Quotes About Culture

You must know that a Chinese must pay all of his debts on or before our New Year's day. He starts every year clean. If he does not, he loses face; but not only that—his family loses face. There are no excuses.

Por el grosor del polvo en los libros de una biblioteca pública puede medirse la cultura de un pueblo. - John Ernst Steinbeck (1902-1968)

The church supper is the grandfather of the country club, just as the Thursday poetry reading in the basement under the vestry sired the little theater.

I thought that if we had a national character and a national genius, these people, who were beginning to be called Okies, were it.

The Irish do have a despairing quality of gaiety, but they have also a dour and brooding ghost that rides on their shoulders and peers in on their thoughts.

Can you imagine? said Adam. 'He'll know so many new things. I wonder if he'll talk different. You know, Lee, in the East a boy takes on the speech of his school. You can tell a Harvard man from a Princeton man. At least that's what they say.' 'I'll listen,' said Lee. 'I wonder what dialect they speak at Stanford.

Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American

Kiev deve ter sido em tempos uma bela cidade. E agora é pouco mais que uma ruína. Não se tratou de combates, mas sim da destruição demencial de todas as instalações culturais que a cidade tinha, e da quase totalidade dos belos edifícios erguidos ao longo de mil anos.

Kiev deve ter sido em tempos uma bela cidade... E agora é pouco mais que uma ruína... Não se tratou de combates, mas sim da destruição demencial de todas as instalações culturais que a cidade tinha, e da quase totalidade dos belos edifícios erguidos ao longo de mil ans

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

Do you realize there isn't a Gentile character in here who isn't slavishly in love with some Jew?

You are still you. The U.S. is still the U.S., held together by credit cards and Indian names

Tall as he is, there is no carrying the slope under his shirt as anything other than a loose gut, a paunch that in itself must weigh as much as a starving Ethiopian child.

He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside or is it all America?

Their houses are the size of small airplane hangars; their carved

The wounds Mao sought to reopen had been inflicted during the nineteenth century when the future superpowers were grinding against each other like so many tectonic plates. The world as we know it was forming then, along fault lines of race, culture, and geography.

My dear, We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck them. Don't let them explore you until they've explored the secret universes of books. Don't let them connect with you until they've walked between the lines on the pages. Books are cool, if you have to withhold yourself from someone for a bit in order for them to realize this then do so. Truly yours, John Samuel Waters

If you go home with someone and they don't have books, don't fuck them.

Wealth is walking into any bookshop and buying any book you want without looking at the price tag.

Tenemos que hacer que los libros vuelvan a molar. Si vas a casa de alguien y no tiene libros, no te lo folles.

If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em.

And no, the hit records of your generation are not better than today's. As soon as you stop listening to new music, your life is over. You are a fart.

The entire piece has been devised with the French in mind. In France, fornication in the streets with total strangers is *compulsory*.

In the 1790s, more than a century before the invention of modern dating culture, an underground sexual economy flourished on a scale almost unimaginable today. Men, whether they were married or not, enjoyed wide sexual latitude: they could often pursue an active sexual double life without incident. Women, on the other hand, faced a stark contrast between sexual respectability and social ruin.