Quotes About Culture

What's it like? Death? It's like being on holiday with a group of Germans.

is a bullshit business that produces a product that causes as much or more cirrhosis, car wrecks, fetal alcohol

Gray is to Berliners what white is to Eskimos and red is to the Maori.

The Young Tradition (1966) and its successor, So Cheerfully Round (1967), both released on Transatlantic, are rustic tapestries of ballads, carols and street cries from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; a parade of serving-maids, poachers, fishermen, cunning foxes, bold dragoons, pretty ploughboys and hungry children.

The Watersons, Frost and Fire (1965); The Young Tradition, So Cheerfully Round (1967); Peter Bellamy, Merlin's Isle of Gramarye (1972).

John Renbourn, Sir John Alot of Merrie Englandes Musyk Thyng & Ye Grene Knyghte (1968); Shirley Collins, The Power of the True Love Knot (1968); Shirley and Dolly Collins, Anthems in Eden (1969). The Early Music movement as we know it today began in practice

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them.

The country and culture commonly known as America had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees---its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian.

Because the world has gone nutty and art always paints the spirit of its times

Yes, sir, there are things to see and do on the French Riviera without spending money.

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them. From an anthropologist's view, 'justice' is a search for workable customs.

Customs, morals--is there a difference?

He] stopped long enough to remind himself that this baby innocent was neither babyish nor innocent — was in fact sophisticated in a culture which he was beginning to realize, however dimly, was far in advance of human culture in some very mysterious ways… and that these naive remarks came from a superman — or what would do in place of a 'superman' for the time being.

Do you speak English? Certainly. And I understand American.

Being "up to something" was the unnamable and unforgiveable crime for which any American male could be indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced in one breath. He wondered how things had gotten rigged so that the male half of the race must always behave to suit feminine rules and feminine logic, like a snotty-nosed school boy in front of a stern teacher.

Could dump two Chinee down in one of our maria and they would get rich selling rocks to each other while raising twelve kids. Then a Hindu would sell retail stuff he got from them wholesale--below cost at a fat profit. We got along.

Everything and anything about a culture can be inferred from the shape of its language—and

If a word for a concept isn't in a language, then its culture simply doesn't have the referent the missing word would symbolize." "Oh, twaddle, Stinky! Animals fight—and ants even conduct wars. Are you trying to tell me they have to have words for it before they can do it?

You know the classification of cultures into 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian.

from George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra: "Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

He's a man by ancestry, a Martian by environment.

Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named…but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

As for the second notion, the idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this our culture; it is rooted in our history

And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of 'rights' . . . and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.