Quotes About Culture

How differently we behave in other peoples countries ... no sooner than we think we can get away with it, we do as we please. It doesn't require the breakdown of a social order. It takes a six-hour plane flight.

Similarly, at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.

Is it not amazing, Puggly dear, that whenever we begin to congratulate ourselves on the breadth of our knowledge of the world, we discover that there are multitudes of people, in every corner of the earth, who have seen vastly more than we can ever hope to?

already know by instinct we're not comfortably at home in our translated world.

I suppose everyone finds the despotisms of other peoples hard to comprehend.

Walk in God's footsteps, Ferro Maljinn." "Huh. They have no God here." "Say rather that they have many." "Many?" "Had you not noticed? Here, each man worships himself.

The most civilized place in the world," murmured Father Yarvi. "Though that mostly means folk prefer to stab each other in the back than in the front.

Cinco de Mayo has come to represent a celebration of the contributions that Mexican Americans and all Hispanics have made to America.

wanted to give people scientific information and then provide them with the necessary instruction on how to apply that information so that they could achieve heightened degrees of personal transformation. Science is, after all, the contemporary language of mysticism. I learned that the moment you start talking in the language of religion or culture, the moment you start quoting tradition, you divide your audience members. But science unifies them and demystifies the mystical. And

For reasons rooted in mass psychology, the history of myth, and the changing face of America, this country cares deeply who is in charge of the Walt Disney Company and what they do with it.

And the knowledge of how to stay sane in this rapidly worsening situation can seem hard to come by - as if it's hiding away from our crude, self-obsessed, materialistic culture. Consequently many people live and die without ever knowing such wisdom exists, (though perhaps it was never withheld from those who sincerely sought it).

The language of sin was universal, the original Esperanto.

She liked things that had been written by people who had lived short, ugly, and tragic lives. Or, who at least, were English.

Americans curse without any imagination at all." Harper

I hope you didn't burn up, British Isles! Where would the world be without your epic contributions to culture: Duran Duran, Idris Elba, and Love Actually? Drop me an e-mail, England, let me know you're still hanging in there!

What's the best part about living in Switzerland? No idea, but the flag is a big plus!

When it comes to golf, Scottish people are famously reserved, undemonstrative, difficult to impress. Golf is like church in Scotland, church like golf.

The problem with the English Patient is that to enjoy it, you have to be either English or patient.

books, ingeniously coupled with music and alcohol, enabled the Irish to transcend reality.

Here I am referring to the types of books that thirtyish women devour at private swim clubs, often to the dismay of their drowning children.

The Sumerians, living five thousand years ago in what is now Iran, are commonly believed to be the world's first civilization.

Representing Pharisaic views, for example, Josephus catered to the Greco-Roman intelligentsia, formulating a body-soul dualism quite at odds with Israel's Scriptures but very much at home in the Platonic tradition.

His mother taught him mathematics, literature, and language at home during the day. His father taught him German history and world history and culture in the evenings. And whenever he could get away from his factories, Uncle Avi came and took him up into the mountains to hike and to fix things and learn to work with his hands.

was that possible? The whole notion of State Department and CIA personnel being inside a country whose language they didn't speak seemed ludicrous to Charlie. How could one government understand another—much less build a healthy, positive, long-lasting relationship—without at least being able to talk in the other's heart language? It couldn't, Charlie knew, and now Washington was about to pay the piper.