Quotes About Culture

I find it impossible not to believe that there's something in Irish blood that favors their power with words.

There is a spine of goofiness in America that has never been deterred by literacy

To the white people, among whom I helplessly number myself, life is a very long and high set of stairs, but to my mother life was a river, a slow and stately wind across the sky, an endless sea of grass.

It's like gender trumps ideas

Two Iranians lectured him in broken English about the Bill of Rights, followed by an indignant Sri Lankan couple who scolded him for ruining their honeymoon. Brandon stepped into the woods to pee later that night and nine Venezuelans surrendered. The shit-magnet razzing roared to new heights.

Or society places a supreme value on control -- hiding what you feel. Our culture mocks primitive cultures and prides itself on supression of natural instincts and impulses.

Our culture mocks primitive cultures and prides itself on suppression of natural instincts and impulses.

A real Irishman will give everything of himself--except that kernel of his soul which makes him a mystery to other peoples.

Exclusively private faith degenerates into a narrow religion, excessively preoccupied with individual and sexual morality while almost oblivious to the biblical demands for public justice. In the end, private faith becomes a merely cultural religion providing the assurance of righteousness for people just like us.

Obedience to the law, even unjust laws, had become one of the most egregious ways that ministers and their churches had become conformed to their culture.

To play for Manchester United in 1956 was not remotely of the same order of national prominence as to play for them half a century later. Not least because Taylor, Edwards, Viollet and the rest were on a basic wage of £15, with an appearance fee of £5 and a win bonus of £3.

It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?

Philippe Ariès, in a series of lectures he delivered at Johns Hopkins in 1973 and later published as Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, noted that beginning about 1930 there had been in most Western countries and particularly in the United States a revolution in accepted attitudes toward death. "Death," he wrote, "so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.

1966 and 1968 were a world removed from each other in the political and cultural life of the United States . . .

To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.

Through most of my life I would have interpreted the growth of the prison system and the diminution of the commitment to public education as evidence of how California had changed. Only recently have I come to see them as quite the opposite, evidence of how California had not changed, and to understand change itself as one of the culture's most enduring misunderstandings about itself.

Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level

Lesbians discussed the dehumanizing aspect of American technology, in French.

There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy, an inability to devote more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside. The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise.

The words "USA Today" were heard quite a bit during the first few months of the new, faster format, as were "New Coke" and "Michael Dukakis".

In the popular imagination, the American motion-picture industry still represents a kind of mechanical monster, programmed to stifle and destroy all that is interesting and worthwhile and "creative" in the human spirit.

My, I get so depressed after a poor meal; that's why I can never stay in England for more than a week. Julia to Avis

One of the chief paradoxes of our culture [is] that the welfare of its children, its _future_, is placed almost exclusively in the hands of people of low status, a class it holds in contempt.

for in contrast to the restrictions imposed on respectable Greek women who only went out of the house as a last resort and even then fully covered, their Egyptian sisters were not only allowed out, but attended market and 'are employed in trade while the men stay at home and do the weaving'. Further unnatural practices meant that Egyptian 'women pass water standing up, men sitting down'