Quotes About Culture

In the West they say, 'Never talk to strangers.' In the East they say, 'Always talk to strangers.

In the West they say, 'Never talk to strangers.' In the East they say, 'Always talk to strangers.' It was this stranger who gave us sustenance on the road, just as strangers had given me company on the way to the Pindar Glacier. On the open road there are no strangers. You share the same sky, the same mountain, the same sunshine and shade. On the open road we are all brothers. The

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.

The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving.

Now in truth our society is not a "capitalist system" at all, but a complex cultural and social arrangement that comprehends religion, morals, prescriptive political institutions, literary culture, a competitive economy, private property, and much more besides. It is not a system designed to secure and advance the interests of great possessors of capital goods unjustly acquired.

Worse still, what future have a people whose schooling has enabled them, at best, to ascertain the price of everything—but the value of nothing?

The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.

I'd like to talk about free markets. Information in the computer age is the last genuine free market left on earth except those free markets where indigenous people are still surviving. And that's basically becoming limited.

Tourists came around and looked into our tipis. That those were the homes we choose to live in didn`t bother them at all. The untied the door, opened the flap, and barged right in, touching our things, poking through our bedrolls, inspecting everything. It boggles my mind that tourists feel they have the god-given right to intrude everywhere.

Many people--whether they live in the heartland or on Fifth Avenue--like to think of New York City as so wild and extreme in its cultural fusion that it's an anomaly in the United States, almost a foreign entity. This book offers an alternative view: that beneath the level of myth and politics and high ideals, down where real people live and interact, Manhattan is where America began.

So how, in an increasingly interconnected world, do we integrate and still keep our values?

Manhattan is where America began.

The Dutch were among the earliest adopters of a new technology—the printed book—and

It was possible, as far as they knew, that the western shore, which in fifty years' time would be christened New Jersey, was in fact the backdoor of China, that India, with its steamy profusion of gods and curries, lay just beyond those bluffs.

It was the Dutch of this era who invented the idea of the home as a personal, intimate space; one might say they invented coziness.

You know, the diversity that America has is so special. It's starting to really become a cool thing for young people.

Are we moving from a society where we ask "Why rent when you can buy?" to a society where we ask "Why own when you can rent by the hour?"

It's the land of my ancestors. I need to set my feet on that soil and see how I feel. I have missed my mother's warm tortillas and many more things than I can name.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.

From the moment of his birth the customs into which [an individual] is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture.