Quotes About Culture

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated and read the papers.

Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian.

He who cherishes the values of culture cannot fail to be a pacifist.

Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.

Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.

Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.

Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.

American society is the only one which has passed directly from barbarism into decadence without once knowing civilisation.

Before Sutter, native people had heeded the cycle of the seasons, time was infinite, and life's rhythms were unchanging. Now, for at least part of their lives, some Indians were wedded to a concept that proclaimed that time was limited and that it had economic value. The clang of Sutter's bell announced that time was money, that it marched onward, and that it waited for no man, including Indians in the 1840s.

I was sort of a half-breed of colonization, understanding everyone because I belonged completely to no one.

Colonial racism is built from three major ideological components: One, the gulf between the culture of the colonialist and the colonized: two, the exploitation of these differences for the benefit of the coloniast; three, the use of these supposed differences as standards of absolute fact.

American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.

Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.

American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite …the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.

Ethnic differences are the very essence of cultural diversity and national creativity.

The African is my brother-but he is my younger brother by several centuries.

The spirit of the age is filled with the disdain for thinking.

We have to have that education. We have to have it. We have to master the western culture. We have to master the English language. It's the only way we can strengthen and fortify our own way of life. We have to know who we are working with and how to work with them.

Estaba condenado con la maldición del que sabe dos idiomas y entiende, secretamente, que no domina del todo ninguno de los dos. Ahora era capaz de comparar; todo se me multiplicaba por dos. En cada sitio terminaba optando por el punto de vista ajeno. Ahora veo todo, esté donde esté, como un extranjero.

Es que no es su pololo" como si "pololo" fuese un estado civil comprobable.

leí ene, incluso cosas densas como Lafourcade o el Pablo Huneeus

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.