Quotes About Culture

I grew up kissing books and bread

we can best understand the nature of this culture if we say that it found its truest mirror in a corpse

and I began to wonder if we were moral beings at all or simply savages who defined their private bigotries as necessary ethics, as the only ways to be.

You observe … that when it's time to unleash a few insults, a man will always choose his mother tongue.

Non mi piacciono i matrimoni combinati. Ci sono sbagli dei quali non bisognerebbe mai poter incolpare i propri poveri genitori.

All these young women these days who describe the veil as a signifier of their identity. I tell them they are suffering what the presently unfashionable philosopher Karl Marx would have called false consciousness. In most of the world the veil is not a free choice. Women are forced into invisibility by men. These girls in the West making their quote-unquote free choices are legitimizing the oppression of their sisters in the parts of the world where the choice is not free.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

Say we are from nowhere or anywhere or somewhere, we are make-believe people, frauds, reinventions, shapeshifters, which is to say, Americans.

Civilsation is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves.

Across the Atlantic, in another theatre of the identity wars, the British prime minister was narrowing the definition of Britishness to exclude multiplicity, internationalism, the world as the location of the self. Only little England would do to define the English.

Bir toplumun kilidini açmak istiyorsan?z, tercüme edilemeyen kelimelerine bak?n.

He talked about wanting to take on the destructive, mind-numbing junk culture of his time just as Cervantes had gone to war with the junk culture of his own age.

On this day Bisnaga moves out of the realm of the fantastic into that of the historical, and the great river of its story flows into the ocean of stories which is the history of the world.

I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.

Half-Christian, half-Jewish, a 'cathjew nut'

I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which one should not be able to blame one's poor parents.

And so it's interesting to remember that when Mahatma Gandhi, the father of an earlier freedom movement, came to England and was asked what he thought of English civilization, he replied: 'I think it would be a good idea.

We celebrate donut culture, it's sweet and it tastes good but there's a void at the heart

The heathen grew up heathenish and, in Windsor Villa at least, that was just fine.

En esta ciudad, Mahound, el negociante-profeta, está fundando una de las grandes religiones del mundo;

I permit myself this one generalization: Americans have mastered the universe, but have no dominion over their mouths; whereas India is impotent, but her children tend to have excellent teeth.)

many of us, as immigrants—or our parents or our grandparents—had chosen to leave our pasts behind just as the Goldens were now choosing, encouraging our children to speak English, not the old language from the old country: to speak, dress, act, be American.

The trouble with the English was that they were English: damn cold fish! - Living underwater most of the year, in days the colour of night!

I think it's legitimate for a work of art made in the present time to say, we are being crippled by the culture we have made, by its most popular elements above all', he replied. 'And by stupidity and ignorant and bigotry, yes'.