Quotes About Culture

A dire il vero, quei laici che guardano un libro piegandolo a rovescio, come se fosse quello il suo verso normale, sono indegni di avere contatti con libri di qualsiasi genere.

High-performing districts "tended to rely more on a common culture of values to shape collective action than on bureaucratic rules and controls.

The history of representations of Cleopatra provides one of the clearest instances of the conviction that whiteness is the pinnacle of human beauty. Cleopatra became a byword for feminine beauty in European culture, but in the process she had to be represented as white. As

The cognitive orientations and skills of East Asians and people of European cultures are sufficiently different that it seems highly likely that they would complement and enrich one another in any given setting.

Why is it then that Westerners rely so much more heavily on personality traits in explaining behavior? The answer seems to be that Easterners are more likely to notice important situational factors and to realize that they play a role in producing behavior. As a consequence, East Asians are less susceptible to what social psychologist Lee Ross labeled the "Fundamental Attribution Error" (or FAE for short).

Independence vs. interdependence is of course not an either/or matter. Every society—and every individual—is a blend of both. It turns out that it is remarkably easy to bring one or another orientation to the fore. Psychologists Wendi Gardner, Shira Gabriel, and Angela Lee "primed" American college students to think either independently or interdependently.

no word in the Hebrew language of that period for "religion." Religion was not a separate, identifiable category of beliefs and activities. It was an inseparable, pervasive part of life.

Unexamined wallpaper is classroom practices and institutional policies that are so entrenched in school culture or a teacher's paradigm that their ability to affect student learning is never probed.

The arts are weapons of understanding and weapons of happiness.

The creative individual is no longer viewed as an iconoclast. He—or she—is the new mainstream.

It's not that gays and diversity equal high technology. But if your culture is not such that it can accept difference, and uniqueness and oddity and eccentricity, you will not get high tech industry.

whosyourcity.com

I believe profoundly in the importance of museums; I would go as far as to say that you can judge a society by the quality of its museums.

Museums have no political power, but they do have the possibility of influencing the political process. This is a complete change from their role in the early days of collecting and hoarding the world to one of using the collections as an archive for a changing world. This role is not merely scientifically important, but it is also a cultural necessity.

There are seductions that should be in the Smithsonian Institute, right next to The Spirit of St. Louis.

Here, race was so difficult and complicated, it was a kaleidoscope you could keep on turning.

A kind of affectionate racism prevailed among the delta gentry, they had kind, paternalistic feelings toward black people and a genuine appreciation for black culture, but they didn't want a black man dating their daughters or sitting down to eat dinner at their table, because that wasn't the way things were done or meant to be.

Gupta and Singh (1982) found that couples in Jaipur, India, who married for love reported diminished feelings of love if they'd been married for more than five years. By contrast, those who'd undertaken arranged marriages reported more love if they weren't newlyweds. These findings reveal that passionate love "cools" over time, and that there's scope for love to flourish within an arranged marriage.

The military, moreover, made one major cultural breakthrough: on the frozen lake, members of the Royal Canadian Rifles developed, by hit and miss and bump and grind, a new game using skates, field hockey sticks and a lacrosse ball.

In fact, Herman never resolves satisfactorily why this achievement should have happened in the particular society of Scotland, so small and backward. The nearest he comes is to argue that, after union with England in 1707, Scottish intellectuals had to cope with the challenge, today common, of "deal[ing] with a dominant culture that one admired but that threatened to overwhelm one's own heritage and oneself with it.

The thing about going abroad is that it's quite far away.

The truths embodied in historical stories are thus not absolute or universal, but relative to the cultural context in which they are made.

The Californians are an idle, thriftless people, and can make nothing for themselves.

A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind.