Quotes About Culture

Greene calls "the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality" is shown by the fact that most intergroup conflicts on our planet ultimately are cultural disagreements about whose "right" is righter.

What helps define a particular culture? Values, beliefs, attributions, ideologies.

Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism?21 The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it's all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking planting and harvesting, which are done in rotation because the entire village is needed to harvest each family's rice.

And then you increase the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual—how has culture shaped the behavior of people living in that individual's group?—what ecological factors helped shape that culture—expanding and expanding

Tessék, a puritán társadalmak átka: mindenki csak a nemiséggel foglalkozik.

Er blätterte in den dicken, alten Alben mit Lichtbildern seiner Familie, [...], und je näher er den Anfängen dieser neuen Bildkunst zu blätterte, desto stolzer, kam ihm vor, hatten sich die Menschen ihr dargeboten.

There's no longer a whole man confronting a whole world, only a human something moving about in a general cultural-medium.

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.

What you are is an expression of history.

If you eliminate suffering from this world you eliminate life. There's no evolution. Those species that don't suffer don't survive. 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 the 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

I don't think I can even imagine what a culture that's been developing steadily for a billion years ought to be like. Disembodied electrical essences, maybe. Ghostly creatures flitting in and out of the eighth, ninth, and tenth dimensions. Cosmic minds that know all, perceive all, understand all. Maybe

I love museums more than any other institution the human race has invented. Museum people are always overworked and underpaid, and they all deserve sainthood, every one.

our culture has educated us into believing that the love of money is the root of all evil.

Sunny Skies Shady Characters: Cops, Killers, and Corruption in the Aloha State

Ninety percent of the population buys TV sets, and only about 10 percent buy business books.

You cling to those beliefs because that is the reality you were raised in.

Come on, it's an American tradition. Apple soup? Mom's homemade chicken pie?' She chuckled in spite of herself, then winced. 'It's apple pie and Mom's homemade chicken soup. But you didn't do badly, for a start.

The happiest countries, like the happiest women, have no history.

away from a world where women bobbed their hair and you couldn't tell who were grandmothers and who were flappers—from behind

What was Latin and the chance of tattooing compared to this?

A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too.

In Arabic, the name Guadalajara evoked a valley of stones, a valley my ancestors had settled more than eight hundred years earlier. They had carried the disease of empire to Spain, the Spaniards had brought it to the new continent, and someday the people of the new continent would plant it elsewhere. That was the way of the world.

Growing up in this town, I had long ago learned that the savagery of a man named Mohammed was rarely questioned, but his humanity always had to be proven.

Humanity is fundamentally a story of migration.