Quotes About Culture

In England you learn only to compete with your men in the world and it's not enough to be loved for yourselves because you are women. I shall try to learn of you, but you must try to learn from me, convenido?

I wish I could make a better job of my clothes. My mother taught me about weather and tides, she taught me eight languages and how to make various medicines, but she never thought to teach me to spin and weave and sew, because I was a boy. It seems silly now.

We have all, of course, heard the story of the invention of the croissant, the tribute of a Parisian pastry chef to Vienna's victory over the Ottomans. The croissant, of course, represented the crescent moon of the Ottoman flags, a symbol the West devours with coffee to this very day.

Tan diferente parece la ladera de una colina turca de la pendiente de un prado magiar? Claro que no, pero la diferencia es imposible de borrar del ojo cuando la historia te informa desde la mente.

Sometimes we also find a tendency to view everything that's indigenous as good and anything European-such as Spain-as evil. That view overlooks such historical realities as the Aztec empire's oppressive domination of other indigenous societies and its class system, which privileged priests and the military. That view also forgets Spain was not a typically European nation after 600 years of rule by the Moors, an Arab/Berber people from Africa.

We need to see how dance, music, theater, art, poetry, are major arenas for alliance-building, especially among youth. Culture can usher in new visions

the artes liberales: music, mathematics, history, and so on.

Americans have many admirable characteristics, but literary taste is rare among them.

Die Englânder! Niemals werde ich sie verstehen!

People are different in different places,' he thought hazily. 'And if they're all right in one place, it's best to leave them there.

In the eighties, when she chiefly flourished, husbands were taken seriously, as the only real obstacles to sin. Beds too, if they had to be mentioned, were approached with caution; and a decent reserve prevented them and husbands ever being spoken of in the same breath.

Have you noticed, how difficult it is to be improper without men?

Ruskin's, whose Stones of Venice

At first, I was shocked that Diane could even suggest this family reunion [on television], and then I realized this is just the way of the world, or at least the way of fin de siecle America. Not only would the next revolution be televised, but so would every other little stupid thing. It was already happening: Television reunions between adopted children and their birth parents...

The whole offensive culture of dieting seems invented as yet another way to make women smaller and weaker - to make us become less, quite literally. The starving self symbolizes a diminishing person, and really we ought to strive to be more, to have more strength and muscle and inner resolve - which is what we get from working out or playing a sport, and what we lose when we live in hunger.

In this privatized world, what sort of cultural conversation can there be? What can one of us possibly say to another about our experience except Today I visited the museum of me, and I liked it.

The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.

Steinbeck wasn't the thirties and Dickens wasn't the eighteen-hundreds. They were of their times but for the ages. Their writings are not products marketed for a brief time until they're out of vogue and discarded on the scrap heap.

The guidance of a cultured human being will always beat the click of a mouse.

you can drop those 'a'ints' too. It ain't 'acting white' to speak your own language properly. People fought for you to get the best possible education. It would break your grandpa's heart to hear you talk like nothing had changed.

Papa Ubu: Yes, gentlemen, but however beautiful it may be, it can't compare with Poland. Because if there weren't any Poland, there wouldn't be any Poles!

Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

A civilized society is one that exhibits the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art and peace.