Quotes About Culture

Alice Kaplan is a teacher of French language and literature, and she has done this kind of remembering in a book called French Lessons. "Why do people want to adopt another culture?" she asks as she summarizes her journey into teaching and into life. "Because there's something in their own they don't like, that doesn't name them."5

heart's darkness or its light, the closer we get to the ultimate mystery of God. But our culture wants to turn mysteries into puzzles to be explained or problems to be solved, because maintaining the illusion that we can "straighten things out" makes us feel powerful. Yet mysteries never yield to solutions or fixes-and when we pretend that they do, life becomes not only more banal but also more hopeless, because the fixes never work.

Humans were designed by evolution to live in societies, but they may not understand how societies work.

Homogénéité culturelle, historique, tel est le destin de l'homme.

Silence becomes a woman.' Every woman I've ever known was brought up on that saying.

Ironically, for a few million people in the Far East, I did become an English teacher through my music.

Understanding anyone begins with the person's family history and the culture he or she is a part of.

Uncontrolled immigration threatens to deconstruct the nation we grew up in and convert America into a conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common -- not history, heroes, language, culture, faith, or ancestors. Balkanization beckons.

American's greatest deficit is no longer found in the federal budget. It is a moral deficit, and it may be found in a polluted and poisoned culture that has become the great enemy within.

Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free.

The new hedonism seems unable to give people a reason to go on living. Its earliest fruits appear to be poisonous. Will this new "liberating" culture that our young have so enthusiastically embraced prove the deadliest carcinogen of them all? And if the West is in the grip of a "culture of death," as the pope contends and the statistics seem to show, is Western civilization about to follow Lenin's empire to the same inglorious end?

Historians will look back in stupor at 20th and 21st century Americans who believed the magnificent republic they inherited would be enriched by bringing in scores of millions from the failed states of the Third World.

Leadership plays a significant role in creating culture.

The world is full of high-handed women,' he complained. 'Certainly Scotland is,' agreed Gil.

I don't think America will have really made it until we have our own salad dressing. Until then we're stuck behind the French, Italians, Russians and Caesarians.

Each culture defines its own idiosyncracies and then forgets that it has done so.

We find the Mayan pantheon peculiar. By our standards, suicide and human sacrifice are unacceptable. We tend not to notice the peculiarities of our own culture. We accept the thousands of children who wear braces to correct their teeth, yet we consider the Maya odd for filing teeth to beautify them. Each culture defines its own idiosyncracies and then forgets that it has done so.

Someone once told me that archaeologists are anthropologists who don't like live people. They dig up dead ones because dead ones can't talk back. That's not quite true. But I think live people are too fast for most archaeologists. We're a slow-moving lot.

There's an assault on human sexuality, as Judge Scalia said, they've taken sides in the culture war and on top of that if we have a democracy, the democratic processes should be that we can elect representatives who will share our point of view and vote those things into law.

The view from outside is a better place to examine a society.

Mercy is not a proper Indian name."..........."Rash Coyote Who Runs With Wolf. We could shorten it to Dinner Woman.

Stefan: "Indian with a dot, not a feather.

My French friend tells me that someday, if I work at it, I may no longer be flattering myself when I say I can speak a very little French.

English is not my first, nor even my fifth, language. Did you say 'a vampire friend'?