Quotes About Culture

Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

Every time you ask yourself where hip-hop's going, ask yourself where you're going; how are you doing?

Reading, to most people, means an ashamed way of killing time disguised under a dignified name

Adolescence as the time when an individual 'recapitulates' the savage stage of the race's past.

video games are the comic books of our time... It's a medium that gains no respect among the intelligentsia".

I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians.

I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.

For the majority of the time, I may as well have been just a really tan white kid. You know, I may as well have just been, like, a fat kid.

Well, the first time I ran into the term religion, people were asking whether you had any. You know, some people had religion and some people didn't have religion

The meaning of an artwork is changing depending on who's looking at it - depending on what culture, depending on what time, and so forth. It's alive.

That one time I had ma Latina texture going on.. Or just.. everyday.

... the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced or knew that such a character existed.

America is a country no one should go to for the first time.

Food first, then talk. Life looks better on a full stomach. People become civilized when they break bread together. Margaret had taught me that.

In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.

The next day, eating a turkey sandwich with salt and mayonnaise, Rebecca decided Thanksgiving was the best holiday, although she had little to choose from: her family never celebrated Hanukkah but her father was militant about ignoring Christmas and insisted they spend December 25 eating Chinese takeout and going to the movies.

Surely an American doesn't want to get it wrong; if there is anything that England stands for, with its quiet central squares, its tweeds and twin sets and teas, the tight-lipped precision of its speech, it is that there is a right way to do things. This is where the right way has its ancestral home.

we have a culture that reflects contempt and antipathy toward a realistic female body, which is just another form of hating women.

I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad

The Hmong never had any interest in ruling over the Chinese or anyone else; they wanted merely to be left alone, which, as their later history was also to illustrate, may be the most difficult request any minority can make of a majority culture.

I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say hoi polloi , never the hoi polloi , because hoi meant the, and two the's were redundant -- indeed something only hoi polloi would say.

Timothy Dunnigan: The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong.

It is worth noting that the standard American tests of success that they have flunked are almost exclusively economic. If one applied social indices instead—such as rates of crime, child abuse, illegitimacy, and divorce—the Hmong would probably score better than most refugee groups (and also better than most Americans), but those are not the forms of success to which our culture assigns its highest priority.

The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong." So much for the Perambulating Postbox Theory.