Quotes About Culture

Political correctness? In my humor, I never talk about politics. I was never much into all that.

Kitsch and tourism are inseparable partners. Perhaps it is because, by definition, both are inauthentic.

Dope is supposed to be bad, but in a bad world it's good

Americans take their strength in victories, Mexicans' strength is in their ability to suffer loss.

Well, that's a big chunk of truth, Eddie thinks. The Mexicans have finally found a drug that white trash likes and can afford. And one thing you ain't never gonna run out of is white trash. That stuff makes itself. They get made in the backseats of junk cars, and then they live in them.

You shop in malls instead of mercados, you watch football instead of fútbol, you become another consumer in a giant machine that consumes consumers.

The Mexicans have finally found a drug that white trash likes and can afford. And one thing you ain't never gonna run out of is white trash.

Mexico is a country where the temples of the new gods are built on the gravesites of the old.

The lost, the lonely, the bicultural misfits with a foot in two worlds and a place in neither.

Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.

You go in there to be Irish, Danny thinks, as if you're not already, as if you can get away from it anywhere anyway.

If it was raining soup, the Irish would run outside with forks.

Truth, justice and the American way. The American way is: truth and justice maybe say hello in the hallway, send each other a Christmas card, but that's about the extent of their relationship.

found himself marveling at how many different names there are in this world. All individual, most pronounceable. Think of that.

Dortmunder lifted his gaze from his reproachful knees, and contemplated, without love, the clothing Andy Kelp had forced him into. He said, "Who wears this stuff?" "Americans," Kelp told him. "Don't they have mirrors in America?

Los Angeles isn't a tank town." "The hell it isn't. Los Angeles is three Long Islands next to each other. But no Midtown Tunnel.

Hispanics have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Come to that, the Irish and Italians and Jews also have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Thinking it over, everybody has a long tradition of defiance against authority. (Except the Germans, of course.)

The growth of poetry is a counterforce--and a response--to our culture of numbers and information, of digits and commerce. We read and write poems so that our psyches can speak to each other with intelligence in the language of feeling, acknowledging the multiplicity and contradiction of each human life.

Christians are the salt of the earth...Nothing grows where they've been.

He considered China's interference in Korea to be an intolerable attempt to prevent the spread of enlightenment, and the war itself not merely a struggle between two countries but a "battle for the sake of world culture."49

Signs and symbols rule the world, not words nor laws.

The final goal ... is to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.

Dressing is a way of life.

Over the years since I left home, I have kept thinking about the people I grew up with and about our way of life. I realize how much the bond that held us had to do with food.