Quotes About Culture

People in America, of course, live in all sorts of fashions, because they are foreigners, or unlucky, or depraved, or without ambition; people live like that, but Americans live in white detached houses with green shutters. Rigidly, blindly, the dream takes precedence.

The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from the bottom to the top of American society.

Tutte le discussioni sullo stato delle donne, sul carattere e il temperamento delle donne, sulla sottomissione o l'emancipazione delle donne, fanno perdere di vista il fatto fondamentale, e cioè che le parti dei due sessi sono concepite secondo la trama culturale che sta alla base dei rapporti umani e che il fanciullo che cresce è modellato, altrettanto inesorabilmente comeLa fanciulla, secondo un canone particolare e ben definito.

As for pictures and museums, that don't trouble me. The worst of going abroad is that you've always got to look at things of that sort. To have to do it at home would be beyond a joke.

They had a saying: An Arab loves in the order of: his son, his camel, and his wife - but there were times when one was allowed to take precedence over the other!

Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

Bread is for us a kind of successor to the motherly breast, and it has been over the centuries responsible for billions of sighs of satisfaction.

In Athol Fugard's play, The Island, an African eats an orange whole; at the play's opening night in London, the audience sat coolly through the nude scenes on stage, but there were gasps of horror at the sight of a man enjoying a whole unpeeled orange.

Fast-food outlets are cultural institutions dedicated not only to dealing with mankind's compulsion to eat and drink regularly, but also to doing battle with his twin and fatal limitations of space and time.

expenditure on food does not increase in the same ratio as income, but becomes relatively lower. People learn to expect that food will be cheap; money is for spending on other things.

Rice," the Italians say, "is born in water and dies in wine.

Corn, beans, and squash are as constantly wedded in Indian cooking today as they were in the past. Sometimes meat is added: for the early Indians that meat would often have been puppy.

Yet table manners have a great deal to recommend them as a subject for analysis. To begin with, since they are each culture's own way to encourage and manage the sharing of food, they are essential for the foundation and survival of every human society without exception. Once we recognize this fact, we may agree that explaining eating rituals is a serious and desirable enterprise.

We have all learned at an early age that the cold of ice cream is not very dangerous, and it is strange now to almost nobody. The great change in taste and attitude in our culture is not the least of the revolutions which the understanding and control of cold have wrought in our lives.

First you took beeffat chopped with sheep's stomachs and cows' udders, soaked them in milk, and suspended the mixture in water and potash, at blood heat.

Great-Uncle Powell, an archaeologist, had spent most of his time digging about in foreign parts.

Is there any way that two people from faraway places can ever really understand each other's daydrems?

It is not by chance that there exists in Haiti the myth of the zombi, that is, of the living-dead, the man whose mind and soul have been stolen and who has been left only the ability to work… The history of colonization is the process of man's general zombification. It is also the quest for a revitalizing salt capable of restring to man the use of his imagination and his culture

Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds; how starved the ears could grow for conga drums, for the blare of traffic, for dogs barking, for the baseball games chattering from TVs, for foices talking flatly, conversationally, with rising excitement in Spanish, for children playing n the streets, the Puerto Rican children whose voices sounded faster, harder, than Chicano Spanish, as if there were more metal in their throats.

Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds; how starved the ears could grow for conga drums, for the blare of traffic, for dogs barking, for the baseball games chattering from TVs, for voices talking flatly, conversationally, with rising excitement in Spanish, for children playing in the streets, the Puerto Rican children whose voices sounded faster, harder, than Chicano Spanish, as if there were more metal in their throats.

After I saw Fantasia (the only Walt Disney movie I saw, as my mother considered it culture; otherwise we boycotted because my mother called him a fascist and a union breaker) . . .

There were at least four people who realized that Inspector Stanislaus Oates, only lately promoted to the Big Five, was being followed down High Holborn by the short, squat, shabby man who yet bore the elusive air of a forgotten culture about him.

A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.