Quotes About Culture

To live your life well, and have respect for what came before or after - there's a strong respect for that in African culture.

Somehow we can't live outside the politics of race. There's something very deep in all of us, that is taught to us when we are very, very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.

My main concern is theater, and theater does not reflect or mirror society. It has been stingy and selfish, and it has to do better.

to give a clear picture of the whole scene of Italian gastronomy.

Per capita the East Germans drank more than twice as much as their West German counterparts.

On se saluait chaque matin et l'on se droguait gentiment en rentrant le soir. Shit, herbe, pinard, incunables, Marie-Antoinette ou Heineken, c'était chacun son trip et Marvin pour tous.

I have a lot of boyfriends, I want you to write that. Every country I visit, I have a different boyfriend. And I kiss them all.

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.

Scratch a Russian, as the saying goes, and you find a Tatar.

I even – sign of the true convert – grew to like salo, the raw pig-fat, eaten with black bread, salt and garlic, that is the national delicacy and star of a raft of jokes turning on the Ukrainian male's alleged preference for salo over sex.

Today, Polish-Ukrainian relations are rather muted – surprisingly so given their long and scratchy common history.

Ukraine's Russians are fairly recent arrivals. They came in waves that mirrored the empire's belated industrial revolution: at the end of the nineteenth century, with the first industrial boom; in the 1920s and 1930s, with the Five-Year Plans; and again after the war. By 1989, according to the last Soviet census, they made up 11 million of Ukraine's 52 million population. In the Donbass coal basin, equidistant from Kiev and Moscow, they form a majority.

Nor, since not all Ukrainians were Cossacks and not all Cossacks Ukrainians, did Cossackdom form an embryo Ukrainian nation.

Many Lithuanians adopted Orthodoxy, and Ruthenian – the precursor to Ukrainian and Belarussian – became the Duchy's lingua franca.

Here begins Ukraine's great debate – still raw, still undecided: are Ukrainians Central Europeans, like the Poles, or a species of Russian? Poles used to call western Ukraine 'Eastern Little Poland'; the Russian name for Ukraine was 'Little Russia'.

West Ukrainian men, like Poles, are addressed as 'Pan So-and-So'; central and eastern Ukrainians, like Russians, are 'Gospodin'. Most Ukrainians are Orthodox, but in the west a separate 'Uniate' church, founded at the end of the sixteenth century, combines Orthodox liturgy with obedience to the Pope.

Ukraine's relationship with Poland is difficult and contradictory. For 500 years they shared a common history, first under the Polish kings, then under the Russian tsars. But like rival siblings they define themselves more by their differences than their similarities – Poland glamorous and self-dramatising;

Humor is probably species specific

This is where I come from. And it's where you come from. You'll never get away from that, and don't you forget it.

Yeah. It's a Spanish thing. They respect age. They celebrate growing older. Not like in our country, where youth is perceived to be everything, and everyone over fifty is past it.

If you look at any great fashion photograph out of context, it will tell you just as much about what's going on in the world as a headline in The New York Times.

People assigned genders based on behaviors and work roles, often ignoring anatomy. Gender was a form of social recognition.

The khñum debt slavery scenario sounds brutal until you consider that most capitalist cultures in the West use a similar system. In the United States, it's not unusual for people to graduate from college with so much debt that they have to work their whole lives to pay it off.