Quotes About Culture

Marketing has supplanted story as the primary force behind the worthiness of making a film, and that's a very sad thing. It's film only as a function of consumerism rather than as an important component of our culture, and that's everywhere around the world.

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mindSees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;His soul proud Science never taught to strayFar as the solar walk or milky way;Yet simple nature to his hope has giv'n,Behind the cloud-topp'd hill, an humbler heav'n.

Those half-learn'd witlings, num'rous in our isle As half-form'd insects on the banks of Nile

I realize that I am expressing a concept that is hard for anyone who is not Sicilian or a mafioso to grasp...A man of honor...must always tell the truth.

With most animals, as with man, the alertness of the senses diminishes after years of work, after domestic habits and progress of culture.

Germans of Jewish descent accounted for an outsize portion of the culture for which the nation would earn renown.

What did I know about the fifty-five (give or take) countries of Africa? I carried within me one deep personal thread of one small part of it, and it had changed and colored everything

As soon as we mistake our ease for our security, our conveniences for our human rights, our luxuries for our entitlements, we aren't culturally distinct anymore. Then we're part of someone else's corporate plan, we're a predictable, fulfilled expectation; we're a black dot on a bottom line.

It should not be possible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible. The shock is too much, the contrast too raw. We should sail or swim or walk from Africa, letting bits of her drop out of us, and gradually, in this way, assimilate the excesses and liberties of the States in tiny, incremental sips.... p 72

The cars we drive say a lot about us.

Lack of personal morality plus "politically correct" prohibition against judging others' behavior and naming immorality sets up a social environment receptive and vulnerable to a tyrannical government. A tyrannical government transforms every aspect of the cultural day-to-day lives of everyone under its control across all areas from the educational and penal systems to fine art and entertainment dictates right on down to housing regulations and food availabilities.

If you travel to the States... they have a lot of different words than like what we use. For instance: they say 'elevator', we say 'lift' they say 'drapes', we say 'curtains' they say 'president', we say 'seriously deranged git.'

In our neighbourhood you believed the same things as everybody else, you wore the same clothes as everybody else and you planned to go into the same job as your father.

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.

The Indian knew how to live without wants, to suffer without complaint, and to die singing.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.

Various forms of religious madness are quite common in the United States.

Americans and British have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator,' we say 'lift' ... they say 'President,' we say 'stupid psychopathic git.'

Am I Aboriginal, or how much of an Aboriginal am I?

But if poetry is now comparatively little read, no one can deny that it is much written about.

This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living and hard dying... but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice... but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks... but nobody loved it.

Les grands artistes n'ont pas de patrie. Great artists have no country.

Great artists have no country.

The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and in their minds everything on the mall would be American.