Quotes About Culture

In the 200,000 years of the species Homo sapiens, patriarchy accounts for less than 5% of our evolutionary history. If we consider the 2.5 million years of the Homo genus, our direct ancestors, patriarchy is less than 0.5% of our history.

More broadly, most of us believe that we have arrived at many of our deeply held beliefs through careful thought and do not want to recognize that if we had been brought up by different parents, let alone in a different society, our fundamental values and attitudes would be very different.

Voltaire had exercised the greatest intellectual influence on Catherine, and Diderot was the only one of the major philosophes she actually met, but it was in Friedrich Melchoir Grimm that the empress found a lifelong friend.

In the evening after supper, Nicholas often sat in the family drawing room reading aloud while his wife and daughters sewed or embroidered. His choice, said Anna Vyrubova, who spent many of these cozy evenings with the Imperial family, might be Tolstoy, Turgenev or his own favorite, Gogol. On the other hand, to please the ladies, it might be a fashionable English novel. Nicholas read equally well in Russian, English and French and he could manage in German and Danish.

General History of Germany

Books were her refuge. Having set herself to learn the Russian language, she read every Russian book she could find. But French was the language she preferred, and she read French books indiscriminately, picking up whatever her ladies-in-waiting happened to be reading. She always kept a book in her room and carried another in her pocket.

That is why Russian penetration of the political systems of the United States and Europe has been so effective. It has exploited the truly dangerous fissures in Western society, which are not based on class, as the Marxists wanted to believe, but on tribe and culture.

When people hear 'flourishing,' they think of appreciation and good feelings. But growth and development does not always equal 'feeling good.' Our culture is not about maximizing the minutes you feel good at work. We don't define flourishing by sitting-around-the-campfire moments. We ask people to do seemingly impossible things.

Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.

Proof of our society's decline is that Halloween has become a broad daylight event for many.

Stories were heirlooms in these parts.

Modern man has yielded to the harsh, the crude, the vulgar, the profane, the immoral.

Ours is a psychological age rather than an institutional one. What used to be done for us by institutional structures and through ritual process, we now have to do inside ourselves, for ourselves. Ours is a culture of the individual rather than the collective.

Our own culture has pseudo-rituals instead. There are many pseudo-initiations for men in our culture. Conscription into the military is one. The fantasy is that the humiliation and forced nonidentity of boot camp will "make a man out of you." The gangs of our major cities are another manifestation of pseudo-initiation and so are the prison systems, which, in large measure, are run by gangs.

When the combined taste, smell, and textural stimuli reach the brain, they remain to be interpreted. Whether the overall sensation will be pleasant, repulsive, or somewhere in between will depend on individual physiological differences, on previous experience ("just like my mother used to make"), and on cultural habituation (haggis, anyone?).

The Egyptians took their goods to their graves with them. The great dynasties of Britain and Europe try to keep things in the family so long as there is something in the bank. But Americans prefer to turn it into cash and start anew. They are less sentimental about these things.

All of us together were of a generation born of old country people who spoke English with an accent and prayed in another language, who drank red wine and cooked their food in the old country way, and peeled apples and pears after dinner.

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.

The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost a part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it.

No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past." — British Major Ronald Balfour of the Monuments Men

We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future. Art

don't believe I've ever been more certain than I am now that the development and understanding of man's workmanship is the fundamental need of man's spirit; or that we can never look for a healthy social body until that need, among others, is fed.

ancestors.… If these things are lost or broken or destroyed, we lose a valuable part of our knowledge about our forefathers. No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost a part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it. —British Monuments Man Ronald Balfour, draft lecture for soldiers, 1944 All