Quotes About Culture

Often we blame a region's religion when the oppression instead may be rooted in its culture. Yet, that acknowledged, it's also true that . . . it is often cited by the oppressors.

This phenomenon, called guimai funu, exists on a vast

Another Western aid group, trying to improve the hygiene and health of Afghan women, issued them bars of soap—nearly causing a riot. In Afghanistan, washing with soap is often associated with post-coital activity, so the group was thought to be implying that the women were promiscuous.

The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention.

In many poor countries, the problem is not so much individual thugs and rapists but an entire culture of sexual predation.

As for wife beating, one survey found support for it from 62 percent of Indian village women themselves. And no group systematically abuses young women more cruelly than mothers-in-law, who serve as household matriarchs in much of the world and take charge of disciplining the younger women.

The United Nations has estimated that there are 5,000 honor killings a year, almost all in the Muslim world. But that estimate appears too low, because so many of the executions are disguised as accidents or suicides.

The people in Roseto smoked, drank and ate fatty sausages, but they didn't have heart attacks, and this protective influence of a close-knit community on mortality is called the Roseto Effect.

Imagine the outcry if the Pakistani or Indian governments were burning women alive at those rates. Yet when the government is not directly involved people shrug.

also designed to keep girls chaste is breast ironing.

There is something about African time that even the Swiss find a challenge.

That he produced the quintessential Bauhaus object is evidence that the ideals of the school were as they purported to be—capable of transcending all that was European, going beyond what was unique to a single culture, and spreading across the map of the entire world.

Culture is sustained in our synapses...It's more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the Net. To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.

Modern life is always experienced as a struggle: to impose one's individuality on the world, one has to work against the fabric of modern culture itself and uphold ultimate values in the face of purely instrumental and ever more 'rational' forces.

If the ideology is built on the identity of the organization and the core tenets of the culture, it is an encapsulation of what makes a company unique.

Translation is a tricky business," Holmes observed, placing the tips of his fingers together in his accustomed fashion. "Cervantes once said that reading something in translation is like looking at a Flemish tapestry wrong side out. The image may be there, but is obscured by a great many dangling threads.

America is the best half-educated country in the world.

If a sample of soil is diluted, mixed with bacteria, and spread on agar, the phages will dot the culture with plaques after 24 hours of incubation. These plaques may be initiated by more than one phage, and the students engage in further rounds of isolation and bacterial infection to ensure that they have purified single phages. After many more steps in this lengthy procedure, the students purify and sequence the phage DNA, and can submit their sequences to an online database.

Adam Ferguson], 'Of the Principle of

Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.

He used to say you can judge a society by how it treats its cats.

Japanophiles were people who just loved Japan without asking questions.

he never felt that way about Japanese - even though he didn't understand it. The fluid monotonic sound of it alone made it a far more beautiful and spiritual language. English, with its heavy stresses and wobbly intonation, was dirty and repugnant to his ears

The UK is not going to leave the European Union. Of course not. We are inextricably wound up with Europe. In terms of culture, history and geography, we are a European nation.