Culture Quotes - Page 16

I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.

Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.

Michael Crichton

If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably—after careful considerations of their relative merits—choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best.

Herodotus

She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else

Jonathan Safran Foer

If you've spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you've probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this! This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence! It's supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware! And this is idiotic. It's the saddest kind of failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused. All those extraneous exclamation points are like little splatters of canned laughter: They represent the "form of funny," which is more easily understood (and more easily constructed) than authentic funniness.

Chuck Klosterman

Our culture places a very high premium on self-expression, but is relatively disinterested in producing "selves" that are worth expressing.

Matthew Kelly

We live in a society and a culture and an economic model that tries to make everything look right. Look at computers. Why are they all putty-colored or off-fucking-white? You make something off-white or beige because you are afraid to use any other color – because you don’t want to offend anybody. But by definition, when you make something no one hates, no one loves it. So I am interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability. That’s what we really pay attention to anyway. We don’t talk about planes flying; we talk about them crashing.

Tibor Kalman

I believe Western culture -- rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. -- is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.

Mark Steyn

Culture is like a giant mirror which enables us to see who we are more clearly. The various facets of a culture also provide us with the means to change what we do not like in the mirror, and retain what we cherish most.

Dr Robin Lincoln Wood

Richard Wright and his Negro intellectual colleagues never realized the plain truth that no one in the United States understood the revolutionary potential of the Negro better than the Negro's white radical allies. They understood it instinctively, and revolutionary theory had little to do with it. What Wright could not see was that what the Negro's allies feared most of all was that this sleeping, dream-walking black giant might wake up and direct the revolution all by himself, relegating his white allies to a humiliating second-class status. The negro's allies were not about to tell the Negro anything that might place him on the path to greater power and independence in the revolutionary movement than they themselves had. The rules of the power game meant that unless the American Negro taught himself the profound implications of his own revolutionary significance in America, it would never be taught to him by anybody else. Unless the Negro intellectuals understood that in pursuit of this self-understanding, they would have to make their own rules, by and for themselves, nationalism would forever remain--as it was for Wright-- "a bewildering and vexing question.

Harold Cruse

Packed up the Dylan and the Man Ray and the JoyceI left a note that said well I guess I got no choiceScuse me girl while I'm kicking it to the curbLeaving with all I need but less than I deserve

Walter Becker

Have you heard," he said "that many of our people believe if you know five colloquial expressions in their tribal language, they must always provide you with nourishment and shelter? But-" He paused as though to make sure she was paying attention. "But if you know fewer than five, they owe you not even a sip of water."She nodded, understanding his point, but he pressed it."Learn those five phrases, Miss Sweeney," he said.

Masha Hamilton

Because different cultures see a particular animal as representing a certain human virtue or vice, the use of animal imagery also allows for more colorful commentary on the human condition.

Larry Herzberg

Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed toward a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the white peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power.

Franz Rosenzweig

Each generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting.

Francis A.Schaeffer

To excavate is to open a book written in the language that the centuries have spoken into the earth.

Spyridon Marinatos

The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

Sara Sheridan

Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity.

Robert Lane Greene

Yesterday's abomination is today's rule.

Robert Lane Greene

When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.

George Steiner

To knock today's prestige dialects off their pedestals, it helps to realize that they are really foul perversions of yesterday's prestige dialects.

Gregory C. Carlson

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

Anton Chekhov

The human impulse behind the isolation of class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk.

Charles Murray

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures.

Philip Zaleski

Lewis is like a gateway, making the riches of Deep Church more accessible.

Alister E. McGrath

The way people want to get respect for their culture and language, it is critical to reciprocate the same to other else you don't have any right to condemn others

Pankaj Gupta

Falling in love is like learning a whole new language and the culture that goes along with it. When you fall out of love it can be hard to pick up where you left off and start a new.

Isabella Poretsis

An accurate accent is powerful because it is the ultimate gesture of empathy. It connects you to another person's culture in a way that words never can, because you have bent your body as well as your mind to match that person's culture. Anyone can learn "bawn-JURE" in a few seconds. To learn how bonjour fits your companion's mouth and tongue; to learn how to manipulate the muscles, the folds, and even the texture of your throat and lips to match your companion's -- this is an unmistakable, undeniable, and irresistable gesture of care.

Gabriel Wyner

Daisuke was of course equipped with conversation that, even if they went further, would allow him to retreat as if nothing had happened. He had always wondered at the conversations recorded in Western novels, for to him they were too bald, too self indulgent, and moreover, too unsubtly rich. However they read in the original, he thought they reflected a taste that could not be translated into Japanese. Therefore, he had not the slightest intention of using imported phrases to develop his relationship with Michiyo. Between the two of them at least, ordinary words sufficed perfectly well. But the danger was of slipping from point A to point B without realizing it. Daisuke managed to stand his ground only by a hair's breadth. When he left, Michiyo saw him to the entranceway and said, "Do come again, please? It's so lonely.

