Quotes About Culture

Our word "Phoenician" comes from ancient Greek. Phoinikes, "red people," was what the Greeks called them, probably in reference to their copper skin color.

Modern experts now believe the alphabet was invented sometime around 2000 B.C. by Semites who dwelled as foreigners in pharaoh's Egypt;

The right idea, one that is in productive sync with one's talents, can unlock a whole worldview. If that idea is also part of a sensibility that is forming and spreading in the larger culture, or zeitgeist, a multiplier effect comes into play, and the art will resonate strongly with the viewing public. We will feel that it expresses us.

Art is more than a sum of cultural signs: It is a language both direct and associative, and has a grammar and syntax like any other human communication. The act of paying close attention to what someone made, in all of its particulars, is what stimulates an authentic, as opposed to a conditioned, response.

If I were given a choice between two films and one was dark and explored depraved, troubled or sick aspects of our culture, I would always opt for that over the next romantic comedy.

Science fiction constantly interrogates the limits of identity and the nature of difference. The latter is frequently described through a quasi-allegorical displacement of the alien on to other countries and planets, following a strategy of encounter whereby readers are encouraged to re-examine their self-conceptions as a result of confrontation with the Other, with beings whose culture is rarely explored in its own right, but rather to highlight the markers of difference.

On average, a teenager is exposed to approximately eighty-four references to drug use every day and almost six hundred references every week—that's more than thirty thousand a year.

in the San Francisco Bay Area, where one out of every three people seem to be a therapist of some sort. What does this say about us? Scott Peck said that the sickest and healthiest people are in therapy. Which are we?

Painting isn't dead. The novel isn't dead. They just aren't as central to the culture as they once were.

Things have their place. You wouldn't hang dreidels from a Christmas tree.

There are no jokes in Woke World. Or, rather, the whole thing is a joke, which means nothing is funny anymore. You need something to be serious before there can be room for laughter. Nothing is serious in Woke World.

The superhero universe is a uniquely American mythology. It replaces the mythology America never had. Native Americans have a long history, but the world knows very little about that history. The fact that colonial America has no history – in the sense of a history stretching back thousands of years – is a fact that haunts the American psyche. The Americans are always in the business of filling that vacuum.

We're not in an Age of Politics, we're in an Age of Netflix. It's who can tell the most compelling story who wins.

Vampires must be the least narcissistic creatures. They can't see themselves in the mirror, and they can't take any selfies. Vampires don't belong to Selfie culture. Boo hoo.

This is one of the great charms of Poirot's investigations, for they reveal a world where manners and morals are quite different from today. There are no overt and unnecessary sex scenes, no alcoholic, haunted detectives in Poirot's world. He lives in a simpler, some would say more human, era: a lost England, seen through the admiring eyes of this foreigner, this little Belgian detective.

The way we live has less to do with individual choices and more to do with the general bent of our society than many of us realize. We forget that we don't need everything.

Because the rituals of the larger culture play a formative role in fashioning our affections, it must be recognized that idolatry is not merely an individual sin but is embedded in the very patterns of civilizations where they take on a systemic character.

The most basic office we hold is indeed that of divine image. Respect for authority must begin with this authoritative office, in which all the other offices find their focus and point of origin. This indeed is the grain of truth to be found in the contemporary ideology of human rights, as manifested in both practical jurisprudence and popular culture.

I'd had a relationship with a French girl, a Japanese girl, an American girl, a Filippina and she was there all the time - a Lancashire girl. I thought: 'It's a Lancashire girl I was looking for. Why didn't I realize it?'

This book is meant to tell the story of Indian lives, and Indian histories, in such a way as to render those histories and those lives as something much more, much greater and grander, than a catalog of pain.

To understand American Indians is to understand America. This is the story of the paradoxically least and most American place in the twenty-first century. Welcome to the Rez.

Any Indian or mixed-blood who shall pay or offer to pay any money or other valuable consideration to the friends or relatives of any Indian girl or woman, for the purpose of living or cohabiting with said girl or woman,

the Indian "must be imbued with the exalting egotism of American civilization so that he will say 'I' instead of 'We,' and 'This is mine' instead of 'This is ours.

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