Quotes About Culture

The most beautiful women in the world were African.

The missionaries ate the local food. Sometimes, as in the case of one New Zealand tribe whose favorite recipe called for Anglicans, the locals ate the missionaries.

Most people have a passive relationship with music and clothes, with culture. But music was my first contact with anything creative. Music is it, as far as I'm concerned.

1). When there is enough for all, all should have enough 2). Truths pose as facts with meaning 3). How you act is who you are 4). We are all atheists, we are all believers 5). The meaning of life is found in the attempt to turn our truths into facts 6). Culture is the immortalization of individuality

There lies a paradox for a dedicated lover of art such as David or me: we devote a great deal of time and energy in the pursuit of art, diligently visiting museums, galleries, churches, mosques, temples and ruins where it is to be found. But of course much of what we look at was made for completely different reasons by pious Buddhists, Christians, Hindus and Moslems.

To visit Florence without visiting churches and museums would be perverse.

The breakfast slimes, angel food cake, doughnuts and coffee, white bread and gravy cannot build an enduring nation.

Entertainment and art are not isolated.

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.

On a larger cultural level, where we live also determines our timeliness. For example, in Australia, you can be assured that your guests will show up thirty minutes late, often with friends in tow that they haven't told you about. In Switzerland, guests are always on time, and if they plan on being five minutes late, they will let you know. Japanese guests will show up a half hour before they are supposed to, and in Israel, they will be forty-five minutes late. Our

Westerners who've never traveled abroad don't realize the extent to which American movies and actors, and Hollywood imagery, dominate overseas cinemas and markets.

Americans, I'd learned, walked less than any other industrialized nation on earth, with the average US native taking 5,117 steps daily compared to 9,695 in Australia, 7,168 in Japan and 9,650 in Switzerland.

when I arrive at a new airport is handpick a taxi driven by a non-native. Foreign-born residents are likely to tell you the truth about a country and a population that natives can't or won't.

Denmark shows up regularly on magazine and online lists as "the happiest nation on earth," yet every year tens of thousands of business professionals leave the country. In a nation of only 5.6 million people, where one in four Danish women admits to suffering from high degrees of stress, its hard not to believe that some lists can be misleading. Denmark

A Russian fashion consultant once told me that fashion stops at the Siberian border, where instead of showing off, the prerogative is survival. The

the more physical touching there is among people, the healthier the country is

Whenever I visit the United States, for example, one of the first things I notice is that no one ever touches one another, especially the men. In America, touch is perceived as sexual. At the same time, American culture overemphasizes sports, especially football, which is one of the few places where men are given permission to touch, slap, wrestle, tackle and hug one another.

The Weather simply didn't exist in Colombia. I later found out that no one asks or talks about the weather in Medellín, as it never varies, nor are there any television meteorologists. Every day the temperature is in the mid-seventies, with sunlight and an occasional cloud cover. Yet even in Southern California, where the same is true, natives talk about the weather constantly. As

Americans' reputation for friendliness is the absence of physicality. In the United States, no one ever touches anyone else and if they do so by accident, most apologize immediately. Physical contact is seen by many as analogous to trespassing on posted land,

If most of the time they do and feel and think and watch and eat and drink precisely what everyone else does, are Americans really free? There

The houses and communities in North Carolina were more upmarket, carefully choreographed versions of the ones I had seen across the Russian Far East. How different, after all, is a look-alike house from a look-alike apartment building?

de-couple the animals themselves from the products on sale. This is a rule of thumb in the United States, but nothing you would ever see in Europe. Europeans have known extensive food shortages, and rationing, and Americans, fortunately, never have. When US tourists visit a marche or charcuterie in France, many are startled and even repulsed by the displays of meat and fowl

South America is known as a "high contact" culture, meaning that residents stand closer to one another, touch one another more and are accustomed to more sensory stimulation than residents in, say, northern Europe, with Australians and North Americans believed to be more moderate in their cultural contact level.

Across many parts of the Western world, salt and pepper shakers take up a prominent space on kitchen and dining room tables. As everyone knows, most are uniform in appearance: three pinprick holes on the saltshaker, and a single one atop the pepper. If you live in Asia, however, the number of holes is reversed, with three on the pepper shaker and one on the saltshaker, thanks to the popularity of pepper in Asian countries and the cultural preference for soy sauce. This