Quotes About Culture

To safeguard these things will not affect the course of battles, but it will affect the relations of invading armies with those peoples and [their] governments.…

Non mi sono mai reso conto di che cosa significasse combattere in un museo finché non ho messo piede in Italia. - Kesselring

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.

the task of the ethnographer is not to determine "the truth" but to reveal the multiple truths apparent in others' lives.

College football: I do not see the relationship of those highly industrialized affairs on Saturday afternoons to higher learning in America.

She told me her real name but insisted that I call her by an American name. This beautiful and innocent girl on the other side of the world insisted that I call her Sally. It was depressing.

Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was very much doubt in anybody's mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind.

I never felt myself an expatriate or anything but an American, but not through some excess of patriotism. My country is much too polyglot of race, type, and variety of faith, political and otherwise, for me to discover exactly to which qualities one would have to remain loyal in order to be a hundred per cent American.

But having said that, what's happening with campaign finance reform and our political culture is devastating.

An archetypal story creates settings and characters so rare that our eyes feast on every detail, while its telling illuminates conflicts so true to humankind that it journeys from culture to culture.

When a society cannot ridicule and criticize its institutions, it cannot laugh. The shortest book ever written would be the history of German humor, a culture that has suffered spells of paralyzing fear of authority. Comedy is at heart an angry, antisocial art. To solve the problem of weak comedy, therefore, the writer first asks: What am I angry about? He finds that aspect of society that heats his blood and goes on an assault.

Al reducirse nuestra fe en las ideologías tradicionales, nos dirigimos hacia la fuente en la que todavía creemos: el arte de contar historias.

When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates.

The archetypal story unearths a universally human experience, then wraps itself inside a unique, culture-specific expression. A stereotypical story reverses this pattern:

In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.

No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.

A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society.

The Italian landscape has always harmonized the vulgar and the Vitruvian: the contorni around the duomo, the portiere'S laundry across the padrone's portone, Supercortemaggiore against the Romanesque apse. Naked children have never played in our fountains, and I. M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66.

Hace algún tiempo que el mundo gira en torno al dinero, ya no en torno a la historia.

Às pessoas saudáveis faço o seguinte apelo: não teimem em ler apenas esses livros saudáveis, travem um conhecimento mais estreito, também, com a literatura dita doentia, que vos transmitirá, decerto, uma cultura edificante. As pessoas saudáveis deveriam sempre expor-se um pouco ao perigo. Senão, com mil raios, para que serve ser saudável? Simplesmente para, num determinado dia, morrer de boa saúde?

All around the world, tourist boards advertise trips to Britain with images of the great castles and cathedrals that occupy the commanding heights of our landscape. They seem timeless and typically English. It is rarely mentioned that they are predominately French - proud monuments to the invasion that signals the end of England's 'dark age'.

It could take a while — perhaps centuries. But the landscape would drip into their souls eventually. The English did not become Norman; the Normans became English.

Nothing is more dangerous to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.

If a boy can't have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic failure to deal with; don't just give him a bad, dull teacher. This is where the private schools score over state-run schools; they can accommodate a few cultured madmen on the staff without having to offer explanations.