Quotes About Culture

those who remain in Paris in July must be true Parisians.

les Italiennes ont du moins sur les Françaises l'avantage d'être fidèles à leur infidélité.

I could recite you the whole of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Strada, Jornandes, Dante, Montaigne, Shaksepeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli, and Bossuet. I name only the most important.

En Italie, on ne paie la justice que si elle se tait, mais en France on ne la paie au contraire que quand elle parle.

Among worldly people manner is contagious.

The dominions of kings are limited either by mountains or rivers, or a change of manners, or an alteration of language

Thousand and One Nights.

Balzampleu!" said the Swiss, who, despite the fine collection of oaths boasted by the German language, had taken to swearing in French.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.

Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences, or of the more elevated departments of science, than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society.

In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.

The whole people contracts the habits and tastes of the magistrate.

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.

In the United States, the majority takes upon itself the task of supplying to the individual a mass of ready-made opinions, thus relieving him of the necessity to take the proper responsibility of arriving at his own.

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded upon the manners of the nation; manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

It must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to Anglo-American society.

There have never been free societies without mores, and as I said in the first part of this work,*1 it is woman who makes mores.

I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.

In no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.

There is no Indian so wretched as not to retain under his hut of bark a lofty idea of his personal worth;

Religious insanity is very common in the United States.

Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.

I do not think that there is a single country in the world where, in proportion to the population, there are so few ignorant and, at the same time, so few educated individuals as in America.

Thus whilst the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust.