Quotes About Culture

Lies are always swirling around Christianity. Other common lies today include: Christians hate all non-Christians; Christians think everyone else is going to hell; smart people are not Christian; Christianity is dying and won't be around for much longer.

Appreciation is the strongest currency in the corporate culture.

Till America has learned to love literature not as an amusement, not as a mere doggerel to memorize in a college room, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy, my dear reverend president, she will not have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a people. That which raises it from a dead name to a living power.'

When you are the only laowai in a village of 10,000 Chinese martial artists and you've sat through several dozen films where a white man shouts, "You Chinese dog," before getting his ass kicked, it starts to irritate you. We all need role models.

The monks sped up the process up for us laowai who have less time, less patience for basics, and a greater need for external markers of our accomplishments.

The myth of the dragon is a very peculiar one, precisely because it is a truly global myth. Giant serpents appear in mythologies from all over the world: China, Scandinavia, Greece, Persia, Germany, Central America, the United Kingdom, even Africa. There is no discernible reason for this. How could the myth of a large serpentine creature be so consistent across the ancient world? From: Dragons in History by Eleanor Lock (Border Press, London, 1999)

I was shocked by the amount of Welsh people in L.A. We'd go to this British pub to watch the 'Six Nations' early in the morning and I remember the first time I walked in it was just a sea of red.

Recently I've been dreaming of cursing old people with little provocation, because their culture has a long history of enslaving, raping, and segregating, and they have special lights which prevent us from dancing.

My parents are there, but they are hazy figures, a tall stern-looking man in khaki shorts with green eyes, and my mother, petite and graceful, wearing a longyi, the Burmese version of the sarong, with a close-fitting jacket or blouse called an eingyi. And there are flowers in her hair, always jasmine.

As the final decade of the millennium dawned, there would be no greater expression of the cultural, economic, and social revolutions to come than fashion. What rock 'n' roll was to the '50s, drugs to the '60s, film to the '70s, and modern art to the '80s, fashion was to the '90s: the fuse, then the filter.

Welsh is an actual, currently used language and our next-door neighbors Angela and Gaenor spoke it. It sounds like Wizard.

Society places enormous responsibility at the feet of mom without giving her the financial support, prestige, and acclaim due to a job of such momentous import for the entire culture.

My heritage has been my grounding, and it has brought me peace.

These Big Brewers scorned honest beer in favor of watery swill brewed from cheap corn and rice. The Big Brewers added insult to injury by using crass commercials, linked mostly to professional sporting events, to sell their foul brew to working-class people. By the 1970s, only a handful of brewers remained and American beer was a thin, yellow concoction with no flavor and even less body.

The shamrock on an older shore Sprang from a rich and sacred soil Where saint and hero lived of yore, And where their sons in sorrow toil.

In each epoch memory reconstructs an image of the past that is in accord with the predominant thoughts of the society.

Mais nous croyons que l'esprit reconstruit ses souvenirs sous la pression de la société. . . que celle-ci le détermine à transfigurer ainsi le passé . . // But we believe that the mind reconstructs its memories under the pressure of society. . . that this causes the mind to transfigure the past . . .

But like everything else in India, the problem would be solved, provided there was no hurry.

Nations have the government which they deserve, or rather, the government which they have is truly no more than the magnified and public projection of the private morality and mentality of the nation.

The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.

One finds societies which do not have an Oedipus complex (cf. Malinowski). The Oedipus complex might be an 'institutiton' tied to the structure of our society.

Culture constantly impregnates the newborn from the first day,

Our ideas, however limited they may be at a given moment—since they always express our contact with being and with culture—are capable of being true provided we keep them open to the field of nature and culture which they must express. And this possibility is always open to us, just because we are temporal.

The psychology of men and women in our civilization does not signal an eternal masculine or feminine...We must not...consider the attributes of the woman or the man as natural, but as historical.