Quotes About Culture

Ah," I said with a bleak smile. "What was a quaint and silly folk belief becomes a major news item when white people believe in it.

Obscenity is a function of culture - a function in the mathematical sense, I mean, its value changing with that of the variables on which it depends.

Spelling is local, or rather national.

St. Petersburg—"Peter" to insiders—was renamed Petrograd at the start of the war in an attempt to erase its Germanic origins. From the first months of 1915, the atmosphere in the city had changed completely.

Le « culturel » vient renforcer le « naturel » dans un cercle vertueux. C'est le fameux « Sois un homme, mon fils »

You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off.

One of the strangest elements in travelling to other worlds is the way people smell. It isn't a matter of hygiene, simply a case of different foods, different oils and soaps for cleaning, meaning skin, hair, sweat and breath is always vastly different, world to world.

The Imperium is right, and that makes it mighty", so say our iterators, so the Word is written, and so shall it be. We succeed where every other human culture has failed. We rise where alien breeds fall. We defeat every solar empire or lonely world that refuses benevolent unity. What more evidence is needed that we, and we alone, walk the right path?

Jak looks at me mock-longingly and spouts three more random Spanish words: "Amor y cacahuetes." "Love and peanuts?" I ask. Jak nods. "Love and peanuts.

I think you should know that real-life white people are not all as funny as the ones on 'Seinfeld'.

Latin food suffers like Chinese. You can do marginal Chinese and be successful. You can do crappy Mexican and be packed.

It's one thing to be asked to respect someone else's religion. It's another to be asked to respect their taboos.

I would say that no film is apolitical. There are politics in all films. Any film that is anchored in a society, any film that deals with humanity is necessarily political.

It's true that humanity has seen a succession of crises, wars and atrocities, but this negative side is offset by advances in technology and cultural exchanges.

Arabic equals Sanskrit plus history, equals Greek minus tragedy

The alpha male must not be a wife beta.

He directed her attention to another question: "When I speak to you in your language, what happens to mine? Does my language continue to speak, but in silence?

Circumcision, like excision indeed, is more a practice of Muslims than a practice of Islam.

The voice of a Muslim woman is also 'aura. Not only because the sweet words coming from her mouth must be heard only by her husband and master, but because the voice may create a disturbance and set in train the cycle of zin?.

Islamic civilization is essentially feminist. One ought to be able to deduce from this that a Muslim cannot be a misogynist. Islam and 'hatred' of women appear to be incompatible de jure.

Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?

Yet I lay in bed that night imagining what it would be like not to feel such an alien in England, to be able to live with someone to whom I could speak casually about things without having to give long explanations, what it would be like not to live in England at all, but here, in a crowd, rather than always being and feeling on the edges of everything.

Abdulrazak Gurnah

I don't think I ever got over those early days, though. Even after all these years I can't get over the feeling of being alien in England, of being a foreigner. Sometimes I think that what I feel for England is disappointed love.