Quotes About Culture

Scandinavia was awash with Maoism in the '70s. Sweden had Maoist groups with a combined membership and periphery of several thousand members, but it was Norway where Maoism became a genuine popular force and hegemonic in the culture.

Most languages spoken by a few thousand people are so complicated they make your head swim; a Siberian yak herder's language is much more complicated than a Manhattan bond trader's.

While I have no empirical evidence to back this up, I bet that the number of homosexual people per thousand has not fluctuated all that much over the centuries. I do not believe the dented wisdom my father used to extol, that homosexuality was a sure sign of a civilization in decline.

In Russia, they have Rusalkis, and they have Selkies in Scotland, and in Fiji, you have a special mention of it. The first earliest mermaid mentioned in history books was Atargartis in Assyria, a thousand B.C... In Africa, you have Mami Wata.

I think it's important to have diversity in comics for a thousand reasons. It's not just some airy conceptual thing: it's important to reflect the humanity of the readership.

I have written a considerable amount - both fiction and nonfiction - about the Caribbean. My love for this part of the world is centered on a deep admiration for its people - a people who are both tough and romantic, dreamers and cynics, people who face a thousand defeats and are never defeated.

We are a country obsessed by records. For us, hundreds, ten thousand runs, and large haul of wickets are more important than the performance of the Indian team.

Why did Americans smile so often? Was it out of politeness or because of a gay disposition?" Whatever it was, she, who had never been "spoiled with smiles," found it pleasant!

One might object that belly dancing originates in a culture which is foreign to the West and therefore unsuited to Western women, yet this is precisely what makes it an even more enriching experience, apart from the fact that it is perfectly suited to the female body. By experiencing unfamiliar movements, a woman can allow her body to break through cultural norms.

Army of soufflés at 'Downton'.

The Street of Booksellers, Via dei Librai, ran through the heart of Florence, midway between the town hall to the south and the cathedral to the north.

this series of biographies quickly turned his interests and attention from the visual arts to the vibrant intellectual life depicted in Vespasiano's pages: from paintings and statues to manuscripts and libraries. The journey through the century, with this well-connected, name-dropping bookseller as a guide, proved exhilarating. Vespasiano was, Burckhardt declared, "an authority of the first order for Florentine culture in the fifteenth century," 7

Ancient Rome had ultimately boasted more than twenty public libraries. They were dotted around its hills and forums, housed in temples, palaces, and porticoes, even in the baths.

In Florence, more than anywhere else, large numbers of people could read and write, as many as seven in every ten adults. The literacy levels of other European cities, by contrast, languished at less than 25 percent.

The soft throb and glow roused in my breast by the gilt letters of four or five different languages winking at me from scores of handsomely tooled bindings—the sight of so much knowledge so beautifully presented—swiftly flamed out.

Italians had a "national peculiarity" to use distinctive hand gestures and body language when they spoke: a resource that was, he believed, obvious to an Italian like Leonardo when he came to paint The Last Supper.

Undoubtedly Italians use hand gestures and body language more creatively and prolifically than other European cultures.

The hand gestures of Italians are not, apparently, as clear-cut as Goethe believed. De Jorio discovered that knowing the purpose of someone's mind

how a people who had raised such mighty works, could have allowed themselves to be conquered by illiterate barbarians.

What brings you up to the City?" he said when we were inside. To San Franciscans, there's only one city.

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

Jerkiness isn't as respectable as it used to be, not even in L.A. Which is why they had to build Vegas.

Approach a trip as a chance to collect unique experiences, not passport stamps, postcards and snapshots in front of famous monuments.

Political cures only worsen the situation. For a changed society, changed men are necessary.