Quotes About Culture

Chicago's neighborhoods have always been this city's greatest strength.

I didn't like England. I couldn't take the look of the place or the style of friendship. I need more intimacy from people than is considered okay there, and I felt that my personality and my enthusiasms weren't understood. I had to put a big lid on myself.

The ritual dance was a dromenon, a thing to be done, not a thing to be looked at.

To take a single and salient instance, to study the folk-epos of Russia, alive in the mouths of the people up to and beyond the time of Peter the Great, is to look at Homer with new and wider opened eyes.

It was worth many hardships to see forty German professors try to mount forty recalcitrant mules. My own horseman¬ ship, as already hinted, is nothing to " write home about ", but compared to those German professors I am a centaur.

Hebrew is a language which has no tenses at all , it has only aspects.

We don't need a melting pot in this country, folks. We need a salad bowl. In a salad bowl, you put in the different things. You want the vegetables — the lettuce, the cucumbers, the onions, the green peppers — to maintain their identity. You appreciate differences.

Cultural speciation had been crippling to human moral and spiritual growth. It had hindered freedom of thought, limited our thinking, imprisoned us in the cultures into which we had been born. . . . These cultural mind prisons. . . . Cultural speciation was clearly a barrier to world peace. So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the 'global village' we would propagate prejudice and ignorance.

In Tibet to kill one's teacher was seen as the worst crime one could commit.

Anthropology was the science that gave her the platform from which she surveyed, scolded and beamed at the world.

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

an Arabic word – algebra? It comes from the Arabic al-jabr and it means the reunion of broken parts. I like that, 'the reunion of broken parts': it's poetic, don't you think?

But for us, sugar is more than just a sweetener: It's a symbol of hospitality, of good luck and happiness.

Our culture prides itself on the quality of our hospitality and courtesy. And of course we are entitled to demand that the tongue be cut out of anyone who impugns our honor, or that of any member of our family." The flicker of his smile did not reach his eyes.

French-English

I think of the irony that in our language [Nepali] the word for love can also mean deceit.

In Nepal, the quality of conversation is much more important than accuracy of the content. Maybe we get overexcited about information in England?

how could Britain operate in India for 300 years and take so little back from it in terms of understanding?

I like the way Nepalis point by pouting their lips; they reckon pointing with a finger is rude.

I laughed at myself for getting so peeved. It did not matter that it had taken a week for the tailor to make the mattress. I had time and so did everyone else: time was the one resource everyone was rich in and generous with in Nepal. How maladjusted of me not to recognize this.

Folklore is the perfect second skin. From under its hide, we can see all the shimmering, shadowy uncertainties of the world.

The food authorities who led America through the Depression were overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon women. Not unreasonably, their ideas about food reflected where they came from, culturally speaking. Who but a WASP could think up a diet based around milky chowders and creamed casseroles?