Quotes About Culture

Bouillabaisse is only good because cooked by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar stumps and empty matchboxes.

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

One story that circulated about (U.S. Minister to Russia Charles S.) Todd concerned his conversation with a lady-in-waiting at an Imperial reception in the Winter Palace. In his bad French with a Kentucky accent, he mispronounced the word for year, so that an explanation of his travels came out: "I was an ass in Paris, part of an ass in London, almost an ass in Germany, and I am two asses here." To which the lady reportedly responded, "And you will be an ass wherever you go.

The great impact of Hellenistic culture was, however, no in natural science, but in the more Plato-inspired imaginative literature. The modern novel has its origins in the ultra-heroic and fantastic literature of the Hellenistic world intellectually centered in Alexandria. The life of Alexander the Great was itself one of the prime genres of Hellenistic romanticized literature, and remained so into the sixteenth century.

It is not uncommon for textbooks on language to have sections on the relationship 'between' language and society, as if these were two independent entities which just happen to come into contact occasionally. My view is that there is not an external relationship 'between' language and society, but an internal and dialectical relationship.

Whenever I see he/him or she/her, I think fuck/you. You must be living an awfully precious life if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns.

Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.

In Japan, the highest-paid executive earns only fifteen times what the average worker does. Here, CEOs earn five hundred times more, but that's supposed to motivate the American worker. To do what, kidnap his boss?

In that thoroughly evil and violent and depraved culture, there was no hope for those children. This nation was so polluted that it as like gangrene that was taking over a person's leg, and God had to amputate the leg or the gangrene would spread and there wouldn't be anything left. In a sense, God's action was an act of mercy.

If we teach students that there is no right and wrong, why are we surprised when a couple of students gun down their classmates or a teenage mother leaves her baby in a trash can?

I showed that privacy was an implicit right in Jewish law, probably going back to the second or third century, when it was elaborated on in a legal way.

It is quite likely that a medieval European would decry our own culture in such terms for its failure to venerate the Blessed Virgin with sufficient fervor. Indeed, a wellbred Aztec would doubtless find us odd and emotionally stunted in our deplorable lack of enthusiasm for massive orgies of human sacrifice. We must therefore ask, in good cultural relativist fashion, whether Kellert is merely glorifying his own intense prejudices by describing them as human universals.

The general culture itself, though without strong ideological passions or theoretical enthusiasms, is poor soil for cultivating a widespread understanding of science. It is, to use blunt words, a lazy, fatally unambitious culture, strongly resistant to demands for sustained and coherent thought on any topic (aside, perhaps, from sports, guns, and automobiles).

There is a strong and fairly substantial theory in India as elsewhere that the gypsies of Europe originated in tribes driven out by Indian population displacements of the remote past.

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.

Mon vœu, quand j'ai commencé à écrire, a été d'être un écrivain roumain. Comme tant d'autres avant moi, qu'ils aient été grecs (I[on] L[uca] Caragiale, Alexandru A. Philippide), arméniens (Garabet Ibr?ileanu), juifs (Mihail Sebastian, Max Blecher) ou de bien d'autres origines, depuis le Géorgien Antim Ivireanul, jusqu'au « russe » Nichita St?nescu.

But the real point of the Freudian paradox is that, despite the social order and despite anatomical fact, the immortal wish of both sexes is the same. Penis-envy in women is the residue of the causa sui project in women, corresponding to the phallic ego in men. As long as mankind and culture are in flight from death, so long will penis fantasies confuse the erotic, familial, and social life of women, as they do for men.

Words, says Freud, are a halfway house to lost things; and words are only one class of the sets of symbols that make up human culture. "If we could not have schizophrenics we also could not have cultures," says LaBarre.21 Freud's analysis of word-consciousness deepens our understanding not only of language as neurosis, but also of culture as neurosis and of culture as a "substitute-gratification," a provisional arrangement in the quest for real enjoyment.

If psychoanalysis is right, virtually the totality of what anthropologists call culture consists of sublimations.

The fear of blacks has become the dirty little secret of our political culture.

I didn't have no sure 'nough weddin'. Me and Julie just jumped over de broom in front of Marster and us was married. Dat was all dere was to it. Dat was de way most of de slave folks got married dem days. Us knowed better dan to ask de gal when us wanted to get married. Us just told our Marster and he done de askin'. Den, if it was all right with de gal, Marster called all de

The world has become more complex as technology and easy travel mixes cultures without homogenizing them.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.