Quotes About Culture

The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state.

Since its appearance the view that prostitution is a product of capitalism has gained ground enormously. And as, in addition, preachers still complain that the good old morals have decayed, and accuse modern culture of having led to loose living, everyone is convinced that all sexual wrongs represent a symptom of decadence peculiar to our age.

Conversation with them turns only upon women, food, and (in the rainy season) the crops.

People are anxious to endorse the tenets they consider as fashionable lest they appear boorish and backward.

If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization

Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.

He thought of the grammar of Gaelic, in which you did not say you were in love withsomeone, but that you "had love toward" her, as if itwere a physical thing you could present and hold—a bundle of tulips, a golden ring, a parcel of tenderness.

The Japanese believe that it takes three generations to forget. Those who experience a trauma pass it along to their children and their grandchildren, and then the memory fades.

How come people don't do things like that nowadays? You grope around in the back of a sedan in high school and you think you're in love. Nobody gets swept off their feet anymore.

May be the question we need to ask isn't whether there's any fresh twenty first century sin...but whether the people who define sin have changed, because of the times.

No child really chooses his religion; it is just the luck of the draw which blanket of beliefs you are wrapped in.

The Abenaki also believe that there are some people who live between the animal world and the human world, never fully belonging to either one.

We [the Amish] look alike. We pray alike. We live alike. ...But none of these things mean we all think alike.

It was Mark Twain who noticed that, in German, the noun for fish is masculine, the one for fish scales is feminine, and the word for fishwife is neuter. These are the thoughts that go through

Waste cilake, Sioux for I love you

I remember reading a novel once that said the native Alaskans who came in contact with the white missionaries thought, at first, they were ghosts. And why shouldn't they have thought that? Like ghosts, white people move effortlessly through through boundaries and borders. Like ghosts, we can be anywhere we want to be.

Eis a minha opinião: não me parece que as religiões se baseiem em mentiras, mas também não me parece que se baseiem em verdades. Acho que surgem devido ao que as pessoas precisam na altura.

He wandered off, leaving me to wonder why white people named girl babies things like Hope and Faith and Patience—names they could never live up to—and black mothers called their daughters Mercy, Deliverance, Salvation—crosses they'd always have to bear.

oriental marionette imitating an occidental gesture.

People sometimes complain that Berliners just sit around all day in cafes, smoking and talking about art. Is that supposed to be a bad thing?

It didn't matter if they were black or white or Mexican, they all grew up with a sense of entitlement that was sickening. Everybody owed them something. They assumed they could talk to the law the same way they talked to their friends because the world had gone soft and they knew it. Everything was tolerated because nobody was at fault.

While traveling in this highly idiosyncratic country, it became clear to me that the Scots did not like the English.

The problem with capitalism is that we have a global theology without morality, without a Bible. And that's dangerous, he warns - we're not going to be able to exist in a global context if we are the bastards of our business.

In his play House master, one character complains of another that "he can translate English into a Greek not spoken in Greece, and Greek into an English not spoken anywhere").