Quotes About Culture

Le plus mauvais film américain est toujours véridique, il rend toujours fidèlement compte des États-Unis. Cela

As you know, when an American sees another driving a Cadillac, he says to himself: 'One day I too will drive a Cadillac.' But when a Frenchman feels intimidated by someone else's car, he says: 'Why can't the bum drive a jalopy, like everyone else?

A civilization worthy of that name will always feel guilty toward Man and that is, precisely, what makes it a civilization." Pascal, probably. It's always Pascal with the French, when it's not La Rochefoucauld. Aristocratic bastards.

Il lui servit une dose maison de ce vieil optimisme américain, qu'ils ont en Europe.

He felt sad, angry and sorry. It was impossible to let the people benefit fully from scientific and ideological progress without first raising the level of cultural awareness of the masses. They had to discard all the traditional molds that were still narrowing their minds.

When the first atomic bomb was exploded successfully, Oppenheimer and Fermi flashed the code word: Baby satisfactorily born. A most befitting yell o triumph for the coming of age of technological civilization and for the death of culture. Since then hundreds of thousands of babies were satisfactorily born with defective genes or died of leukemia brought on by radiation. Compulsive creation, genius, what the hell do you want, clap censorship on science?

Morally speaking, the fathers of the hydrogen bomb had nothing to do with the latter. They were cracking not ethics, not culture, not our soul, but a scientific and technological problem.

Zijn jullie kinderen van Goethe of van Atilla voeren jullie oorlog tegen de legers of tegen de mensheid, dood de mensen maar respecteer hun werken!

The true man of culture is not he who makes of himself and his ideal the center of the universe, but who looking around him sees, as in the sky the stream of the Milky Way, thousands of little flames which flow with his own; and who seeks neither to absorb them nor to impose upon them his own course, but to give himself the religious persuasion of their value and of the common source of the fire by which all alike are fed.

If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India!

Japan is the most intoxicating place for me. In Kyoto, there's an inn called the Tawaraya which is quite extraordinary. The Japanese culture fascinates me: the food, the dress, the manners and the traditions. It's the travel experience that has moved me the most.

Linguista sum, linguistici nihil a me alienum puto.

People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I've been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it's the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.

In Sanskrit, there exists no word for 'The Individual' (L'Individu). En Grèce antique, il n'y avait aucun mot pour dire 'Devoir' (Duty). In French, the word for 'Wife' is the same as the word for 'Woman.' En anglais, nous n'avons aucun mot semblable à l'exquise 'Jouissance!

In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent.

It's really sad for me that in the United States the Latino community is losing its culture and language, especially among kids born here - a lot of them can't even speak our language.

The fundamental sanity of Indian civilization has been due to an absence of Satan.

Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past.

National-ism seeks legitimacy from the past and history therefore becomes a sensitive subject

The eating of beef was reserved for specific occasions, such as rituals or when welcoming a guest or a person of high status. This is a common practice in other cattle-keeping cultures as well.

The late arrival of the horse in India is not surprising since the horse is not an animal indigenous to India. Even on the west Asian scene, its presence is not registered until the second millennium BC. The horse was unimportant, ritually and functionally, to the Indus civilization.

The existence of autonomous individuals free to criticize was once a landmark of our civilization.

The remains of what might be the earliest temple dedicated to Hindu worship have been located through excavations at Besnagar.

That every civilization emerges out of interactions with others, but nevertheless creates its own miracle, was not yet recognized by either European or Indian historians.