Quotes About Culture

Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

Spanish! His family didn't even like speaking Spanish to him. He tried, and they insisted on answering him in English. Though they knew perfectly well that he spoke Spanish as well as they did and better than their children did. Each side had something to prove, and none of them knew what it was.

On that long westward morning, all Mexicans still dreamed the same dream. They dreamed of being Mexican. There was no greater mystery.

To become accepted by the bulk of humanity, spirituality must be "cleansed" of magic, thereby turning it into religion. The original ritualistic elements that are designed to liberate the individual from his cultural trance are labeled as "immoral" or "primitive.

Mer-people could be read as a colonialist term," explained the biologist.

Janet did not believe it was feasible to be single; to Janet a bachelor eked out his living on the margins of society, orbiting the married couples wild-eyed and feral as a homeless man at a polo party. A single man, to Janet, was superior in the social hierarchy only to a single woman--this last a life form that was repellent but fortunately short-lived, naked and glistening as it gobbled its way out of its larval cocoon.

There's America, there's the South, and then there's Mississippi.

Art is a nation's most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal to ourselves and to others the inner version which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.

FACT The Native Americans invented the game lacrosse.

Come inside," it says, "for CD's, VIDEO's, DVD's, and BOOK's.

By the late Stalin period, the right of complaint was so thoroughly a part of this political culture, in which civil law and litigation were frequently meaningless, that there were special mailboxes in the concentration camps of the Gulag labeled, To the Supreme Soviet, To the Council of Ministers, To the Minister of Internal Affairs, and To the Prosecutor General.

You guys put them all on a boat and sent them over here to North America a couple of hundred years ago." "The English maybe would do such a thing. Is what they did with the criminals, so maybe they would send you the smelly cats. But no the Italians. We would no be so cruel.

Most of us operate from a narrower frame of reference than that of which we are capable, failing to transcend the influence of our particular culture, our particular set of parents and our particular childhood experience upon our understanding.

Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one's evil from oneself as well as from others than to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture

Theater in America is a kind of weed sprouting up in the weirdest places. It's deeply democratic and deeply human, and I think it's one of the best things our culture does.

Segundo Monteiro Lobato, "um país se faz com homens e livros". Podemos extrapolar e dizer que os sonhos de uma nação se tecem em sua literatura. A cada nova leitura dessas obras, os sentidos ali registrados se renovam, iluminando o passado, contrastando-se com o presente e enriquecendo as aspirações para o futuro. Assim, mais que a história, a literatura é o testemunho palpitante de um povo.

And God knows the strength of an adjective, especially in young and warm countries.

Todas as noivas têm quinze anos.

O que nas mulheres é sentimento, nos homens é pieguice

When we lose our myths we lose our place in the universe.

Probably the worst thing that has happened to our understanding of reality has been the acceptance of ourselves as consumers.

And it came to me as I stood on the desert sand, looking at the Great Pyramid, that what any civilization says about God tells us more about that civilization than it does about God.

If the artist reflects only his own culture, then his works will die with that culture. But if his works reflect the eternal and universal, they will revive.

A truly great work of art breaks beyond the bounds of the period and culture in which it is created, so final judgement on a current book has to be deferred until it can be seen outside this present moment.