Quotes About Culture

Myths are the mental supports of rites; rites, the physical enactments of myths.

We can't have a mythology for a long, long time to come. Things are changing too fast to become mythologized.

The symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche.

Mythology -and therefore civilization- is a poetic, supernormal image, conceived, like all poetry, in depth, but susceptible of interpretation on various levels.

The third function is the sociological one—supporting and validating a certain social order. And here's where the myths vary enormously from place to place. You can have a whole mythology for polygamy, a whole mythology for monogamy. Either one's okay. It depends on where you are. It is this sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world—and it is out of date.

Sí. La idea de un dios siempre está culturalmente condicionada

An American is a man with two arms and four wheels.

Like the Egyptians, the Hittites sat when eating.

There is something of the preacher essential in every Russian intellectual. It is in our blood; it has been instilled by the whole of Russian literature in the last generations

Louisiana politics is of an intensity and complexity that are matched, in my experience, only in the republic of Lebanon.

An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed.

Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas - stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.

Westerners say, "I think, therefore I am," with the focus on individual identity apart from social context. Africans say, "We relate, therefore I am"—a

The French in particular confuse unadorned direct language with a lack of culture or intellectual elegance.

America has always understood that it is defined by what it stands against more than what it stands for.

Europe is a place that conserves. It maintains, it curates its civilization, protects it against the ravages and rust of other cultures, and the rot of time and intellectual theft. We are a continent where fear of losing what we have is greater than the ambition to make it anew.

There is no tragedy so utter that a Belgian, with the best will in the world, can't make worse.

cleverness that the French adore and always mistake for wisdom.

It is in Europe that we are born and bred to a single role. America is populated by second acts, encores and revivals.

Crack cocaine is the contemporary beaver, an international fad that has radically altered the economics of the poorest, marginal people, indigenous America. The gangs are the tribes of the New World.

a gun in a film is so culturally specific to America. It looks odd in world cinema unless it's ironic. I wonder if there are more balls in English films than guns, more nipples in French films. Guns in America's story are a constant, a plot device, like coffee cups in European films. Guns are Hollywood.

Islands prove, I think, that geography makes people what they are.

Of course, only Americans can name a shop In-n-Out Burger without collapsing into a heap of dirty sniggers. You know the difference between them and us? To us, a double entendre means only one thing; to them, it means absolutely nothing.

What else? Well, she belongs to a book review club, one her mother helped start, that meets once a month in some Highland Park home. If it's a particularly interesting home, she'll go.