Quotes About Culture

Parties are like life-you think that what you see is all there is, until you discover the next layer, a whole other culture that's going on all around you but you never knew existed.

I told her of your knife fight, and your purchase, and she told me, gravely, to tell you to have a care with the girl. She said wealh and Anglisc do not walk the same path or dream the same dreams. And she should know.

Human cultures kept the oddest gestures.

You've made more of a life here in three weeks than you've done in five years in Atlanta. I only wonder that you've managed to hide from the obvious for so long. This place is ideal for a Norwegian who isn't really Norwegian anymore. It positively reeks of Scandanavia, all clean and shiny and Americanized full of rules that people obey with a smile when it pleases them and break with a smile when it doesn't. Ideal for you.

Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it.

In a century where the media publish endless stupidities, the cultured man is defined not by what he knows but by what he ignores.

The taste of the masses is characterized not by their antipathy to the excellent, but by the passivity with which they enjoy equally the good, the mediocre, and the bad. The masses do not have bad taste. They simply do not have taste.

The cultured man has the obligation to be intolerant.

When he is stripped of the Christian tunic and the classical toga, there is nothing left of the European but a pale-skinned barbarian.

Rather than humanizing technology, modern man prefers to technify man.

Contemporary literature, in each and every epoch, is the worst enemy of culture. A reader's limited time is wasted in reading a thousand books that blunt his critical sense and damage his literary sensibility. (I, 258)

The Gospels and the Communist Manifesto are on the wane; the world's future lies in the power of Coca-Cola and pornography.

It is not just that human trash accumulates in cities—it is that cities turn what accumulates in them into trash.

Instead of looking for explanations for the fact of inequality, anthropologists should look for the explanation for the notion of equality.

Al repudiar los ritos, el hombre se reduce a animal que copula y come.

The barbarian either totally mocks or totally worships. Civilization is a smile that discreetly combines irony and respect.

The gesture, rather than the word, is the true transmitter of traditions.

Sólo las letras antiguas curan la sarna moderna.

Leveling is the barbarian's substitute for order.

Good manners, in the end, are nothing but the way in which respect is expressed. Since respect, in its turn, is a feeling inspired by the presence of an admitted superior, wherever hierarchies are absent—real or fictitious, but revered—good manners die out. Rudeness is a democratic product.

Opinions, customs, institutions, cities—everything has become vulgar, since we gave up repairing the old in order to buy every day some gaudy novelty.

By means of the notion of "cultural evolution," the democratic anthropologist tries to avoid questions of biology.

The contemporary anthropologist, under democrats' severe gaze, skips quickly over ethnic differences like over hot coals.

Die Christen Nietzsches sind nicht die von gestern, sondern die von heute. Kein exakter Historiker, aber vielleicht ein Prophet.