Quotes About Culture

Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus ?

In Land of Milk and Money , Anthony Barcellos mines rich family history to create a full-blooded tale that readers will find insightful, rewarding, and entertaining.

Most historians accept that Sweden was fully Christian by the beginning of the twelfth century at the latest.

Most runic inscriptions are utilitarian, and despite popular conceptions, they have little to say about mythology or magic.

My great hero was that archetype of cheerful American normalcy, Norman Rockwell.

Viking names included 'desirous of beer', 'squat-wiggle', 'lust-hostage', 'short penis', 'able to fill a bay with fish by magic', 'the man who mixes his drinks' and 'the man without trousers'.

The rickshaw was invented by an American missionary, Jonathan Scobie, who first used it to wheel his invalid wife through the streets of Yokohama, Japan, in 1869.

Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps. TIGER WOODS

And amongst those who are counted the civilized part of mankind

The Two Kingdoms view maintains that the kingdom came in Jesus and will come again in Jesus' return, but that it is confined to the church in the period between Jesus' two advents. That view goes against the passages cited above. Clearly, the kingdom has in fact deeply affected human culture over the centuries: in the sciences, the arts, the treatment of orphans and widows, education, and every other area of importance to human beings.

Civilization: a thin veneer over barbarianism.

Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be 'too clever by half.' The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.

The ancient Maya were superb stargazers. Their calendar synchronized not just the Sun and Moon, byt also Venus and Mars. They worked out that 81 (or 3X3X3X3) full moons occur exactly every 2,392 (or 8X13X23) days, an astonishingly accurate gearing.

Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

So much of TV seems to be chewing gum for the eyes.... TV desperately needs more self-reliance and pride in the medium.

In the West, the past is very close. In many places, it still believes it's the present.

Look, demanding somebody do anything in this day and age is not going to fly.

There's a constantly applicable nature to soul music, whereas sometimes pop music can be a periodical.

There are people in the world who have the power to change our values.

I wish every American who out of ignorance or worse curses immigrants as criminals or a drain on the country's resources or a threat to our "culture" could have been there. I would like them to know that immigrants, many of them having entered the country illegally, are making sacrifices for Americans that many Americans would not make for them.

Demographics aren't destiny. Our culture isn't the work of one race or religion. To suggest otherwise is to contradict our ideals and to doubt their power.

If it's well written, even an obscene book cannot be immoral. John McGahern, Galway, October 6th 2003. "Acclaimed as the most important Irish novellist since James Joyce.

learned about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which said that the language you spoke affected how you processed reality.

At a newsstand, Owen read a German newspaper while Vivie and I paged through the Hungarian fashion magazines, and discussed how the models looked less tormented than models in American magazines. "Maybe it's like how, in cultures where everyone is starving, the standard of beauty is less skinny," Vivie said. We both looked for a moment at the confident Hungarian women, each of whom knew tens of thousands of the words closest to Ivan.