Quotes About Culture

I don't know what London's coming to — the higher the buildings the lower the morals.

Esta Pérsia parecia tentar fazer de cada homem um cornudo, à vez

At last count there were more than four hundred and twenty million guns in America (population 330,000,000). This makes America a Chekhov play, in which a gun shown in Act One must be fired in Act Two. In other words, if you think the next act of American life is going to unfold without gunfire, you're not paying attention.

David is in the entertainment business, which is what people in his line of work call television news these days. A Roman circus of information and opinions.

Your author would also like to explain that he didn't want to put all those guns in his story, but this is a story about America. At last count there were more than four hundred and twenty million guns in America (population 330,000,000). This makes America a Chekhov play, in which a gun shown in Act One must be fired in Act Two. In other words, if you think the next act of American life is going to unfold without gunfire, you're not paying attention.

Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

The higher the buildings, the lower the morals.

Wouldn't it be dreadful to live in a country where they didn't have tea?

Las Vegas: It was not cafe society, it was Nescafe society.

Washington? A city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

Second Avenue, was now the Fondue Chalet. Why, Siegfried wondered, did not anyone in America understand the wonderful

In Rahel's song, henna was blood and blood was henna.

Maybe I'm genetically more inclined to music - but the music I make is so far removed from Indian classical music. I grew up in Texas!

I wasn't very aware of pop music because I attended an arts school. For me, it was all about jazz.

Kohei Goshi, the 81 year old founder of the Japan Productivity Center, our host in Japan, said, "Americans are very good at inventing, but we may be better at raising a baby.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life. — Cited in ALA Bulletin, Oct. 1954, p.475

One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if 'Scottishness' or 'Englishness' were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations – like the United States of America or Australia – from diverse ethnic elements.

the Welsh name for 'England', Lloegr, meant 'the Lost Land', I fell for the fancy, imagining what a huge sense of loss and forgetting the name expresses. A learned colleague has since told me that my imagination had outrun the etymology. Yet as someone brought up in English surroundings, I never cease to be amazed that everywhere which we now call 'England' was once not English at all.

Cultural differences are so persistent because when our native culture is learned and wired into our brains, it becomes "second nature," seemingly as "natural" as many of the instincts we were born with. The tastes our culture creates - in foods, in type of family, in love, in music - often seem "natural", even though they may be acquired tastes.

Because we could change, we did not always know what was natural in us and what was acquired from our culture. Because we could change, we could be overly shaped by culture and society, to a point where we drifted too far from our true nature and became alienated from ourselves. While we may rejoice at the thought that the brain and human nature may be "improved," the idea of human perfectibility or plasticity stirs up a hornet's nest of moral problems.

civilization will always be a tenuous affair that must be taught in each generation and is always, at most, one generation deep.