Quotes About Culture

Consumerism has become a hypnosis that keeps our culture immature, as it keeps us overly focused on ourselves and on material desires, instead of on cultivating deeper soul richness. Corn

Libraries represent the sole contemporary American institution with the potential for making available a wide-ranging, genuinely diverse spectrum of opinions, cultural expressions, and ideas in an environment that is commercial-free and huckster-free, a commons where people can gather and select, in an un-intimidating atmosphere, whatever interests them, delights them, or even repels them--whatever they want to know about.

There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse.

diversity management" becomes a way of managing or containing conflict or dissent.

To become a complainer can also mean becoming the object of other people's complaints.7 Members of her department submitted an informal complaint to Human Resources identifying her as a bully. It should not surprise us that a "pushy minority" can morph into a bully. Bullying often works to create a narrative about a person as behind whatever is deemed problematic. She was a new head of department; she was trying to make changes to the culture of that department.

I pick up my cutlery: fork in my left hand, knife in my right -- European-style, like my mother.

From the most distant prehistory, masked dancing and dramatic art have woven the fabric of group life. Declaiming and performing myths was a way of reinforcing a common worldview, bringing it to embodied life, imprinting it in members' subconscious. That is what the anarchists were doing.

No reading can be called a vice.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: I do not want to call pop soda. I do not want to eat gloppy banana mush. I do not want to be it. "I'm pretty sure the way I play is the right way," I say, my throat tightening. I'm right. I am.

The title of this book, Conflict Is Not Abuse, recommends mutual accountability in a culture of underreaction to abuse and overreaction to conflict.

Doc didn't have a television but he could predict that sort of thing. He just didn't need one. He could always tell what was on TV when he heard more than two people in a row say the same strange phrase in the same way. He knew that they had just seen it on television. A few weeks later everyone would have those words written on their chests.

When one of a culture's guiding credos is that all men are created equal, any person who, say, becomes an expert on, say, nuclear weapons or, say, ecology, i.e., anyone who distinguishes himself through mental excellence, is a nuisance.

He spent part of last year working in Canada, and I think it rubbed off on him, diminishing his innate American ability to celebrate the civic virtue of idiocy.

I swear on Peter Stuyvesant's peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston's communitarian English majors.

In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.

In Woody Allen movies people stood in line for Ingmar Bergman films or Holocaust documentaries talking up media theory to pass the time. At 16 that was my idea of fun. Now that I live in New York I can tell you that people lined up for tickets don't debate theory. They talk about cute guys at the gym or whether or not they live within walking distance of a Krispy Kreme. I was such a young fogy that growing up involved becoming less mature.

First, from this side of the twentieth century, après strip malls, fast-food franchises, glass boxes, housing projects, and other architectural gaffes, it's fun to look back on this dilemma of to-column-or-not-to-column, because honestly, the only question most Americans ask about a new building at this point is basically: Is it a soul-sucking eyesore of cheap-ass despair? It's not? Whew.

One of the French officers was horrified that at a dinner in Washington's tent, His Excellency served the meal not in a succession of courses like in civilization. Apparently Washington "gave, on the same plate, meat, vegetables, and salad." On the same plate? Were these Americans people or animals?

For the better part of the 1990s, it seemed like the only Americans who publicly described themselves as patriots were scary militia types hiding out in the backwoods of Michigan and Montana, cleaning their guns.

One of the advantages to visiting historic sites as opposed to merely reading about them is the endearing glow of hometown pride.

more Irish than French).

the cheapest, most pleasurable way for a country of strangers to get to know each other and the rest of the world is through reading.

one learns that his bed was so short because most people back then slept sitting up;

Ganesh, the elephant-faced god