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Culture Quotes
"In India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it."
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"Man is often the prisoner of the culture he lives in. Question your culture to break the prison doors! Question it so that you can be able to see the incredible stupidities in your culture!"
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"It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction."
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"Society in its wisdom has found ways of constructing refuges of all kinds, for since it has been disposed to make the love-life a pastime, it has also felt obliged to trivialize it, to make it cheap, risk-free and secure, as public pleasures usually are."
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"What sells, today, is whatever Fucks You Up - whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time."
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"Every cuisine has its characteristic 'flavor principle,' Rozin contends, whether it is tomato-lemon-oregano in Greece; lime-chili in Mexico; onion-lard-paprika in Hungary, or, in Samin's Moroccan dish, cumin-coriander-cinnamon-ginger-onion-fruit. (And in America? Well, we do have Heinz ketchup, a flavor principle in a bottle that kids, or their parents, use to domesticate every imaginable kind of food. We also now have the familiar salty-umami taste of fast food, which I would guess is based on salt, soy oil, and MSG."
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"Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing."
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"But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them."
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"But I have to say this in defense of humankind: In no matter what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got here. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these games going on that could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the crazymaking games going on today are love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf, and girls' basketball."
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"Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
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"Mardi Gras, baby. Mardi Gras. Time when all manner of weird shit cuts loose and parties down."
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"If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people."
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"All of us have to ensure that our future generations lead a life of peace, dignity and mutual respect. We need to sow the seeds of a conflict-free world, and in this endeavour, Buddhism and Hinduism have a great contribution."
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"Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is."
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"Veil, you see, if I vas to say something portentous like "zer dark eyes of zer mind" back home in Uberwald, zer would be a sudden crash of thunder,' said Otto. 'And if I vas to point at a castle on a towering crag and say "Yonder is . . . zer castle" a volf would be bound to howl mournfully.' He sighed. 'In zer old country, zer scenery is psychotropic and knows vot is expected of it. Here, alas, people just look at you in a funny vay."
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"We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of Libraries it opens, not the number it closes down."
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"Witchcraft had once been widely used before cursed by the society. I see today the society presumes technology will have a different treatment."
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"All the things that are part of your heritage make you British - that makes this country what it is. It's part of your history. And here, unlike America, it's still living history."
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"When you touch someone who authentically represents a tradition, you not only touch his or her tradition, you also touch your own."
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"A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul."
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"Pagans earn their reputations for relaxed sexual mores, often in rebellion from the repression of their religions during adolescence. At a Pagan festival, one need only lower one's guard to be offered sex under the cloaking of the sacred."
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"It is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way."
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"Our cultural lens is so much a part of us that we are not even aware of how obvious it is to others. Like the nose on your face, you may forget that it is there, but everyone else sees it. I can't look at you and not see your nose."
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"Could it be that simple? Tell one story to one generation and repeat it until it was accepted as fact?"
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"England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare,but the Bible made England."
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"A lot of people still maintain genre prejudice. I still meet matrons who tell me kindly that their children enjoyed my books but of course they never read them, and people who make sure I know they don't read that space-ship stuff. No, no, they read Literature-realism. Like The Help, or Fifty Shades of Grey."
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"In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures."
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"Present global culture is a kind of arrogant newcomer. It arrives on the planetary stage following four and a half billion years of other acts, and after looking about for a few thousand years declares itself in possession of eternal truths. But in a world that is changing as fast as ours, this is a prescription for disaster. No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them."
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"The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists--and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments; one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength."
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"There are many madnesses in every culture! All cultures need reason!"
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"Unfortunately, unapproachable leaders create a tense environment that may prevent their people from bringing their best strengths and talents or challenges and solutions forward."
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"In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it's like death: only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn't matter and he said, That's what's so sad about anything: not only virginity and I said, Why couldn't it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he said, That's why that's sad too; nothing is even worth the changing of it..."
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"Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music."
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"Just when you see a kid selling a mascot,If you don't buy it because he winks, Not only that will be considered a "boycott",Xenophobically, it will also be a jinx!"
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"In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations - ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies - were not only accepted but occasionally applauded."
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"Mythology didn't cease to exist and be useful to Pagans when we gained digital watch technology."
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"In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
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"It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of a man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire... Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter."
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"To be able to use leisure intelligently will be the last product of an intelligent civilization."
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