Quotes About Culture

The one elementary but elemental factor in all civilizations that collapsed into extinction is the failure to read the handwriting on the wall, the failure to respond to warning signs. Every extinct culture hurled signs high into the heavens for all to see. But every collapsing culture failed to read and heed these flares.52

Why become well-versed in science and the arts if not to impress a lovely little woman?

it's important for fathers and sons to go to baseball games. It's the American way of male bonding.

Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.

When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.

a whisperer of Yiddish—the lingua franca spoken by Jewish immigrants when they didn't want their American children to understand what they were saying

Americans continue to rapidly homogenize ourselves into a neutered oblivion. For a country founded on the protection of the unique, we relish our sameness.

Americans...publish more books than any other country, but the per capita figure is surprisingly low. Of the English-speaking nations, the United States comes in fifth, behind the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The United Kingdom publishes 2,336 books per person, the United States 545.

What's the French for fiddle-de-dee?

So it was that she knew she liked him, loved him as they said in the soppy English books, you were shamed and a fool to say that in Scotland.

That technics has often lagged behind culture, that the efficiency of the assembly line, for example, might be, humanly speaking, a mark of social backwardness, seems never to have occurred to the exponents of unqualified technological progress.

What do you feel? I've never been asked this question once. None of us has. We aren't supposed to feel. We're British.

Oh, sure. Of course, they say now that we've got Freud and the motorcar, God is dead." "He's not dead; just very tired.

There is a dualism inherent in democracy--opposing forces pushing against each other, always. Culture clashes. Different belief systems. All coming together to create this country. But this balance takes a great deal of energy.

It occurs to me that cricket is not the true sport in London - gossip is.

On TV, talking heads wrung their hands over a lack of traditional feminine values and wondered if girls' sports were to blame. Then they cut to a commercial featuring a sexy college coed vacuuming her dorm room in her underwear.

We are English, and I expect you to behave as such. No more crying.

A token of bathroom stoner etiquette.

That's totally their interpreter, a girl with a lip ring informs us. Even though they totally record their music in English, they totally speak in Inuktitut. Totally.

Theta sat next to Memphis and watched Mr. and Mrs. Chan laughing about some private joke. They were a mixed couple, and they were happy. No one seemed to be bothering them. But they were also here in the few blocks of Chinatown. What happened when they crossed Canal Street into the rest of the city? What happened when they went out into the rest of the country?

Did everyone from your little Hans Christian Andersen village look the same?

This country is founded on a certain tension." He pressed his fists against each other. "There is a dualism inherent in democracy—opposing forces pushing against each other, always. Culture clashes. Different belief systems. All coming together to create this country. But this balance takes a great deal of energy—and, as I've said, spirits are attracted to energy.

She didn't really understand. Few people did. Sex sold everything. It was in every advertisement, song, and Hollywood movie. Who was the freak who didn't want to make love?

En Nueva York todo el mundo es de algún otro lugar.