Quotes About Customs

All cultures are different. Some commit genocide. Some are uniquely peaceful. Some frequent bathhouses in groups. Some don't show each other the soles of their shoes or like pictures taken of them. Some have enormous hunting festivals or annual stretches when nobody speaks. Some don't use electricity.

In France, I am just Madame Campbell. In Jamaica, nobody uses my title.

I've often found myself looking fondly at the Valentine's cultures in other countries. South Korea, for instance - where women must give chocolate to men.

People value Halloween, like Valentine's Day, because they can tell themselves that it's not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.

A Maori conqueror explained, "We took possession…in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people.

Children in the New Guinea highlands have the swollen bellies characteristic of a high-bulk but protein-deficient diet. New Guineans old and young routinely eat mice, spiders, frogs, and other small animals that peoples elsewhere with access to large domestic mammals or large wild game species do not bother to eat.

The honorific was long winded, but correct. Technically speaking, all practitioners should be introduced this way, but it just soaked up useful time that might be otherwise spent drinking tea, or chatting.

Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control, constraint, compulsion. Civilised man is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions.

Art is a way into other realities, other personalities. When I let myself be affected by a book, I let into myself new customs and new desires. The book does not reproduce me, it re-defines me, pushes at my boundaries, shatters the palings that guard my heart. Strong texts work along the borders of our minds and alter what already exists. They could not do this if they merely reflected what already exists.

Nations, like men, are teachable only in their youth; with age they become incorrigible. Once customs are established and prejudices rooted, reform is a dangerous and fruitless enterprise; a people cannot bear to see its evils touched, even if only to be eradicated.

In my day, there were things that were done, and things that were not done, and there was even a way of doing things that were not done.

Our actions, behavior, speech and for that matter anything that we do should strictly comply with our culture.

In Judaism, there are a lot of rules - everything from which fingernail you cut first to which side you sleep on in bed, to the way you get dressed in the morning, to actual ideas, like ideas about being chosen people or ideas about female/male and how to interact with people from the opposite sex.

When we speak of institutions, economists mean more than just organizations. We mean conventions, even rules, about how things are done.

There's a gray area between Conservative and Orthodox people, for whom you don't screw around with the mezuzah, you don't mess with the holy melodies.

I got to travel to some pretty awesome places, learn other people's customs, and see what works in their world differently than in ours.

Although it is no longer customary to offer visitors a straw through which to drink from a communal vat of beer, today tea or coffee may be offered from a shared pot, or a glass of wine or spirits from a shared bottle. And when drinking alcohol in a social setting, the clinking of glasses symbolically reunites the glasses into a single vessel of shared liquid. These are traditions with very ancient origins.

Cultural Values Determine Behavior.

It seemed an odd thing to put on a tombstone, but then everything about the white man's burial customs seemed odd to Chee. The Navajos lacked this sentimentality about corpses. Death robbed the body of its value.

When you're in another country, remember to do as the locals do, since it is your ways that may seem strange of offensive to them.

Tashi says nomads keep to the routines and customs they learned from their parents and they know the basic truths: that life is full of suffering, that suffering can be understood and lived through, that their actions and intentions will determine their future lives just as the past has allowed for this present life.

The Americans had been kind, polite, hospitable, and their sailors thorough seamen, but they had the strangest notion of coffee: a thin, thin brew - a man might drink himself into a dropsy before the stuff raised his spirits even half a degree.

In reality the gatherings were held in order to entertain these few Moslem guests, to whom the unaccountable behavior of Europeans never ceased to be a fascinating spectacle. Most of the Europeans, of course, thought the Moslem gentlemen were invited to add local color.

Culture can be loosely defined as the body of non-genetic information which people pass from generation to generation.