Quotes About Culture

A person who does not remember where he came from will never reach his destination.

Well, you go to Holland and everybody's on a bike - nobody would think to have a car.

Society lives by faith, and develops by science.

Too many good girls single, too many hoes taken.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

Race, let's remember, is a social invention and a cultural identification, not a biological reality.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Collioure from La Tour Vieille.

When Noam was a kid and felt picky about choking down gefilte fish on Pesach, his dad sat him down and told him the story of la pobre viejecita. Once upon a time, there was an old lady with nothing to eat but meat, fruit and sweets... and he'd flop another lump of poached fish on Noam's plate and say, "God bless us with the poverty of that poor old woman.

Those jeans're so tight I can see your religion

The spirits of our ancestors are all around us, Emmalehua. They speak to us in the rustle of the leaves, the whisper of the wind, and the song of the sea. We must listen to their wisdom, and let it guide us on our journey. For they are the keepers of our history, the guardians of our culture, and the inspiration for our future. We must honor them, respect them, and carry their legacy forward, so that their voices may be heard for generations to come." (Kneubuhl 89)

A certain emotional frostiness is the heritage of a culture that puts great stock in WASP values: One does not talk about money sex, religion, and above all, one does not expose one's feelings. If a case can be made for the cultural contouring of personality, the Puritan ethic is the culprit in such rubrics as 'Children should be seen and not heard' and 'Never complain, never explain.

Realizing our society as it is, without theology dogmatically telling us how we should react to it, and being humane toward that society, that is all that we're sure of.

I could live without television, but not without books.

Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.

In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories.

While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them.

Our teachers were firm believers in the corporal punishment that Americans had given up, which was probably one reason they could no longer win wars. For us, violence began at home and continued in school, parents and teachers beating children and students like Persian rugs to shake the dust of complacency and stupidity out of them, and in that way make them more beautiful.

we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.

As the crapulent major said, A man doesn't need balls in this country, Captain. The women all have their own.

The reason for such behavior, her father said, was that the foreign tourists knew only one thing about this country, the war.

My task was to ensure that the people scuttling in the background of the film would be real Vietnamese things and dressed in real Vietnamese clothing, right before they died.

We did our best to conjure up the culinary staples of our culture, but since we were dependent on Chinese markets our food had an unacceptably Chinese tinge, another blow in the gauntlet of our humiliation that left us with the sweet-and-sour taste of unreliable memories, just correct enough to evoke the past, just wrong enough to remind us that the past was forever gone, missing along with the proper variety, subtlety, and complexity of our universal solvent, fish sauce.

All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. The Chinese might have invented gunpowder and the noodle, but the West had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications.