Quotes About Culture

Those wonderful coincidences of sound and sense between one language and another were also at work, giving each new term an alluring resonance.

Civilization is a myth. That is the truth this world has taught us. We have not risen above our baser instincts... That is what always has and always will drive us.

Weißt du, diese ganzen Small-talk Fragen, sie funktionieren nicht mehr. Hast du Kinder? Wo leben deine Eltern? Was macht dein Mann? Wie viele Brüder und Schwestern hast du? Sport, Wetter, Arbeit... Die ganze Palette. Es funktioniert einfach nicht mehr. Aber die Macht der Gewohnheit, nicht wahr? (Lori)

There was too little space for their own—and they guarded their own as all Chinese had done from the earliest dynasties.

The thought came back to him, as it often did: To save the culture of your allies is a small thing. To cherish the culture of your enemy, to risk your life and the life of other men to save it, to give it all back to them as soon as the battle was won … it was unheard of, but that was exactly what Walker Hancock and the other Monuments Men intended to do.

To save the culture of your allies is a small thing. To cherish the culture of your enemy, to risk your life and the life of other men to save it, to give it all back to them as soon as the battle was won… it was unheard of, but that is exactly what Walker Hancock and the other Monuments Men intended to do.

World War II had exposed millions of young American men and women to the art and architecture of Europe and Asia and almost overnight created an interest in and appreciation for the arts that would normally require generations to nurture.

It tempted Clinton, Bush, and even Obama to think we could change other countries, despite history and culture, and make them more like us. Contrary to Machiavelli's warning, they misjudged our power and our resources.

From that original perception of the Indians as the originators of the American style of speech had come an expansion: The Indians were the originators of the American style of life. The American personality is a mixture of European and Indian values. When you see this you begin to see a lot of things that have never been explained before.

the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep.

Now anybody can be kind. And everybody's supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn't help. Now it's just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class.

What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos... the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man...

The Meeting of East and West, by F. S. C. Northrop

Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are the closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. They may be precursors of social change. They've taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves, and in their struggle to solve their own problems they're solving problems for the culture as well.

And so in recent times we have seen a huge split develop between a classic culture and a romantic counterculture—two worlds growingly alienated and hateful toward each other with everyone wondering if it will always be this way, a house divided against itself. No one wants it really—despite what his antagonists in the other dimension might think.

He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His (Korean) friends nod and smile and eat the food they've taken from tins and say no pleasantly.

In a study of employees throughout the world working for the same multinational bank, what was the most important reason cited to help someone? Among Americans it was that the person had previously helped them; for Chinese it was that the person was higher ranking; in Spain, that they were a friend or acquaintance.

In general, our morally tinged cultural institutions—religion, nationalism, ethnic pride, team spirit—bias us toward our best behaviors when we are single shepherds facing a potential tragedy of the commons. They make us less selfish in Me versus Us situations. But they send us hurtling toward our worst behaviors when confronting Thems and their different moralities.

Look at systematic patterns of cultural variation as they pertain to the best and worst of our behaviors. Explore how different types of brains produce different culture and different types of culture produce different brains. In other words, how culture and biology coevolve.3 See the role of ecology in shaping culture.

Edward Tylor, a distinguished nineteenth-century cultural anthropologist. For him culture is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man [sic] as a member of society.

by the time you finish this book, you'll see that it actually makes no sense to distinguish between aspects of a behavior that are "biological" and those that would be described as, say, "psychological" or "cultural." Utterly intertwined.

By ages four through six, kids in cultures from around the world respond negatively when they are the ones being shortchanged. It isn't until ages eight through ten that kids respond negatively to someone else being treated unfairly.

Culture leaves long-lasting residues—Shiites and Sunnis slaughter each other over a succession issue fourteen centuries old; across thirty-three countries population density in the year 1500 significantly predicts how authoritarian the government was in 2000; over the course of millennia, earlier adoption of the hoe over the plow predicts gender equality today.

Cuando haya acabado de leer este libro, verá que, al hablar de los distintos aspectos de un comportamiento, no tiene sentido distinguir entre los que son «biológicos» y aquellos que podrían ser descritos por ejemplo como «psicológicos» o «culturales». Están totalmente entrelazados.