Quotes About Culture

I am interested in the highbrow/lowbrow synthesis. My sensibility, I am proud to say, is middlebrow.

There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.

Nightlife is, to me, a little synthetic, a little desperate?

Very few people are fortunate enough to walk through countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, and I had seen them all. I had spoken to many on the street.

Syria is geographically and politically in the middle of the Middle East.

Even when you just hear the word 'Syria,' it packs a lot of political connotations.

I'm from Lebanon, and I've been exposed a lot to Syria.

At this market in Tel Aviv, we put together a mezze platter and we had Syrian, Iraqi, Bulgarian, Venezuelan, Iranian, all doing something very different with chicken. All these different cultures had taken the same product and made this fantastic cuisine, it was very exciting.

I was born in Canada, but both my parents are Syrian - they moved to Canada in the '70s, and I was born in a 100-percent-Arab house.

Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who can't write their own language.

I always consider myself Syrian. I just happen to be born in Canada.

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

The fact remains that secularism is inherent in the Indian system, in the Indian ethos and culture. India cannot but be secular.

The way that I see astrology is as a repository of thought and psychology. A system we've created as a culture as way to make things mean things.

The way that social norms become social norms is not through any systematic process. It is through a flowering of an understanding within a culture.

Cranking the Auto-Tune is so easy to do that there's almost no systemic resistance to trying it. So when someone's stuck for an idea, that's what they do. I mean, to the extent that it's been embraced by an entire idiom of club music and culture.

Over time, our inescapable, systemic, fundamentally human impurity gives us the capacity to do what has not been done before: to make creative leaps in our biology, in the diseases we can resist and the foods we can digest. And in our thinking and culture and politics, too.

A culture is like an immune system. It operates through the laws of systems, just like a body. If a body has an infection, the immune system deals with it. Similarly, a group enforces its norms, either actively or passively.

Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. You can't buy class.

Private communication systems have been around since the beginning of human culture.

Blaming the bride, while making for colorful feature stories and cruelly riveting television programming, wasn't an adequate explanation for what seemed to be underlying the concept of the Bridezilla: that weddings themselves were out of control, and that a sense of proportion had been lost, not just individually but in the culture at large.

Tepary beans, before the advent of the playing card and the poker chip, figured as counters in an ancient Indian gambling game.

vegetable eating traditionally has been considered far better for the good of the soul.

Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed.