Quotes About Culture

And at school there was little or no time for those other stories, just an orderly accumulation of the real knowledge they brought to us, in books they made available to us, in a language they taught us.

Abdulrazak Gurnah

I thought you'd come back to get married,' he said with a grin. 'Not to carry out an archaeological project.' 'Cut out that getting married stuff,' I said, and in this way we smilingly slid past the troublesome moment.

Kalau Kristen jangan kebarat-baratan, kalau Islam jangan kearab-araban

I'm Chinese and in China making a beautiful meal for someone is the highest expression of love. Food is a very sensual, passionate thing. Culturally, I understood why my husband wanted to make this big meal for me. But he couldn't understand why I was having such a strong reaction to such a silly simple thing like yams. It's hard to understand how something that tastes sweet in on person's mouth, in another person's mouth can taste so bitter.

Individual cultures and ideologies have their appropriate uses but none of them erase or replace the universal experiences, like love and weeping and laughter, common to all human beings.

The leaders and followers of the Harlem Renaissance were every bit as intent on using Black culture to help make the United States a more functional democracy as they were on employing Black culture to 'vindicate' Black people.

A little of what you call frippery is very necessary towards looking like the rest of the world.

I regret the trifling narrow contracted education of the females of my own country.

I see the power of music to connect cultures. I see it when I stand on a stage at a bluegrass festival … and I bust out into a song in Chinese, and everybody's eyes just pop wide open.

official capital of Russia in 1718 and remains to this day one of the world's most beautiful cities.

If it be true that our people represent a high percentage of mental vigor, the distinction is probably due, in some measure, to the extremely important part which Talmud studies have played in the spiritual life of the race.

A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.

Het modernisme rust niet voordat het van de vrouw een man en van de man een vrouw heeft gemaakt, en, alle onderscheid nivellerend, het leven doodt door het onder de ban van de eenvormigheid te leggen.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?

The reader, knowing nothing about the 'dark continent,' filled in the blanks. Pictured Stone in a tent, kerosene lamp held up by a Hottentot providing the only light, elephants stampeding outside while the good doctor recited Cicero and excised part of himself as blithely as if he were cutting for stone on the body of another.

OUr teachers at LT&C had their A levels and the odd teaching certificate. It is astonishing how a black crepe robe worn over a coat or blouse gives a Cockney punter or a Covent Garden flower girl the gravitas of an Oxford don. Accent be damned in Africa, as long as it's foreign and you have the right skin colour.

After just a week in the hospital, I felt I'd left America for another country. My world was a land of fluorescent lights where day and night were the same, and where more than half the citizens spoke Spanish. When they spoke English it wasn't what I expected in the land of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The bloodlines from the Mayflower hadn't trickled down to this zip code. Three

The bloodlines from the Mayflower hadn't trickled down to this zip code.

In working myself ragged, I felt integrated, I felt American, and I rarely had time to think of home.

If one could read fluently, confidently, in every known language, one would have no need of translators or translations; one could read Homer on Mondays, Akhmatova on Tuesdays, Swahili poets on Wednesdays, and so on.

His motivation was to rattle the good people of Greenwich mean time, have them raise their heads from their tea and scones, and say, Oh, yes. Africa. For a fleeting moment they'd have the same awareness of us that we had of them.

The Arabs had the dry, musty smell of a grain cellar; the Asians contributed the ginger and garlic; and from the whites came the odor of a milk-soaked bib.