Quotes About Culture

Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia," she reflected, "they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.

Bilo je toliko o?igledno da je ona žrtva civilizacije koja ju je stvorila, da su karike njene narukvice delovale kao okovi koji je vezuju za njenu sudbinu.

Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

Real civilisation means an education that extends to the whole of life, in contradistinction to that of school or college: it means an education that forms speech, forms manners, forms taste, forms ideals, and above all forms judgment.

Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, inaugurated a literary salon; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it.

If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.

Imaginatively challenged folks, for whom crossing a state line amounted to foreign travel, could not conceive that the gray-blue-eyes inspecting them had, over the past year, similarly scrutinized Nandi warriors, Arab mullahs, Magyar landowners, French marshals, Prussian academics, and practically every monarch or minister of consequence in Europe--not to mention the maquettes in Rodin's studio, and whatever dark truths flickered in the gaze of dying lions.

Unless wealth was chastened by culture or regulated by government, it was at worst predatory, at best boring.

So many novelists of our time eschew any "message," as if it's an aesthetic flaw. Maybe critics want to preserve our self-defeatingly clamorous culture by making sure no radical idea actually gets through and can be heard.

America was, alas, a country of great eccentrics and great prudes, of great writers and few readers.

In the 1950s the three most heinous things in America were heroin use, communism, and homosexuality.

Young people dislike and even fail to understand our slang; my gay students ask me what "tricking" means. It's all old whore's slang, of course.

America was the attic of French culture.

I've lost over twenty friends [to AIDS]. I've seen a world vanish-a culture that has been oppressed in one generation, liberated in the nest, and wiped out in the next.

Real men don't moisturise.

I don't know what this great weight of hair is for. Our Lady would hardly approve it," she said as she passed on to the next girl.

Ay que ver qué Hola y qué Zara Home os estáis volviendo los maricones. Digo, los gays.

The cult of the individual that dominates modern minds, the ideology of the "I," prevents most of us from seeing ourselves as products of the chronicle and choices of our predecessors

Marriage between cousins was common in the planter families—rather, it was expected.

The names of families are the front doors of history.

More than six out of ten runaways from the Balls and their peers had been born in Africa.

It may be that Japanese culture is not ego-based like Western culture: argument has often a strong ego base. The most likely explanation is that Japanese culture was not influenced by those Greek thinking idioms which were refined and developed by medieval monks as a means of proving heretics to be wrong. (p36)

According to the maxims of universal toleration, the Romans protected a superstition which they despised.

and the most civilized portion of mankind.