Quotes About Culture

The little child learns to speak, though it has no learned teachers - because it lives with those who know how to speak.

Vulgar of manner, overfed, Overdressed and underbred; Heartless, Godless, hell's delight, Rude by day and lewd by night." —Byron RufusNewton

Societal expectations matter little; personal expectations matter tremendously.

What if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?

The more opera is dead, the more it flourishes.

Even little old ladies seem to drive like demons in Germany. By comparison, when we were balked by them I felt I could have got out and walked faster.

The Greeks Had a Word for It.

I think as an American society, when we're paying too many taxes or dealing with war, we don't want to see sad things at the movies.

As a traveler, education is our way of life.

Fear is a disease of the mind we inherit from society

Now domestication and sophistication of men by women are the norm and acceptable by society, but they are terrible for manhood.

It's funny how the entertainment industry was so scared of hip-hop. Chris and I were so turned on by it. Chris was so buzzed that he talked to some people in the music industry about all these great bands. Every one of them told him that rap was a fad and it would soon go away.

There is no perfect solution to the problem of writing about therapy patients. But not to do so strikes me as the riskiest choice at a time in our culture when the power to define madness, malingering, and suicide potential is being handed over to insurance company functionaries.

There are of course also Jews who—intentionally or unintentionally—traffic in antisemitic stereotypes. When this seeps into the larger culture, it signals that it's okay for non-Jews to do likewise.

The fact that lipstick and mascara and eye shadow were called 'Make Up' thrilled me. Everywhere in the world there were made up people and most of them were women.

I have researched aboriginal culture, Mayan hieroglyphics and the corporate culture of a Japanese car manufacturer, and I have written essays on the internal logic of various other societies, but I haven't a clue about my own logic.

So do you anthropologists study primitive people?' 'Yes, but the only primitive person I have ever studied is myself.

British literary landscape,

To not feel at home in her family home is the beginning of the bigger story of society and its female discontents.

And who can speak more authoritatively of what it is like to inhabit the middle ground between biology and culture than gender-variant people? An individual who has inhabited the social roles of both and and woman, with all the cultural baggage that accrues to both states - or to neither- acquires a kind of gender gnosis: a secret knowledge denied the rest of us who live in our assigned boxes, M or F, with really probing the boundaries.

Every time a hillbilly hears his cell phone ring, an angel gets a beer.

It's true--I can see it now--we are made of where we've come from, molded by landscape, weather, harbors, hunger, and war, as much as by individual ancestors. The experience of the place--its struggles, strife, and horrors--accrues, even if we haven't personally experienced it. We are, still, its inevitable consequence.

At every age, the girls and women sit closer to each other and look at each other directly. At every age, the boys and men sit at angles to each other—in one case, almost parallel—and never look directly into each other's faces.

One of the great joys of traveling through Italy is discovering firsthand that it is, indeed, a dream destination.