Quotes About Culture

Whether we like it or not, many of our pop artists today play post-modernist games with their audiences.

Jan Huizinga, a Dutch sociologist, studied the game element in human behavior, and noted that we live by game rules which often have never risen to the level of conscious speech. In other words, we not only interpret data as we receive it, we also, quickly and unconsciously, fit the data to pre-existing axioms, or game-rules, of our culture (or our sub-culture).

As Thomas Szasz, M.D., points out in The Myth of Mental Illness, many people in our society develop neurotic symptoms or psychosomatic illnesses because the only way to become important in Christian culture is to be conspicuously more pitiful than others.

Liberalism, as in a "normal" Hollywood film, has triumphed over fascism, and we can all feel warm and fuzzy.

EMIC realities are the realities created by people communicating with each other. It's one of the major discoveries of the social sciences in the last 80 years that a very large percentage (nobody has found a way of mathematically estimating it, but a very large percentage) of what we experience is EMIC reality. A large percentage of what we experience just exists because our society has talked it into existence.

The peoples of the earth are islands," said the late Clement Atlee, "shouting at each other over oceans of misunderstanding." Each island is a separate reality-tunnel created by (a) our culture, (b) our sub-culture and (c) by the myth-maker or artist in each of us who is the adamantine individuality that makes you and me unique human selves, not replicable units like the ants in a hive.

All the received truths of popular culture presume that successful love is rooted in shared interests. Dating services computerize preference, hobbies, vacations, and such so that they can match like with like.

Christmas dinner? At Susan's?" I nodded. "We could call it a Kwanzaa dinner, if that would improve your mood.

Colombians have been dealing with cocaine since your ancestors were running around Ireland with their bodies painted blue," Kingsley said.

One of the things that made Susan so interesting was the fact that she looked like a Jewish princess and worked like a Bulgarian peasant.

Tony's patois kept getting broader as we talked. Like Hawk, he seemed able to turn it on and off. "Sho 'nuff," he said.

Don't you think we're oversexed?" "You're the shrink," I said. "You tell me." "Yes," she said. "I believe we are." "What should we do about it?" I said. "Encourage the pathology," Susan said, and smiled her rebelangel smile at me.

How can a man with your heritage not be able to tap-dance." I heard Hawk's gliding chuckle. "My ancestors busy eating missionaries, boy.

Mentre ci allontanavamo sull'automobile ho ricordato con infinita gratitudine le gentilezze ricevute in quelle brutte casette, e fra la comunità inglese in generale. Gentilezze del genere sono facili da dimenticare e impossibili da ricambiare: bisogna essere ricchi per offrire in Inghilterra lo stesso grado di ospitalità che equivale a due lenzuola pulite e a un bagno dopo un viaggio in Persia.

It's not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian.

Stone tried to sound noncommittal. He knew Koreatown well. Liked the women. Liked karaoke. The Koreans were big on noraebang. "I

You good with Arabic?" Bam! Out of left field, and now Stone was smiling. There were many Arabic dialects, from Moroccan Arabic with Berber words which often did not even sound Arabic, to the aristocratic Arabic spoken by the Saudi royal family, which was different from the Arabic spoken in the streets.

Southeast Asians almost never use chopsticks. If you go to Vietnam or Thailand or Cambodia, you never see a chopstick. Even in the boonies. They use forks and large spoons but when they come here and open a little restaurant they put out chopsticks because that's what Americans expect. Ain't life a bitch?

Geography does not determine individual character, but it does matter.

People need to discover their ethnic roots as an anchor in the face of a more cosmopolitan world.

What destroyed the Indian was not primarily political greed, land hunger, or military power, not the white man's germs or the white man's rum. What destroyed him was the manufactured products of a culture, iron and steel, guns, needles, woolen cloth, things that once possessed could not be done without."19

In 1945, there were 20,000 mosques in Turkey; in 1985, 72,000, and that number has since risen steadily, out of proportion to the population.

Without the Indian Subcontinent, in other words, there could not have been a Vietnam in any cultural or aesthetic sense.

Huntington argues that it is a partial truth, not a total truth, that America is a nation of immigrants; America is a nation of Anglo-Protestant settlers and immigrants both, with the former providing the philosophical and cultural backbone of the society.