Quotes About Culture

I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.

Ethnic minorities were 10 times more likely than whites to eat at a table where they were the only representative of their race.

In a country that values the ballroom dancing talents of washed-up actors, writers were less than afterthoughts.

To play June, I had an immediate connect with her background and culture. We grew up with the same religion and shared a lot of the same values of family and spirituality. But I was really so inspired by what a modern woman she was.

In schools where learning is taken very seriously, there are few interruptions. See what you can do to change the culture of your school so that teaching and learning are "sacred.

How do you say, 'Bring me steak and eggs or I'll slit your throat' in Italian?

C est quand notre milieu (naturel ou culturel) commence a nous faire du mal qu on s avise de son existence, et plus il nous decouvrira ses fragilites, plus nous y aurons mal. Ainsi decouvre-t-on sa langue quand, a l etranger, on ne peut plus la parler - ou qu on avait une patrie, quand on est exile.

The typical Cuban machismo has attained alarming proportions in Miami. I did not want to stay too long in that place, which was like a caricature of Cuba, the worst of Cuba: the eternal gossip, the chicanery, the envy.

The church has lost the chance of becoming the unifying element in our American society. It is not anticipating any facts. It is merely catching up very slowly to the new social facts created by economic and other forces. The American melting pot is doing its work. The churches merely represent various European cultures, lost in the amalgam of American life and maintaining a separate existence only in religion.

Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.

The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models.

Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan's architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.

Bad books engender bad habits, but bad habits engender good books.

reading good books is like engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries who had composed them, or rather, taking part in a well-conducted dialogue in which such minds reveal to us only the best of their thoughts

It is useful to know something of the manners of different nations, that we may be enabled to form a more correct judgment regarding our own, and be prevented from thinking that everything contrary to our customs is ridiculous and irrational, a conclusion usually come to by those whose experience has been limited to their own country.

the perusal of all excellent books is, as it were, to interview with the noblest men of past ages, who have written them.

It is good to know something of the customs of different people in order to judge more soundly of our own, and so that we might not think that all that which is contrary to our own ways be ridiculous and contrary to reason, as those who have seen nothing have the habit of doing.

On the other hand, when too much time is occupied in traveling, we become strangers to our native country; and the over curious in the customs of the past are generally ignorant of those of the present.

It is well to know something of the manners of various peoples, in order more sanely to judge our own, and that we do not think that everything against our modes is ridiculous, and against reason, as those who have seen nothing are accustomed to think.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.

A dynamic force seems to be drawing first Western society, then the rest of the world, toward a state of relative indifferentiation never before known on earth, a strange kind of nonculture or anticulture we call modern.

In myth, violent death is always justified.

There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol. The above-ground tomb does not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of the unanimous stoning is buried. It is the first pyramid.