Quotes About Culture

Au Japon - dans ce pays que j'appelle le Japon - la sexualité est dans le sexe et non ailleurs ; aux États-Unis, c'est le contraire : le sexe est partout, sauf dans la sexualité. L'Empire des signes.

This is why myth is experienced as innocent speech: not because its intentions are hidden—if they were hidden, they could not be efficacious—but because they are naturalised.

Magic consultations, secret rites, and votive actions are not absent from the amorous subject's life, whatever culture he belongs to.

But when a myth reaches the entire community, it is from the latter than the mythologist must become estranged if he wants to liberate the myth.

Le mythe est une parole choisie par l'histoire : il ne saurait surgir de la « nature » des choses.

Obliger a penser tout seul, voila une definition possible de la culture classique. Une civilisation n'est belle que dans la mesure ou il y a une circulation naturelle entre les oeuvres de ses grands hommes et la vie intime de ses individus et de ses foyers.

printed fashion functions, semiologically speaking, like a true mythology of clothing: it is even because the vestimentary signified is here objectified, thickened, that fashion is mythic. So it is this mythology of clothing (one could also say its utopia) that needs to be the first stage of a vestimentary linguistics.

Mass culture is a machine for showing desire; here is what must interest you, it says, as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire themselves.

La notoriété est la première forme de la naturalisation.

Lo que hoy es tabú es la sentimentalidad, no la sexualidad. El sujeto enamorado se siente muy solo hoy frente a lo que "la sociedad" hizo del amor.

The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.

He dabbled in watercolors, attended the theater, and quoted liberally from Shakespeare and Dickens.

Despite Grant's best efforts at Appomattox, the breach of the Civil War never healed but became deeply embedded in American political culture.

Grant promised to send the Oglala Sioux large herds of sheep and cattle for raising stock and to build schools that would teach them English. For the Indians, however, this didn't mean salvation so much as the wanton destruction of their traditional culture.

Pierpont's anti-Semitism was well known.

Conversely the British saw a one-dimensional figure in the Cypriot; they did not realize how richly the landscape was stocked with the very sort of characters who rejoice the English heart in a small country town—the rogue, the drunkard, the singer, the incorrigible.

paederasty is somehow no qualification of

Perhaps language was the key—it was hard to say. Certainly I was astonished to find how few Cypriots knew good English, and how few Englishmen the dozen words of Greek which cement friendships and lighten the burdens of everyday life.

In South Carolina, I had been an African. In Nova Scotia, I had become known as a Loyalist, or a Negro, or both. And now, finally back in Africa, I was seen as a Nova Scotian, and in some respects thought of myself that way too.

I remember wondering, within a year or two of taking my first steps, why only men sat to drink tea and converse, and why women were always busy. I reasoned that men were weak and needed rest. As

A few years later, in Inukjuak, I learned that SFU is the Inuit texting acronym for snowmobile fucked up, and that POOS is the acronym for passed out on snowmobile.

Sveinbjörn offered me another kittiwake egg. I shook my head and told him I was on a diet that expressly forbade me to eat more than one raw bird a day.

The trouble with China is, there are too many chinks here.

In Austin, we don't have such high expectations of chihuahuas.