Quotes About Culture

He ate breakfast like a savage: quantities of leavened bread, chunks of cheese made from cows' milk, and coffee drowned in cows' milk too, which he called galão – things that no right-minded person would eat at the beginning of the day.)

Exilatul nu poate uita - si trebuie, prin urmare, sa simuleze - arsita uscata din Desh, fostul si viitorul lui taram, in care pana si Luna este fierbinte si picura ca niste lipii proaspete, date cu unt. O, cat de dor ii e de acea parte a lumii, unde soarele si luna sunt de genul masculin, dar lumina lor dulce si fierbinte are intotdeauna nume femeiesti!...

the art of the novel revealed anything, it was that human nature was the great constant, in any culture, in any place, in any time, and that, as Heraclitus had said two thousand years earlier, a man's ethos, his way of being in the world, was his daimon, the guiding principle that shaped his life – or, in the pithier, more familiar formulation of the idea, that character was destiny.

The more I see of the West, he says, the more I realize that the best things in life come from the East.

Medeniyet, gerçek doÄŸam?z? kendimizden gizleyen bir el çabukluÄŸudur.

Ya-ta-hey (pop. 580) > Tohatchi (pop.

But now, discontinuity ruled. Yesterday meant nothing and could not help you build tomorrow. Life had become a series of vanishing photographs, posted every day, gone the next. One had no story anymore. Character, narrative, history, were all dead. Only the flat caricature of the instant remained, and that was what one was judged by. To have lived long enough to witness the replacement of the depth of her chosen world's culture by its surfaces was a sad thing.

Fifteen years old! Okay, okay. In our part of the world that's not so young.

information, in a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy that revealed the extent to which he had internalised the adversarial fragmentation of American culture and made it a part of his personal damage.

And look at the stains on the carpets, janum; for two months we must live like those Britishers? You've looked in the bathrooms? No water near the pot. I never believed, but it's true, my God, they wipe their bottoms with paper only! …

Our names contain our fates; living as we do in a place where names have not acquired the meaninglessness of the West, and are still more than mere sounds, we are also the victims of our titles.

Winner of the "Booker of Bookers," Midnight's Children is the novel that can be said to have done for Indian literature what One Hundred Years of Solitude did for the literature of the Americas, exciting a boom whose echoes have yet to fade.

I was born in the city of Bombay...once upon a time.

here is so particular wisdom in the East, all human beings are foolish to the same degree.

because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary;

If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery.

The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.

We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.

120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.

Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality.

While religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction, it is still sheltered from criticism in every corner of our culture.

It is time we realize that belief is not a private matter. As a man believes, so he will act. Believe that you are a member of a chosen people, awash in the salacious exports of an evil culture that is turning your children away from God, believe that you will be rewarded with an eternity of unimaginable delights by dealing death to these infidels—and flying a plane into a building is only a matter of being asked to do it.

There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity ? a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.