Quotes About Culture

As the Arab proverb says, "People resemble their times more than they resemble their fathers.

The forces of culture and geography are likely to prevail at some point. A man-made border that does not match a natural frontier zone is particularly vulnerable.

Because of the creation of a global middle class in the intervening decades, everyone the world over looks and acts increasingly similar. In this sense at least, travel has lost its magic; or, rather, I should say the traveler must now work harder to understand the mystery of places given that travel relies on the differences between us.

Romania, as I am forced to refer to it, constitutes one of those indigestible ethnic nations, like Georgia and Armenia, that have miraculously survived the millennia despite being oppressed, overrun, and vanquished.

We are a people who deny publicly that we are even partially in the Balkans, but we admit our Balkan identity privately, among ourselves.

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.

The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!

People need symbols, something greater than their own lives.

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

Pardon me, but my father says that it is a lie that Americans have everything. You have no sheep, no goats, no trees, no oil, no vines, no wine, not even chickens. He asks, 'What kind of life is that?' He says, 'No wonder you don't sing or dance or recite poetry very often.

And give money to all street musicians.

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.

The vast majority of people conform to whatever is normal for the time.

What excites me about America is its social mobility, people continually rising from the bottom to the top and altering the culture in the process. On another level, however, we remain a nation that lives in social ghettos. Celebrities generally congregate around other celebrities; academics and intellectuals are cloistered in their worlds; people like to associate with those of their kind. If we leave these narrow worlds, it is usually as an observer of another way of life.

Understand: we live in the world of a sad separation that began some five hundred years ago when art and science split apart.

If they come from another culture, it is all the more important to understand this culture from within their experience.

The idea that the early Christian tradition was limited to its Greek and Latin expressions is still widespread. This assumption distorts historical reality and weakens greatly our understanding of the roots of Christian theology and spirituality. In the third and fourth centuries Syriac was the third international language of the church. It served as the major means of communication in the Roman diocese of the East, which included Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia.

In every culture the total word of God has to be declared to us by another. In every culture the message of the gospel is in constant danger of being compromised by the value system that supports that culture and its goals. The stranger to that culture can instinctively identify those points of surrender and call the community back to a purer and more authentic faith. But such infusions of new life are usually resented and resisted.

Centuries of high quality Arabic Christian literature remain, for the most part, unpublished and unknown.' All of these sources, Syriac, Hebrew/Aramaic and Arabic, share the broader culture of the ancient Middle East, and all of them are ethnically closer to the Semitic world of Jesus than the Greek and Latin cultures of the West.

from talking with your mouth full. The Badger did not mind that sort of thing at all, nor did he take any notice of elbows on the table, or everybody speaking at once. As he did not go into Society himself, he had got an idea that these things belonged to the things that didn't really matter. (We know of course that he was wrong, and took too narrow a view; because they do matter very much, though it would take too long to explain why.)

AESTHETICS OF THE AESTHETICIAN What is the aesthetician But a mule hitched to the times?

Harry Yutu. His last name is Eskimo for 'The Claw.

He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

The Chinese say it's better to be deprived of food for three days than tea for one.