Sōseki Natsume

When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, “I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being.

Trevor Noah

Furniture or gold can be taken away from you, but knowledge and a new language can easily be taken from one place to the other, and nobody can take them away from you.

David Schwarzer

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

Adam Gopnik

Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.

Pádraic Pearse

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

Amy Tan

What these people were trying to create or re-create here in this new world is beyond me. I can't put myself in their minds or their hearts, but I can sympathize with their struggle for an identity, with their puzzlement, which has troubled Americans from the very beginning - Who are we, where do we fit in, where are we going?

Nelson DeMille

The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.

Pat Conroy

Those who have not lived in New Orleans have missed an incredible, glorious, vital city--a place with an energy unlike anywhere else in the world, a majority-African American city where resistance to white supremacy has cultivated and supported a generous, subversive, and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues, and and hip-hop to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, jazz funerals, and the citywide tradition of red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and food and traditions and sexuality and liberation.

Jordan Flaherty

...on opening the incubator I experienced one of those rare moments of intense emotion which reward the research worker for all his pains: at first glance I saw that the broth culture, which the night before had been very turbid was perfectly clear: all the bacteria had vanished... as for my agar spread it was devoid of all growth and what caused my emotion was that in a flash I understood: what causes my spots was in fact an invisible microbe, a filterable virus, but a virus parasitic on bacteria. Another thought came to me also, If this is true, the same thing will have probably occurred in the sick man. In his intestine, as in my test-tube, the dysentery bacilli will have dissolved away under the action of their parasite. He should now be cured.

Félix d'Herelle

That boy is talented. You don’t develop those gifts in houses or in schools.

Sara Sheridan

We experience new culture with every journey.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Standing still is never an option so long as inequities remain embedded in the very fabric of the culture.

Tim Wise

If privacy had a gravestone it might read: 'Don't Worry. This Was for Your Own Good.

John Twelve Hawks

Science contributes to our culture in many ways, as a creative intellectual activity in its own right, as the light which has served to illuminate man's place in the universe, and as the source of understanding of man's own nature.

John F Kennedy

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

Jorge Luis Borges

I think it was a sense of being completely swallowed up by nature that gave the prairie its powerful attraction.There is nothing like it in all of Europe. Even high up on a Swiss glacier one is still conscious of the toy villages below, the carefully groomed landscape of multicolored fields,the faraway ringing of a church bell. It is all very beautiful, but it does not convey the utmost escape. I believe, with the Indians, that a landscape influences and forms the people living on it and that one cannot understand them and make friends with them without also understanding, and making friends with, the earth from which they came.

Richard Erdoes

Try seeing, feeling, and tasting the water you swim in the way a land animal might perceive it. You may find the experience fascinating -- and mind-expanding.

Erin Meyer

The problem with our culture is we cling to so many different truths. Yet, the truths that we cling to also depend on our point of view. Maybe, the journey to a truth that can be free of hatred, bias and injustice requires a journey of the soul to see all view points.

Shannon L. Alder

I would say that introverts make some of the best international philosophers. The less common attribute of the introverted lifestyle - a close societal connection, as such a connection disappears or changes in relevance as the currents of the winds change - leaves too much room for one's own cultural bias. Instead, introverts tend to turn inward, the laboratory of being and all its forms. This is the most accurate study of the individual human being, which is in turn, rather than those affected by cultural limitations, the most universal reflection of human understanding and human behavior.

Criss Jami

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong.

Lily King

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure, it's a little like making love, the physical act of love.

Francis Bacon

If a culture is good or evil, it is only because of its carriers.

M.F. Moonzajer

Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes — affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism — the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response.

Victor Davis Hanson

Evangelicals believe they are saved by grace through faith but then add a man-made waiver that you have to work as hard as you can can meet middle-class behavioral patterns to hang onto it.

Steve Stockman

So do you want to make culture? Find a community, a small group who can lovingly fuel your dreams and puncture your illusions. Find friends and form a family who are willing to see grace at work in one another's lives, who can discern together which gifts and which crosses each has been called to bear. Find people who have a holy respect for power and a holy willingness to spend their power alongside the powerless. Find some partners in the wild and wonderful world beyond church doors. And then, together, make something of the world.

Andy Crouch

Our culture will stand in roaring ovations for the illusionists, escape artists, and magicians. Deception is everything opposite the truth.

Billy Graham

The colored hobo and now Junior Rabbit had told us, ‘Be ready to compete but be ready to fight too or you may not get a chance to compete’.

Clarence Hunter

They looked more like day laborers than seamen.

Erik Larson

Art indeed may not change anything, and yet on some very basic level, life is insupportable without it.

Richard Matturro

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Culture Quotes - Page 16

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