Quotes About Culture

Greeks were so much a part of the Roman world that, in the surviving texts, they are often more visible by the shadow they cast than by their actual written presence.

Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic—you were made to feel guilty about everything.

there is a cultural blank spot that never ever leaves, only it is not a spot, it is a huge blank canvas and it makes life very frightening.

But we are all mythologies

I could not believe how Black Hawk was taken on a tour of cities after his capture. I read his autobiography as soon as I could. And I remembered the line he said: "How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.

They're not crazy. They're exhausted. And partly they're exhausted by people like you reading about the most inflammatory aspects of their culture in some book club, and then getting to hate them for it, because deep down that's what we ignorant, weenie Americans, ever since the towers went down, really want to do. Have permission to hate them.

he had thought more and more how provincial New Yorkers were, and how they didn't know it.

Haweeya had never been able to figure out exactly what Americans wanted. (Everything, she sometimes thought. They wanted everything.)

with the group of Somali men who gathered

Looking back, I imagine that I was very odd, that I spoke too loudly, or that I said nothing when things of popular culture were mentioned; I think I responded strangely to ordinary types of humor that were unknown to me. I think I didn't understand the concept of irony at all, and that confused people. When I first met my husband William, I felt—and it was a surprise—that he really did understand something in me.

The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.

The great dream merchant Disney was a success because make-believe was what everyone seemed to need in a spiritually empty land.

This great, though disastrous, culture can only change as we begin to stand off and see... the inveterate materialism which has become the model for cultures around the world.

I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha.

The term used to describe them was rednecks, a Scots border term meaning Presbyterians. Another was cracker, from the Scots word craik for "talk," meaning a loud talker or braggart. Both words became permanent parts of the American language, and a permanent part of the identity of the Deep South the Ulster Scots created.

Then one day he returned from school to learn he was going to be married. He was thirteen—certainly not too young for the prearranged marital match that was considered essential to a Hindu household. His bride Kasturbai Makanji, also thirteen, was the daughter of a merchant who lived only a few doors down from the Gandhis' old house in Porbandar.

with the new economic order, a new moral perspective was taking shape. The Enlightenment term for it was "politeness.

Men are guided instead by custom, and the personal authority

For Sale, Europeans are nature-haters; they are cut off from life.

Nurture, not nature, explained human behavior and institutions.

As in old Edinburgh, drink opened the doors for free intellectual exchange. The

The historical pessimist worries that his own society is about to destroy itself, the cultural pessimist concludes that it deserves to be destroyed.

He liked to call people "brutes" or even "bitches" (in Scots it can apply to men as well as women).

Scotland became Europe's first modern literate society. This meant that there was an audience not only for the Bible but for other books as well.