Quotes About Culture

The security state that has grown up since 9/11 has transformed our culture; and yes, we have needed the protection. We are often reminded that we must "never forget" what happened on that fateful day. But if we fail to keep in mind the country we were before 9/11, we may never steer in that direction again. In that case, the terrorists really will have won.

En las reuniones sociales abundaban las charlas superficiales. La gente llenaba los museos y las salas de conciertos, pero no acudían allí para ver y oír, sino más bien impulsados por una desaforada y narcisista necesidad de ser vistos y oídos.

Despair and idleness are dangerous companions in any culture, and it was inevitable that the young would search for a hero who could voice their longing for change and provide a focus for their rage.

Mon père ne m'a pas appris la langue des femmes de son peuple.

And most people stick to underwear from their country of origin." "Do they?" "As a general rule. It's a comfort issue, literally and metaphorically. And an intimacy issue. It's a big step, putting on foreign underwear. Like betrayal, or emigration.

There were pictures on the walls, all of them dime-store prints of Jesus. In all of them Jesus had blue eyes and wore pale blue robes and had long blond hair and a neat blond beard. He looked more like a Malibu surfer than a Jew from two thousand years ago.

The wild frontier was many blocks away. The street life changed as they walked, from occasional busy workers heading home briskly, to a stoop culture with knots of people hanging out in doorways doing not very much of anything. Some of the stores had been shuttered at the close of business, and some looked like they had been boarded up for years, but others were still open and doing a trade. Food, soda, loose cigarettes.

Michelle," she said. "Or Shell, sometimes, for short. Which I quite like. It's a nice diminutive. Except not with my last name. Shell Chang sounds somewhere between a Korean porn star and an oil exploration company in the South China Sea and a roll of quarters being dumped in a cash register.

Looking at the big things that had shaped the nation. Battlefields, factories, declarations, revolutions. Looking for the small things. Birthplaces, clubs, roads, legends. The big things and the small things which were supposed to represent home. I'd found some of them. I

foreign legal systems. So I made

So he repeated the same made-up crap he had lived on then, about bubblegum machines and Cadillacs with fins, and endless sunshine, and drive-in movies and waitresses on roller skates, and cheeseburgers and cold Coca-Cola in green glass bottles, and baseball on AM radio, out of Kansas City, static and all.

His signature was big and awkward. He was Bulgarian. I guessed he had grown up with the Cyrillic alphabet and was new to writing with Roman letters.

But French people understand that

the Irish seven-course meal is a six pack and a potato

breaches of Sharia law, some involving domesticated animals.

Dutiful mapmakers drew lines and wrote India or Pakistan or Afghanistan, and the Pashtun smiled politely and went about their eternal business.

Strong cultures are vigorously and widely supported, and they are difficult to change.

The counterculture had sought to practice the idea that creative personal expression was the essence of an authentic existence. The WELL, drawing strength from the Internet culture's belief that the market contains all values, put personal expression up for sale.

Mandel, who died in 1995, had mastered the art of packaging his interiority, an innovation that would become the driving engine behind Web culture.

Perhaps we half and halfs should always make a choice, one nationality instead of the other, one language instead of the other. We should nourish one identity and starve the other so that it would atrophy and drop off. Then we could relax and become like everyone else, we could snuggle up to the majority and fit in.

Western culture generally, as well as the Christian subculture specifically, has had an unwarranted tendency to think that abstract ideas and facts are the only valid type of knowledge that we possess. Literature challenges that bias, and so does the Bible. The Bible is not a theological outline with proof texts attached. It is an anthology of literature.

If you live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish

Even if you are Catholic, if you live in New York you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you are going to be goyish even if you are Jewish.

There is nothing sadder than an aging hipster.