Quotes About Culture

Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.

When Americans sip their iconic Budweiser, they are in fact enjoying a beer produced by a company engendered by a 2004 merger of Brazilian and Belgian breweries that in turn managed to gain control of Anheuser-Busch in 2008, thus forming the world's largest beer company. Its CEO, Carlos Brito, is from Brazil.

Estas tendencias se observan no solo en los ámbitos tradicionales de lucha por el poder —la guerra, la política y la economía—, sino en otros como la filantropía, la religión y la cultura, además del poder personal e individual.

Today, new identity groups form around a burning sense of grievance. They're brought together by the very real experience of being left behind economically, disrespected culturally, and immersed in an increasingly alien-seeming, threatening society.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Another thing those kind nuns had done was to teach him to say 'the toilet' when he meant the po or the lavatory, which was a vulgarity no one seemed able to straighten out.

She was opening the window as high as the sash would go – that's one of their superstitions, something to do with letting the spirit go freely. They do it.

I was always getting run-down from jet lag and being in strange towns where I didn't speak the language or know what the food was like.

Spreading rumours is our national past time

Mrs. Japan and Mrs. Romania had unpronounceable names, the former free-floating with vowels, the latter fortressed by consonants.

It is quite possible for a work of literature to operate as a war machine upon its epoch.

On peut seulement noter que l'hétérosexualité n'est pas "naturelle", pas plus qu'elle n'est la seule sexualité, la sexualité universelle. L'hétérosexualité est une construction culturelle qui justifie le système entier de la domination sociale fondé sur la fonction de la reproduction obligatoire pour les femmes et sur l'appropriation de cette reproduction.

L'hétérosexualité allait tellement de soi qu'elle n'avait pas de nom [par le passé]. C'est la norme sociale. C'est le contrat social. C'est un régime politique.

L'hétérosexualité n'est pas "naturelle", pas plus qu'elle n'est la seule sexualité, la sexualité universelle.

Et vivre en société c'est vivre en hétérosexualité.

Car la catégorie de sexe est le produit de la société hétérosexuelle qui impose aux femmes l'obligation absolue de la reproduction de "l'espèce", c'est-à-dire, de la reproduction de la société hétérosexuelle

Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half.

If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn't to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island.

As Afro-Latinas in the world, we are constantly negotiating others' assumptions about where our bodies and our memories overlap, where our Blackness/negritud begins and our Latina-ness end.

People are only mean when they're threatened… and that's what our culture does. That's what our economy does. Even people who have jobs in our economy are threatened, because they worry about losing them. And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself. You start making money a god. It is all part of this culture.

The result is that children now live in an "ethos of fantasy consumerism." Modern American childhood, says Cross

As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much mon- ey will it bring in?     —Alexis de Tocqueville, letter to Ernest de Chabrol, June 9, 1831                                         1

All-out nuclear war, of course, is just a literary device here; it is not a prerequisite for contemporary cultural disintegration, and indeed, one could argue that corporate consumer culture is tantamount to a kind of nuclear attack on the mind.

Department stores, hotels, and amusement parks began to dot the landscape, and by World War I, buying was seen as the road to happiness. Money became the measure of everything, friendship and religion included.