Quotes About Culture

Capitalism existed in China, India, Babylon, in the classic world, and in the Middle Ages.

All the great religious doctrines of Asia are creations of intellectuals.

In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.

The intellect, like all cultural values, has created an aristocracy based on the possession of rational culture and independent of all personal ethical qualities of man. The aristocracy of intellect is hence an unbrotherly aristocracy.

A language is a dialect with an army and navy.

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Parfümierte, wortreiche, handlungsarme Ideenromane, die deshalb von den Deutschen geliebt werden, weil dieser Mann [Thomas Mann] genauso ein Heuchler war wie sie selbst.

The proletarian state must bring up thousands of excellent "mechanics of culture," "engineers of the soul."

Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.

Can it beI am the only Jew residing in Danville, Kentucky,looking for matzoh in the Safeway and the A & P?

The cult of beauty without social responsibility is a threat to civilization as we know it.

When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.

I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.

Out of the corner of his eye Wycliff saw the little maid's cheeks turn pink. He'd forgotten how adorably prudish and modest English women could be.

I really love rap music. I grew up in the '80s and '90s with Public Enemy, N.W.A., LL Cool J - I'm a hip-hop encyclopedia. But I got kind of frustrated with the chauvinistic side of rap music, the one that makes it hard to write songs about love and relationships.

I was really fortunate growing up to have a broad musical education. My parents listened to all kinds of music, rock, soul, Motown, jazz, Frank Sinatra, everything.

If you take different mythologies from different cultures, the names may change and the story lines may vary but there is always something in common.

Para algo soy puertorriqueño, es decir, isleño hasta cierto punto, negro negado y blanco sin serlo. Un híbrido, la mitad de algo, el doble del doble.

Americans don't know a lot about the Middle East — [they] don't know we laugh.

There was a sense of permanence about Egypt; the past was never far from the present.

Nisu govorili o svojoj ljubavi, ve? o tu?oj, a to je isto. Ona je govorila evropske ljubavne stihove, on isto?ne, a to je isto. Nikad im tu?e rije?i nisu bile potrebnije, a to je isto, kao da su izmišljali svoje.

The glitz and glamour of the megapolis and modern times had become the golden calves that were being worshipped throughout the planet.

And in terms of identity, surely one could argue versions of such a crisis have been with us for a very long time. There is nothing new in exile. It is as ancient as the notion of home.