Quotes About Culture

Paris practices its sins as lightly as it does its religion, while London practices both very seriously.

I found cause to wonder upon what ground the English accuse Americans of corrupting the language by introducing slang words. I think I heard more and more different kinds of slang during my few weeks' stay in London than in my whole "tenderloin" life in New York. But I suppose the English feel that the language is theirs, and that they may do with it as they please without at the same time allowing that privilege to others.

The culture without children is forever immature, self-obsessed and rightous. They cannot help the high opinion they have of themselves; there's no kids around to show them otherwise.

Manufacturers use names like 'Apache' and 'Cherokee' to conjure up images of the wild freebooting warrior. (Would you fly an Aborigine into battle? Drive a Swede across the desert?) In the same vein, there are still sports teams called 'the Braves' and 'the Redskins' - roughly the equivalent, as several Native Americans have pointed out, of calling a team 'the Buck Niggers' or 'the Jewboys'.

Middlestein thought texting was the same as Morse code, and the more people texted, the closer American came to being a nation at war.

I love the old Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly movies they're so beautiful to look at. It's such a shame we don't make them anymore. Although, I don't know how you could make tap dancing current and topical.

Particularly for English people, Shakespeare is always at the forefront of both drama and the English language. He's always been there. I can't remember starting school and not learning about him.

Nobody wants to hear R&ampB. It's sad. If you want to be on the radio you got to stay young.

Just because the Americans are so good at rattling out accessible and cheap junk food, nobody looks twice when it comes to their food. But there are golden nuggets everywhere.

What I've enjoyed most, though, is meeting people who have a real interest in food and sharing ideas with them. Good food is a global thing and I find that there is always something new and amazing to learn - I love it!

She reminded Sumi of the Japanese custom of gaman. Nobu spoke the ancient word as a charge to her daughter: to have gaman was to endure the unbearable with dignity and forbearance.

Mathias bore the immigrant's burden. He had one foot on one side of the ocean in Germany and the other in America, which made him an outsider in both places.

Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too.

The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten.

The face of the dead man was concealed, of course, our customs not being those of the south, where corpses are carried to the grave in open coffins, that they might – one last time before slipping into the pit – be warmed by the light of the sun.

Wenn eine Gesellschaft vor ihrer literarischen Kultur keine Achtung mehr hat, wenn die Achtung nicht so beschaffen ist, daß sie es als achtenswert empfindet, über diese Kultur einigermaßen Bescheid zu wissen, wenn sie also das unaufhebbare Nichtbescheidwissen der Mehrheit - ihre Unbildung - nicht mehr als bedauerlichen Mangel empfindet, der nur durch die Bildung einer kulturellen Elite kompensiert werden kann, dann ist nichts mehr zu machen.

Nazism ... destroys the very soul of our civilization ... I have not taken the same grave view of Bolshevism, for it never was clear to me that Bolshevism, in spite of its brutalities and cruelties, really threatened the essentials of our ethical civilization. And after all it was a revolution of a semi-barbarous people against a rotten government and an effete church. Nazi-ism in highly cultured Germany is a very different affair.

ONE CRITICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT WAS THAT ART escaped from religion and into the larger world.

boobs are twice as large as normal. From where I sit, that's pretty

Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans.

That's the whole point of bread and circuses; they give employment to the vulgar.

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

we are much better at admitting that humans infect nature than we are at admitting that nonhumanity infects culture, for the latter entails the blasphemous idea that nonhumans—trash, bacteria, stem cells, food, metal, technologies, weather—are actants more than objects. Latour

Our universities and museums are respected around the country.