Quotes About Culture

English was emerging from the tribal Babel as a resourceful tongue, but it had no great written language and without that it would be for ever condemned to the limbo of vernaculars all over the world whose attempt to live on by sound alone has often doomed them to insularity, then to irrelevance, finally to oblivion. Occasionally there is desperate resuscitation from a few survivors who know that to lose any language is to lose a unique way of knowing life. Only writing preserves a language.

Old English 'æppel' used to mean any kind of fruit.

Culture makes all men gentle.

If the King loves music, it is well with the land.

If the king loves music, there is little wrong in the land.

It is not likely that the insects were attracted by any beer in the bottle because, as the authors remind us, no Australian would ever throw away a bottle that still has beer in it.

Truth and trust are the means by which civilization holds off barbarism.

This naïveté about the inevitable problems that arise when people use new gadgets shows up again and again in tech culture.

data is socially constructed.

I have yet to meet a Southern woman with two first names that wasn't a man-eater.

Herodotus of Greece, several centuries before Diodorus, wrote that in Egypt, "Women go in the marketplace, transact affairs and occupy themselves with business, while the husbands stay home and weave.

Love poems, discovered in Egyptian tombs, strongly hint that it was the Egyptian women who did the courting, oftimes wooing the male by plying him with intoxicants to weaken his protestations.

everybody was a lady—the fish lady, the yam lady, the store lady, the teacher lady'.6 She noticed, however, many instances of self-contempt. 'When I was a child,' she said, 'nearly everything about us was bad, you know; they would tell yuh seh yuh have bad hair, that black people bad… and that the language yuh talk was bad. And I know that a lot of people I knew were not bad at all, they were nice people and they talked this language.'7

the rationale for the existence of literature lies precisely in its ability to work on issues that concern us deeply. And it does so in a way that keeps our motivation at its highest intensity. Literature is fuel for 'hot cognition.' One may presume that imaginative literature is a property that all human cultures possess and as such may provide humans with an evolutionary advantage.

Rir junto é melhor do que falar a mesma língua. Ou talvez o riso seja uma língua anterior que fomos perdendo à medida que o mundo foi deixando de ser nosso.

Eu já me estou a desmulatar. (...) Eu estou é a ficar branco de língua, deve ser porque só falo português....

A gargalhada é mulher, o riso é masculino.

Às vezes, as línguas fazem-nos ser.

Ocupada en darles nombre, se le ha escapado su historia.

África rouba-nos o ser. E nos vaza de maneira inversa: enchendo-nos de alma.

My mom used to have a lot of European cinema playing in the house, so I'd catch bits and pieces of films.

How can educators start to learn more about the home worlds of their actual students rather than learning generic information about the "groups" from which students come?

In discussing the slave trade, it is essential to view those trafficked first and foremost as human beings, with families, cultures, and sensibilities – no different from anyone else.

learn to behave like an anthropologist who observes groups of people in natural settings. You cannot simply ask people questions; you must watch how they behave.