Quotes About Culture

When the flicker of London's sun falls faint on the club-room's green and gold, The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the mold— They scratch with their pens in the mold of their graves, and the ink and the anguish start When the Devil mutters behind the leaves: It's pretty, but is it art?

Rudyard Kipling

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accomodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior.

If we are interested in cultural processes, the only way in which we can know the significance of the selected detail of behaviour is against the background of the motives and emotions and values that are institutionalized in that culture.

the Japanese love the theme. They play up suicide as Americans play up crime and they have the same vicarious enjoyment of it. They choose to dwell on events of self-destruction instead of on destruction of others.

Such men will never know the added love of their culture which comes from a knowledge of other ways of life.

Every culture, every era, exploits some few out of a great number of possibilities [of traditional institutions]. Changes may be very disquieting, and involve great losses, but this is due to the difficulty of change itself, not to the fact that our age and country has hit upon the one possible motivation under which human life can be conducted.

A moral code was good for the Chinese whose inferior natures required such artificial means of restraint.

You owed him absolute obedience because you were Japanese.

The typical Japanese swing of mood is from intense dedication to intense boredom

Nowadays, in modern technological culture, sometimes we hear people complain that nothing feels real anymore. Everything in the modern world is plastic or digital or virtual. But I say, that was always life! That is life itself! Plato discussed that things in this life are only shadows of forms. So this is what I mean by the changing and unreal feeling of life.

In Japan if you say "the war," people know you mean World War II, because that was the last one that Japan fought in. In America it's different. America is constantly fighting wars all over the place, so you have to be more specific.

By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.

We place such crazy importance on physical appearance in our image-obsessed culture, on youth and beauty to define our sense of self-worth, that aging, by default, becomes a kind of defect, something secret and corrosive and shameful.

It was the most ordinary thing in the world, but it felt like we were doing something illegal, lovers or something, because in Japan dads don't generally hug and kiss their kids. Don't ask me why. They just don't. But we kissed and hugged because we were American, at least in our hearts, and then we'd both step away really fast in case anyone was watching.

I would like to think of my 'ignorance' less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive without ignorance.

If there is one single symbol for the demise of regional American culture, it is this superstore prototype, a huge capitalist3 boot that stomped the moms and pops, like soft, damp worms, to death.

schools while their dads are on company assignments, and then have to catch up with their Japanese grade level when their dads get transferred back. Only my dad wasn't on a company assignment, and he wasn't getting transferred

We're by-products of the mid-twentieth century, Oliver said. Who isn't?

Traveling across America, they were astonished at how deeply violence is embedded in our culture, how it has become the culture, what's left of local color. We are a grisly nation.

It was the most ordinary thing in the world, but it felt like we were lovers or something, because in Japan dads don't generally hug and kiss their kids. Don't ask me why. They just don't. But we kissed and hugged because we were American, at least in our hearts, and then we'd both step away really fast in case anyone was watching.