Quotes About Culture

Si ricordò di alcune riflessioni che aveva annotato di recente sul suo quadernetto. A proposito della povertà di vocabolario riguardante il mare. Solo i greci avevano tante parole per definirlo. Hals, il sale, il mare in quanto materia. Pelagos, la distesa d'acqua, il mare come visione, spettacolo. Pontos, il mare spazio e via di comunicazione. Thalassa, il mare in quanto evento. Kolpos, lo spazio marittimo che abbraccia la riva, il golfo o la baia...

Il mediterraneo non è solo geografia. Non è solo storia. Ma è più di una semplice appartenenza.

Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn't manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared.

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.

We are in a system that doesn't give a rap about sacredness.

If you meet a woman in a burqa, she can't reply to your smile. It's a denial of identity.

Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.

Politics is just love, sex, food, clothes, money, and correct society in a different form.

Lydia's English is a help, but there are many different languages in el norte. There are codes Lydia hasn't yet learned to decipher, subtle differences between words that mean almost, but not quite the same thing: migrant, immigrant, illegal alien. She learns that there are flags that people use here, and those flags may be a warning or a welcome. She is learning.

Luca likes to listen to the foreign sounds, the peaks and rolls of the words he doesn't understand. He likes the way voices sound the same in every language, the way, if you train your ear to listen just outside the words, to only the shifting inflections, you can attach your own meaning to the sounds.

She learns that there are flags people use here, and those flags may be a warning or a welcome.

The man's words have landed on her face and she does – she looks like an Aztec warrior.

It's unusual in a culture where adult children take care of their aging parents that Lydia's mother even had a savings account.

that line his abuela's street. He's

San Pedro Sula: second-largest city in Honduras, a million and a half people, murder capital of the world. Out loud, he says, "Ah, you are Honduran." "No," Rebeca corrects him. "Ch'orti'." Luca makes his face into a question. "Indian," she explains. "My people are Ch'orti'." Luca nods, even though he doesn't really understand the difference.

A man says what he knows, a woman says what will please.

we now live in a society

Every film is the result of the society that produced it. That's why the American cinema is so bad now. It reflects an unhealthy society.

Humane people don't start revolutions, they start libraries. And cemeteries.

One might almost say that to live in society today is something like living inside an enormous comic strip.

We're born in the museum, it's our homeland after all...

Adossée à cette philosophie aujourd'hui dominante, la violence est partout. Depuis le célèbre

From the start, therefore, American culture seemed to the majority of émigrés both simplistic and crude: it corresponded to the tastes of the petty bourgeoisie and not those of an intellectual elite, and, scarcely concerned with either political awareness or formal experimentation, it sought rather to seduce, distract, arouse laughter or tears.3

The task therefore was not only to denounce this supposed kinship between classical German culture and National Socialism, and show what this supposed 'Germanity' had falsified, but also to emphasize the extent to which the classical German heritage was indissociable from those values now trampled on by the Nazis: a certain belief in freedom, justice and democracy.