Quotes About Culture

As Carol Bialock writes in her poem, we cannot stop the drowning waters of our addictive culture from rising, but we must at least see our reality for what it is, seek to properly detach from it, build a coral castle, and learn to breathe under water. The New Testament called this salvation (some might call it enlightenment); the Twelve Step Program calls it recovery.

he had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any at all.

Most Americans want it to be 1959, with the addition of cappuccino and cable TV.

They got their own name in French," she reminded Miss Beryl, stealthily exchanging her soiled cloth napkin for a fresh one at an adjacent table. "Escargot." There's also a word in English, Miss Beryl had pointed out. Snail. Probably horse doo had a name in French also, but that didn't mean God intended for you to eat it.

witness the sad demise of fundamental Western values. Pride. Order. Personal responsibility.

She was a full lipped and hipped italian tomato with Rome burning in her eyes. She had the look of a carnival in Rio, or Mardi Gras in New Orleans, or bullfights in Spain, or Saturday night in my apartment.

Henry Miller's Air-Conditioned Nightmare

city' meant two different things – one a physical place, the other a mentality compiled from perceptions, behaviours and beliefs.

In cultural production, Levi-Strauss famously declares, food is both good to eat (bonne a manger) and good to think with (bonne a penser). He means this literally: cooking food begets the idea of heating for other purposes; people who share parts of a cooked deer begin to think they can share parts of a heated house; the abstraction he is a warm person (in the sense of sociable) then becomes possible to think.14 These are domain shifts.

In effect, the objective world has been ruled by the Enlightenment, the subjective world by Romanticism.

Astrology," he stated, "represents the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.

The culture of modern humanism into which he had thus incorporated himself was to remain important to Hobbes for the rest of his life, though, as we shall see, he distanced himself from many of its specific elements, and in particular its openness to classical republicanism.

The world of most men is given to them by their culture..

America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another.) Granny

the civilization which had given birth to Bigger contained no spiritual sustenance, had created no culture which could hold and claim his allegiance and faith, had sensitized him and had left him stranded

The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever," Howe declared. "It made impossible a repetition of the old lies [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture." A

George Washington Cable in the nineteenth century and, in Wright's own time, William Faulkner.

Contrite words cannot now stop profound processes which white men set in motion on this earth some four hundred years ago; four hundred years is a long time…time enough for habits, reactions, to be converted into culture, tradition, into a raison d'être for millions….

Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man.

in a boy like Bigger, young, unschooled, whose subjective life was clothed in the tattered rags of American "culture," this primitive fear and ecstasy were naked, exposed, unprotected by religion or a framework of government or a scheme of society whose final faiths would gain his love and trust; unprotected by trade or profession, faith or belief; opened to every trivial blast of daily or hourly circumstance. There

At the core, this is a worship issue. The first guy worshiped his religious security (and perhaps even his superiority). The second guy worshiped the cause and the social agenda. One chose the kingdom of the church and the other the kingdom of the culture.

I have found on occasion that the Italians are suspicious of the benefits of air-conditioning. Or skeptical, or resistant, or oblivious to the benefits of air-conditioning.

Conservatives felt victimized by a sort of radicalism that, because it graced Middle American classrooms, did not seem radical to most Americans at all.

Egyptians believe in the power of the sunrise. They believe each morning begins not just a new day, but a new world.