Quotes About Culture

this is not the country we grew up in. This is a different country. And given where America is headed morally and culturally, we are not far from a day when traditionalist Catholics will be saying, "This isn't my country anymore.

In science, technology, economics, industry, agriculture, armaments, and democratic rule, America, Europe, and Japan are generations ahead. But the Islamic world retains something the West has lost: a desire to have children and the will to carry on their civilization, cultures, families, and faith.

From Gibbon to Spengler to Toynbee and the Durants, the symptoms of dying civilizations are well known: the death of faith, the degeneration of morals, contempt for the old values, collapse of the culture, paralysis of the will. But the two certain signs that a civilization has begun to die are a declining population and foreign invasions no longer resisted.

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?

The death of European Christianity means the disappearance of the European tribe, a prospect visible in the demographic statistics of every Western nation.

give their employees wacky titles of their own choosing.

We live in such an alienated and busy culture that the simple act of genuinely smiling at somebody is quite rare on a day-to-day basis.

Without a knowledge of where words come from, things disappear, history is lost.

The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health.

Musee de l'Homme.

I don`t know if he was English but he spoke like it. He said good afternoon when everybody else said hardy weather or she looks like rain.

He should have known that the Irish, in spite of a handful of anti-clerical writers, were by nature priest-servers.

No. She told me she was going to marry him, to get French nationality . . . She was obsessed with getting a nationality...

Her accent's funny, different from mine, different from anyone in Prentisstown's. Her lips make different kinds of outlines for the letters, like they're swooping down on them from above, pushing them into shape, telling them what to say. In Prentisstown, everyone talks like they're sneaking up on their words, ready to club them from behind.

The wind picks up a little more (Terribly sorry, I imagine it saying; apparently, the wind is British, wondering how it got all the way over here)

The whole room was like a museum of how people lived in olden times.

She was reading a book on his pad, he saw, her strange attraction to the written words of his people still unabated, still amazed at how anyone could pack so much of themselves into lines on a page. It was a reduction, as she saw it, when expansion seemed so much more natural. And yet here she was again, spending time decoding a language not her own.

Her accent's funny, different from mine, different from anyone in Prentisstown's. Her lips make different kinds of outlines for the letters, like they're swooping down on them from above, pushing them into shape, telling them what to say. In Prentisstown, everyone talks like they're sneaking up on their words, ready to club them from behind. Manchee

You know, the way teenage guys talk about sex, you'd think all of us were having it all the time, nonstop.

I thought I could organise freedom. How Scandinavian of me. –Björk

No man born of woman has ever understood spoken Portuguese.

Another language, sir? But I dare say it is much the same thing - a putain, as they say in France?

Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed that, "for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed that, 'for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village.