Quotes About Culture

the ancient Persians had indeed used their arya word in an ethnic sense; they called themselves the 'Ariana' (whence derives the modern 'Iran').

The Islam of the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th century was a poor thing. Nobody bothered about it. Islam was that funny sort of pure system of beliefs that depressed people in the Middle East held as their religion.

The leisure class has been replaced by another and much larger class to which work has none of the older connotation of pain, fatigue, or other mental or physical discomfort. We have failed to observe the emergence of this New Class, as it may be simply called.

Commencement oratory must eschew anything that smacks of partisan politics, political preference, sex, religion or unduly firm opinion. Nonetheless, there must be a speech: Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.

Punks are nihilists who see no tomorrow at all, and dwell in a culture of death music and death imagery. Appropriately, Return focuses on a group of punks who bear names like Trash, Suicide, and Scum, their very names indicating their lack of respect for the world, and themselves. They see themselves as nothing in a world that doesn't value them, and won't survive an apocalypse.

NEGRO Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamednot by its residentsAfrica. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.

Je ne give a damn pas about le français, Les filles en France ne wear pas les pantelons

lumus the poignant humaness beneath the spectacle of society.

occhiolism n. the awareness of the smallness of your perspective, by which you couldn't possibly draw any meaningful conclusions at all, about the world or the past or the complexities of culture, because although your life is an epic and unrepeatable anecdote, it still only has a sample size of one, and may end up being the control for a much wilder experiment happening in the next room.

treachery of the common n. the fear that everyone around the world is pretty much the same-that despite our local quirks, we were all mass-produced in the same factory, built outward from the same generic homunculus, preinstalled with the same tribal compulsions and character defects- which would leave you out of options if you ever want to reinvent yourself, or seek out a better society on the other side of the globe.

Fei Xiaoton, the University of Chicago - trained Chinese sociologist, once observed, this nation is "a land without ghosts," a place where people are so busy with promises of progress that they have forgotten where they come from and who their ancestors were...

Who speaks for the West?: Muslims around the world do not see the West as monolithic. They criticize or celebrate countries based on their politics, not based on their culture or religion.

You can die from kitsch. And we're close to it.

curry plays a nostalgic, retrogressive role in British culinary culture; the proliferation of restaurants specializing in it is a consolation prize for the loss of world-historical consequence; we are to be understood as having given away the Empire and received in return, in delayed settlement of that very considerable invoice, the street-corner tandoori house.

But apart from that, I was amazed by how little the language had penetrated the place – given, after all, that we Brits had been running the colony for 150 years. Other groups you might well have expected to speak English were, as a rule, remarkable for being monoglot Cantonese:

It was a mark of how little we had affected the real life of the place. I suppose part of me had thought of Hong Kong as somewhere essentially British, except with a lot of Chinese people scattered about, for local colour.

It might now be the occasion to remember that for the Romans, a barbarian was someone who wore trousers, had a beard and ate butter.)

In Polish, the language of Poland, all green vegetables are known as w?oszczyzna, which means 'things Italian

The economic metaphor came to be applied to every aspect of modern life, especially the areas where it simply didn't belong. In fields such as education, equality of opportunity, health, employee's rights, the social contract and culture, the first conversation to happen should be about values and principles; then you have the conversation about costs, and what you as a society can afford.

He had never heard of a composer called Tippett but he knew it meant a tuneless evening of scraping catgut.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

Anybody under the age of forty knows hip-hop, gospel and R&ampB pretty well, and it's all a part of what we consider to be 'black music.' There is a natural synergy between the three.

Music is everybody's business. It's only the publishers who think people own it

Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it.