Quotes About Culture

The cultural ban on having sex with your friends is an inevitable offshoot of a societal belief that the only acceptable reason to have sex is to lead to a monogamous marriagelike relationship.

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.

When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.

Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.

Scientology is not a white religion. It is not just for white people.

People can look to me as a teacher, but I consider myself a student of hip-hop.

The Nerds became so popular that the word nerd was added to some dictionaries.

All that stuff, tradition and heritage. It's dead people's baggage. Quit carrying it.

I ventured the idea that, as most of the women in Kilkenny were such misshapen pigs, if you were to actually fuck them, you would be more concerned the next morning about what species they were rather than what age.

Early estimates indicated that the average American child or teenager viewed 1,000 murders, rapes, and aggravated assaults per year on television alone (Rothenberg, 1975).

To be numb to another's pain—to be acculturated to violence—is arguably one of the worst consequences our technological advances have wrought.

The US was fully capable of catching up from behind. In Reed's view, free societies, whose people were raised with a can-do attitude and whose culture embraced individualistic, maverick approaches, could outpace scientists raised in tightly controlled totalitarian societies every time.

fertility and intelligence, dysgenics, and the Idiocracy effect.

Most of the Americans believed that any culture other than their own was backward and beneath contempt.

In a politically correct university culture packed with too many spoiled rich kids complaining of micro-aggressions, parsing every word and statement for any hint it might give offense, no matter how convoluted the logic behind it, desperately needing to separate the world into victimizers and victims. People with so much time on their hands, and so few actual struggles, that the brush of a metaphoric butterfly wing would send them howling in outrage.

Along with a chamber pot and tersorium, of course." "What's a tersorium?" Boyd thought at this AI. "A sponge on a stick," replied Sage helpfully. "Which Roman's used to wipe their anuses after defecation.

In the West, the phone had become a drug even more addictive than opioids. In a culture becoming ever more secular,

In the West, the phone had become a drug even more addictive than opioids. In a culture becoming ever more secular, the phone had become a god.

This symbol had since migrated to the Greek and Roman Empires, and then to the modern world, and the idiom "extending an olive branch" was now understood across cultures to mean an offer of reconciliation.

Cultures and national belief systems that maintain their integrity can add to diversity. I'm a strong believer in melting pot societies, but enclaves of distinctiveness are important too. As long as every nation, and every diverse group within every nation, is accepting of others.

The idea of proposing marriage with a diamond ring seems like a tradition so old, and so steeped in our culture, you'd think it was one of the Ten Commandments delivered to Moses on Mt. Sinai. But it's a recent, man-made creation. De Beers brilliantly fostered this shared mythology, taking a relatively abundant, relatively inexpensive item that wasn't selling, and convincing the public over decades that a diamond engagement ring was an indispensable

We seek to better ourselves, and to be accepting of other cultures. But the result is often that we're hypersensitive to the slightest hint of injustice in our own country, while ignoring appalling abuses in others. Many of us even hold these other countries up as shining examples, when the opposite is true.

The Chinese people were, by all accounts, a wonderful group—generous and peace-loving

To immerse oneself in popular culture for any length of time is to wallow in an almost unbearable shallowness. Was the sum of European endeavour and achievement really meant to culminate in this?