damn thing about what really happened in Granada in 1936." - Gerardo Ros

Luego está la ración. España es el único sitio del universo, si no me equivoco, donde la gente come antes de irse a casa a comer. Me parece genial.

Poetry could be a brilliant antidote to some of our current cultural problems...our collective attention deficit.

Theirs is a life measured by the richness of these relationships, rather than by accumulated possessions: they treasure life lived for the moment. The Rom have maintained this way of life not in some isolated spot, but superimposed upon a widespread sedentary civilization over hundreds of years.

My mom is in the navy and my dad works for the army, but I never called them 'sir' or 'ma'am' or anything like that, and we never really moved around a lot because both my parents were stationed in D.C.

Satisfying news hunger no longer involves a twice daily diet of a morning newspaper and evening TV news bulletin: news comes in snack-form

Australian aborigines have the oldest continuous culture in history, dating back almost 60,000 years. In their mythology, there was a time before humans that stretched back into eternity.

I do feel like I have always, in my life, been inclined to be on the outside, walk a different path or something. Because of that, and increasingly over the years, my sense of distance from mainstream society or from the way culture works, I have a different kind of perception of it.

And how did you find the East?' 'It's a shit-hole. But it's our shit-hole.

Ian McDonald

Place becomes psyche, story becomes history.

So many names in this … "place.

Is this a Kurdish thing?' 'What?' 'Being deliberately contradictory?

It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

He'd tried to talk to you about anarchy yesterday but his English and your French conspired against the dialog.