Quotes About Culture

Eventually, a Soviet general sat down in the empty seat next to Howley. Rank-conscious, the Russian visibly shuddered when he realized he was sitting next to someone of much lower position. 'I see you're a colonel,' he said through an interpreter. Howley looked up from his plate and grumbled, 'I see you're a general. Here, have some salami.

People, not just writers, are attracted to New Orleans because it's full of stories and listeners who love nothing better to do than to listen to them.

He's got a bad case of something I call ethnic PMS. I think it sounds nicer than 'bloodlust.

He also stayed awake all night many times in the neon-lit insomnia of cities where the all-nighter is culturally certified and commercially mandated. But the all-nighter of the bohemian heroes was something else: it was spiritual work, the night shift; they stayed awake so the demons that haunt the world wouldn't get them in their sleep.

Nosferatu is the daddy of modern American sex.

Still, there is something disappearing from the world, something composed of many instances of tradition and skill, or maybe not disappearing, but translating. Maybe culture, like physical matter, doesn't disappear, but is subject to infinite play, and th e world is a vast workshop for making and remaking everything, including people, and the engine of play is desire…

Intellectual freedom is the only guarantee of a scientific-democratic approach to politics, economic development, and culture.

I was always admonished by my English teachers in their heavily accented, Viennese-inflected English not to speak this abomination of an "American dialect" or "American slang" and never to use "American spelling" with its simplifications that testified prima facie to the uncultured and simpleton nature of Americans.

Thus, for example, an article in the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel proclaims that this women's soccer has nothing to do with sports—a standard European reaction to women's soccer in America.47 "Typically American" were the first two words in the introduction to the article, so that the reader would know right away what to expect.

Sooner or later, almost every problem in the European working world is either branded with the label "Americanization" or blamed on the culprit of Americanization—or both.

Because so many Germans came into contact with America and Americans, Germany provided the most productive and widely read authors in Europe dealing with the New World.

the course of the following decades, as Germans increasingly came to view themselves as potential victims of America's insatiable drive for capitalist growth, prey to all the negative consequences of modernization, they began to identify with North American Indians and their fate.

In the field of politics, therefore, the European Left fears American power much more than does the Right. It is the other way round in the realm of culture; there, the Right is much more worried than is the Left.

But does the large presence of guns in America and their relative paucity in Europe render the former more democratic than the latter? Does the fact that some American states, such as New York and Massachusetts, have much tougher gun laws than France make them more complete democratic polities?

There are also specific cultural fetishes and phobias unique to France. No European country pursues so rigid a linguistic policy as France, a nation that has always viewed its language as both an antiAmerican and an anti-English bulwark.

My encounter with another world and another culture and the beginnings of an attachment to them had set up an irritation, barely perceptible but incurable-rather like unrequited love, like a symptom of the hopelessness of trying to grasp what is boundless, or unite what cannot be joined; a reminder of how finite, how curtailed, our experience on earth must be

There's a dear little plant that grows in our isle, 'Twas St Patrick himself, sure, that set it; And the sun on his labor with pleasure did smile, And with dew from his eye often wet it. It thrives through the bog, through the brake, and the mireland; And he called it the dear little shamrock of Ireland...

Alexander emerges as an almost Hamlet-like figure, more sinned against than sinning. In a sense Alexander, too, was haunted and motivated by his father's ghost... He may well have saved more lives than he destroyed and was rarely gratuitous in the use of violence... his legacy is enormous. He was the founder of the Hellenistic Age, which in turn has bequeathed us the foundations of our modern art, science and culture.

It is the Bohemian fad to expatriate himself, to seek strange and bizarre environments. As soon as a place begins to attract civilization he flees it for some new hiding place. When he chooses a Chinese dinner he must have a restaurant where no white man has ever before trod, if he can find one. . . . As soon as others begin to frequent it also, again he flies.27

It's not easy to look the way I do: in popular culture, one only sees a face like mine on the Phaontom of the Opera, on Freddie Krueger from Elm Street, or on Leatherface from deep in the heart of Texas. Sure, a burn victim may "get the girl" - but usually only with a pickax.

Coincidentally, a good age for a Japanese girl is younger than twenty five, because that's when she turns into a 'Christmas Cake'. Christmas cakes, as everyone knows, are desirable before the twenty fifth but afterward quickly become stale and are put on the shelf.

Between 1820 and 1830, only about a hundred novels by American writers were published in the United States; in the next decade, the number rose above three hundred, and in the 1840s, it leapt toward a thousand.

Assam tea goes very well after white wine. —MICHAEL OBNOWLENNY, Canada's first tea sommelier

TIP: In Japan, green tea is steeped for one to two minutes, while in China it is steeped for three to five minutes.