Quotes About Culture

a group of mostly middle-aged people (Scots, by their pallor) doing tai chi—Jackson didn't get tai chi, it looked okay on television when you saw people doing it in China, but in Scotland it looked, let's face it, arsy.

Look at the Germans, the most cultured and well mannered of people, and yet… Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen. Given the same set of circumstances it could just as well have been the English

He was Irish, which always helped. A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn't.

Melanie was Irish, and this made everything she said sound nice even when it wasn't.

What had happened to women? Jackson wondered. They made him feel almost prudish. (Obviously not prudish enough to have resisted the dubious charms of one of them.) More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn't just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.

Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers.

Male privilege is assuming one has the right to occupy any space or person by whatever means, with or without permission. It's a sense of entitlement that's unique to those who have been raised male in most cultures - it's notably absent in most girls and women.

cast their babes to the crocodiles in the Ganges.

How can it be men would put up with such an arrangement?' 'Why do some people demand it of women but not of men? It is just another way of doing things. As my father would have said, folk will have their customs according to their nature and their surroundings.

We need to talk about ending a pregnancy as a common, even normal, event in the reproductive lives of women—and not just modern American women either, but women throughout history and all over the world, from ancient Egypt to medieval Catholic Europe, from today's sprawling cities to rural villages barely touched by modern ideas about women's roles and rights.

What in the world would we do without our libraries?

All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Everyone was literate as a matter of course. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that. It was there to read, and we read.

American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.

They were always nice to Jess when he went over, but then they would suddenly begin talking about French politics or string quartets (which he at first thought was a square box made out of string), or how to save the timber wolves or redwoods or singing whales, and he was scared to open his mouth and show once and for all how dumb he was.

was appalled that I was heading across the world for four years, asked me: "How could you do this to your mother?" "Well," I answered, "she did it to her mother." But when my parents went to China it was different.

I got up the nerve to ask her if she remembered that first visit and my terrible faux pas. She pretended, in true Japanese fashion, that it had never happened.

Likewise, while the men and women were no more naturally attractive than their English counterparts, they dressed with an assurance and attention to detail that would have been considered the height of arrogance in England. Here, maintaining a certain chic was apparently nothing less than a civic duty.

Diversity is the product of the effort to be a Christian in different cultural contexts. What it means to be a Christian should not look the same from one cultural context to another-say, from pagan ancient Rome to contemporary Catholic Spain. One lives a Christian life differently depending on the cultural materials with which one has to work and the challenges to the Christian faith specific to that context.

There's no more education, no more culture - if culture depends on a commonly understood history - and perhaps no more middle class in the United States. There's War.

Since an emotion's an announcement of value, in this society of the death (of values) emotions moved like zombies through humans.

And if they are lucky enough to be exposed to multiple languages, they will master all of them, as long as the languages are presented in a natural context, such as when dad speaks Spanish and mom speaks English or the live-in nanny speaks French.

One joy, the Chinese believe, scatters a hundred griefs...

Among the Yuit Eskimos of St. Lawrence Island, if an individual requested suicide three times, relatives were obligated to assist in the killing. The person seeking suicide dressed in ritual death garb and then was killed in a "destroying place" set aside specifically for that purpose. To save commonly held resources of food or to allow a nomadic society to move on unhindered by the physically ill or elderly, some societies gave tacit if not explicit approval to suicide.

But tell me, Taro, don't you worry at times we might be a little too hasty in following the Americans? I would be the first to agree many of the old ways must now be erased for ever, but don't you think sometimes some good things are being thrown out with the bad? Indeed, sometimes Japan has come to look like a small child learning from a strange adult.