Quotes About Culture

Temperament lies behind mood; behind will, lies the fate of character. Then behind both, the influence of family the tyranny of culture; and finally the power of climate and environment; and we are free, only to the extent we rise above these.

I have explored and have voluntarily entered into domains forbidden by a large fraction of those in our culture who are not curious, are not explorative and are not mentally equipped to enter these domains.

In some ancient cultures, elder rituals helped men shift from warriors to elders. What kind of ritual might allow you to surrender instinctual masculinity for the elder's spiritual consciousness? Could you create your own ritual?

Pan marks Flying Down to Rio as the first time full dance numbers were seen on the screen, that is, a complete dance sequence that demanded the viewers' attention from beginning to end. Prior to that, dance had most often been relegated to background scenery or brief interludes or served as backup for vocal numbers.

While he rested, she asked, 'What's the difference between natives and outsiders?' 'Natives,' he replied, 'eat indoors and shit outdoors, outsiders eat outdoors and shit indoors.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of "culture.

But, as a heathen tells us,[54] there is no nation so barbarous, no race so brutish, as not to be imbued with the conviction that there is a God.

For the primary function of culture in Gissing's scheme of things was to segregate him from other people. To qualify as culture, knowledge had to be abstruse.

My films are expressive of a culture that has had the possibility of attaining material fulfillment while at the same time finding itself unable to accomplish the simple business of conducting human lives. We have been sold a bill of goods as a substitute for life. What is needed is reassurance in human emotions; a re-evaluation of our emotional capacities.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

Christmas is the antithesis of Thanksgiving. Christmas is pretty much a man-made holiday.

There is no racial or ethnic involvement in Thanksgiving, and people who may be very distant from the Christian system can see the beauty and the positive spirit that comes from the holiday.

I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.

unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it.

To tell the history of the Americas is to tell the story of bovine expansion. Settlers may have made the Wild West and the frontier, but they followed in the wake of their bovine brother. No other animal has so shaped a culture. So many American icons are associated with the cow: the cowboy, the western, the rodeo, the hamburger, the steak house, the Marlboro Man, the very notion of the frontier itself. The story began more than five centuries ago.

He had a love of books, for in books was recorded the knowledge of all those who had gone before him.

We're the world's leading producer of serial killers. It's a sign of sickness, is what it is. We're sick and weak and these killers are like a cancer inside us: the faster we grow, the quicker they multiply.

One of the glories of New York is its ethnic food, and only McDonald's and Burger King equalize us all.

Loneliness seems to have become the great American disease.

Violet always said that in her part of England a single eyebrow marked you as a violent, criminal person, possibly a maniac.

Society makes. Then society rewards and punishes her handiwork.

Western culture is in its twilight; there is a dark age ahead; and while college-humanities fads and 'secular-progressive values' have certainly done much damage, they are symptoms, not causes—fragments of junk sucked into a vacuum. The fundamental reason why so much of our culture is shit—either literally, like Signor Manzoni's masterwork, or figuratively—is exhaustion, cultural exhaustion.

The intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment. Common subject matter accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated. The assimilative force of the American public school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and balanced appeal.