Quotes About Culture

We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)

But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.

I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.

Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)

Missiologist Dr. Stuart Murray identified seven transitions that mark a shift from Christendom to a post-Christendom culture that the church has to come to terms with: from the center to the margins, from majority to minority, from settlers to sojourners, from privilege to plurality, from control to witness, from maintenance to mission, and from institution to movement.

The argument is that they need to assimilate and adopt American customs. And that feeling often leads to cruelty and crime.

There was no matching real, Jersey-style pizza

We find a place on the lower [sic] East Side," confesses one suburban couple in the genteel pages of the New Yorker: Ludlow Street. No one we know would think of living here. No one we know has ever heard of Ludlow Street.

We shouldn't feel restricted by our sexuality, and our sexuality doesn't have to be a cultural choice. That's an amazing variety of music within those five main performers.

Back then people closed their eyes and listened to music. Today there's a lot of images that go with the music. A lot of music is crap and it's all commercial and the images are all trying to sell the record.

American English was different from the language she'd learned at Maple Leaf International in Dhaka, but she was lucky because George corrected her and kept her from making embarrassing mistakes.

Cheating means something though," she said. "Americans are obsessed with it." "Americans in particular?" "I think they worry about it more—so it happens more.

In the second place, the term "Caucasian" as a designation for white people originates in concepts of beauty related to the white slave trade from eastern Europe, and whiteness remains embedded in visions of beauty found in art history and popular culture.

Ancient Greeks did not think in terms of race (later translators would put that word in their mouths); instead, Greeks thought of place.

I'm homesick, not for America, but for Negroes.

Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it.

In search of the past, I have travelled halfway around the globe, from Canada to Afghanistan, from a world of peace, material comfort and technology to a country that lives in the shadow of its history - a place whose only relevance to the rest of the world depends on the value and extent of a Westerner's life and "security". It may be illusionary, self-indulgent or bizarre, but I still think digging into the grave of history might lead to an understanding of the present.

The Irish 'n Polacks always get along- didn't ya ever notice? Irish 'n Polacks live on p'tatoes 'n got it in for Hitler, that's why they get along so good; all over the world. Never heard of no war between Poland 'n Ireland, did you? No sir, that's cause we're all Cath'lics.

Women need a reason to have sex; men need only a place.

I continued, "The painting shows this fish with a big eye and a halo, floating in air, and underneath the fish are all these Native Americans having sex." "What? What does that have to do with Custer's Last Stand?" "Well, the painting is titled, Holy Mackerel, Look at All Those Fucking Indians.

Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.

if you talk to a man in a second language , your talking to his brain ,if you talk to him in his mother language you're talking to his heart -