Quotes About Culture

If on a friend's bookshelf You cannot find Joyce or Sterne Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton, You are in danger, face the fact, So kick him first or punch him hard And from him hide behind a curtain.

Time was the first thing I noticed about the United States.

Paul Theroux, she adores his long, grumpy travelogues, his trips around Africa especially.

although he knew very little about American history, or pop culture, he'd fundamentally understood the place, cut to its original wound. "A bit racialist, aren't they?" he'd observed.

In 1984, when the legal drinking age was raised to 21, underage students moved their partying from bars to private houses, which changed the Greek experience profoundly. Now fraternities had disproportionate control over the college party scene, they played an even more dominate role on campus. By the early, 1990s, 86 percent of fraternity brothers were binge drinking.

No matter who initiated these activities, the good boys in each chapter didn't stop them from happening. Objectification of women and tolerance of racism are massive problems in fraternity culture at large.

but he laughed as the English do at the end of his teeth.

Russians are rarely in a hurry, and like to have frequent opportunities of eating and drinking. In Russia time is not money; if it were, nearly all the subjects of the Tsar would always have a large stock of ready money on hand, and would often have great difficulty in spending it. In reality, be it parenthetically remarked, a Russian with a superabundance of ready money is a phenomenon rarely met with in real life.

You know, Granna, going around saying how you don't watch TV... It's not even pretentious anymore... it's just plain out of it.

Frederick Ward thought novels immoral and had been known to leave the room rather than subject himself to "bohemian" opinions.

Lurid tales are the South's principal export. - Rhett Butler

It can be seen as being between Jewish inter-nationalists and the remnants of a Russian national culture.

Japan never considers time together as time wasted. Rather, it is time invested.

What I have done is to draw and redraw my portrait in front of the backdrop of Japan. I have exemplified what Helen Mears devoted Japan, Mirror for Americans to. You look into this country and find yourself reflected. It is not a simple process. You can do this only if you describe the place as it is. Only then, through what you emphasize and what you do not, does your own form become visible. I am the empty places in my books.

The word discipline has disappeared from our minds, our mouths, our pulpits, and our culture. We hardly know what discipline means in modern American society. And yet, there is no other way to attain godliness; discipline is the path to godliness. JAY ADAMS

Invariably an organization takes on the personality of its top leader, providing that individual is in touch with the members of the organization. If the leader is petty, the subordinates will be petty. But if the leader is encouraging, optimistic, and courteous, then the vast majority of the workers in the organization will be as well.

I've read hundreds of books about China over the decades. I know the Chinese. I've made a lot of money with the Chinese. I understand the Chinese mind.

All those "why" questions are rooted in culture, which is to say, in ethical beliefs. I emphasize the point not to denigrate the achievements of scientists, but only to remind that natural science cannot by itself fathom the sources of the crisis it has identified, for the sources lie not in the nature that scientists study but in the human nature and, especially, in the human culture that historians and other humanists have made their study.

Too often science seems oblivious to the fact that human beings have been interacting with nature over a long period of time ... and that what we mean by nature is, to some extent, a product of that history.

So we are making a pathway across the levee that separates nature from culture, science from history, matter from mind.

The idea that there might be limits to growth is for many people impossible to imagine. Limits are politically unmentionable and economically unthinkable. The culture tends to deny the possibility of limits by placing a profound faith in the powers of technology, the workings of a free market, and the growth of the economy as the solution to all problems, even the problems created by growth.

I have known Nature. I have known Civilization. Civilization is better.

And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems.

The world would be a better place if everyone traveled. ~Miss Clarrie