Quotes About Culture

And we will have macaroni and cheese, which is a vegetable in the South, and, one of the best things on earth, a big pot of pinto beans, a massive ham bone swimming in the middle for seasoning.

People used to 'pig out' on fresh produce and home cooking, but today, there are only the pigs, human and otherwise — no produce. Local fruits and vegetables are vanishing, and only occasional barbecue gatherings remain. Frozen foods and fast foods, and melons and strawberries from Mexico, have become staples. Folks aren't eating less (just look at the stomachs hanging over the counters at McDonald's and Taco Bell), but they are eating differently.

The whole notion of what is black and what is Southern is a thorny issue, to say the least.

Over the years, I have learned just how Southern my Northern upbringing was, and I think that it is important to begin by making the point that the custodians of many of the old ways of African American foodways are also to be found in the ghettoes of the North.

Where does black food (Dunbar food, to use Ishmael Reed's term, which I prefer to 'soul food') stop and Southern food begin, or vice versa?

Here it is also possible to suggest that there are more than a few similarities in dishes of African origin throughout the hemisphere, notably the preparation of composed rice dishes; the creation of various types of fritters and croquettes; the use of smoked ingredients for seasoning; the use of okra as a thickener; the abundant use of leafy green vegetables; the abundant use (some would say abuse) of peppery hot sauces; and the use of nuts and seeds as thickeners.

Wherever okra points its green tip, Africa has been: 'nuff said.

Given the overwhelming presence of English settlers, the warp of cookery in the colonies was English. … But from the very beginning, there were other peoples on the scene contributing brilliant streaks and splashes of color to the tapestry that was American cookery.

Nineteenth-century Southern cookbooks almost invariably included receipts for okra.

We're simply operating on the premise that if there's anything your garden-variety Southerner likes to do more than harvesting, preparing, or consuming the region's superlative food and drink, it probably would be talking and writing about the very dishes and libations that have sustained us through this vale of tears for centuries.

Here's the test—if you can't take your church culture and language and drop it in the middle of a bar or a bus, and have it make winsome sense to the people there, then it's not from Jesus. Because that is exactly what he could do. That's what made him the real deal.

As C. S. Lewis wrote, "A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on himself. He himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other."2 This is where our sin and our culture have come together to keep us in bondage and brokenness, to prevent the healing of our wounds.

The spirit of our day is a soft acceptance of everything—except deep conviction in anything.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

The interaction of disparate cultures, the vehemence of the ideals that led the immigrants here, the opportunity offered by a new life, all gave America a flavor and a character that make it as unmistakable and as remarkable to people today as it was to Alexis de Tocqueville in the early part of the nineteenth century.

Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.

When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of the nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose - and is a test to the quality of a nation's civilization.

Science contributes to our culture in many ways, as a creative intellectual activity in its own right, as the light which has served to illuminate man's place in the universe, and as the source of understanding of man's own nature.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

Chambers (1986) argues that contemporary metropolitan society produces a culture of the spectacle in which the realization of the self is not achieved in the depth of one's inner being, but on the surface, through style, through image, through a series of theatrical gestures (p.11).

In capitalist societies there is no so-called authentic folk culture against which to measure the "inauthenticity" of mass culture, so bemoaning the loss of the authentic is a fruitless exercise in romantic nostalgia.

Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they'd have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.