culture Quotes

“‘You know, you’re a feminist.’ It was not a compliment. I could tell from his tone—the same tone with which a person would say, ‘You’re a supporter of terrorism.‘”

“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”

“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”

“What if, in raising children, we focus on ability instead of gender? What if we focus on interest instead of gender?”

The different nations of the world had different customs.

“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.”

Everything you value is a product of unimaginably lengthy developmental processes, personal, cultural, biological.

“In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.”

“Where my culture I’m told holds no significance I’ll wither and die in ignorance But my inner eye can c a race who reigned as kings in another place”

“What Robin Hood is to the English and John Henry to the American Negroes, Elil-Hrair-Rah, or El-ahrairah—The Prince with a Thousand Enemies—is to rabbits. Uncle Remus might well have heard of him, for some of El-ahrairah’s adventures are those of Brer Rabbit. For that matter, Odysseus himself might have borrowed a trick or two from the rabbit hero, for he is very old and was never at a loss for a trick to deceive his enemies.”

“Once, so they say, he had to get home by swimming across a river in which there was a large and hungry pike. El-ahrairah combed himself until he had enough fur to cover a clay rabbit, which he pushed into the water. The pike rushed at it, bit it and left it in disgust. After a little, it drifted to the bank and El-ahrairah dragged it out and waited a while before pushing it in again. After an hour of this, the pike left it alone, and when it had done so for the fifth time, El-ahrairah swam across himself and went home. Some rabbits say he controls the weather, because the wind, the damp and the dew are friends and instruments to rabbits against their enemies.”

“By law, I could not have another, but my in-laws were desperate for a boy, a male heir who could carry on the family name. If we had lived in the countryside, they might have just abandoned or drowned the baby girl … However, there was one loophole to the one-child rule: if your baby had a handicap, you were allowed to have another.”

″‘So disgraceful! Sharing a hotel room when they aren’t even married! You know, some people might think they eloped and are coming here for their honeymoon!’ Nadine Shaw chimed in, though secretly the thought of any potential scandal that might bring those high-and-mighty Youngs down a peg filled her with glee.”

“This was the way things had been since their childhood as neighbors growing up on Serangoon Road, mainly because, coming from a Chinese-speaking family, Carol had always felt inferior to Eleanor, who was brought up speaking English first.”

“In an unfamiliar culture, it is wise to offer no innovations, no suggestions, or lessons.”

“I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.”

“Education had been a great gift for him. He believed that lack of education was the root of all the Pakistan’s problems. Ignorance allowed politicians to fool people and bad administrators to be reelected. He believed schooling should be available for all, rich and poor, boys and girls.”

“We felt like the Taliban saw us as little dolls to control, telling us what to do and how to dress. I thought if God wanted us to be like that He wouldn’t have made us all different.”

“The Taliban could take our pens and books, but they could not stop our minds from thinking.”

“School wasn’t the only thing my aunts missed out on. In the morning when my father was given a bowl of cream with his tea, his sisters were given only tea. If there were eggs, they would only be for the boys. When a chicken was slaughtered for dinner, the girls would get the wings and the neck while the luscious breast meat was enjoyed by my father, his brother, and my grandfather. ‘From early on I could feel I was different from my sisters,’ my father says.”

″‘They are abusing our religion,’ I said in interviews. ‘How will you accept Islam if I put a gun to your head and say Islam is the true religion? If they want every person in the world to be Muslim why don’t they show themselves to be good Muslims first?‘”

“Islamabad was totally different from Swat. It was as different for us as Islamabad is to New York. Shiza introduced us to women who were lawyers and doctors and also activists, which showed us that women could do important jobs yet still keep their culture and traditions. We saw women in the streets without purdah, their heads completely uncovered. I stopped wearing my shawl over my head in some of the meetings, thinking I had become a modern girl.”

“I am very proud to be a Pashtun, but sometimes I think our code of conduct has a lot to answer for, particularly where the treatment of women is concerned.”

“The Taliban became the enemy of fine arts, culture, and our history. The Swat Museum moved its collection away for safekeeping. The Taliban destroyed everything old and brought nothing new.”

“We liked to be known as the clever girls. When we decorated our hands with henna for holidays and weddings, we drew calculus and chemical formula instead of flowers and butterflies.”

“But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”

“Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Chaos begets chaos. Instability begets instability. Welcome to family life for the American hillbilly.”

“But what drove Mamaw’s initial dislike were the parts of him that most resembled her. Mamaw apparently understood what would take me another twenty years to learn: that social class in America isn’t just about money. And her desire that her children do better than she had done extended past their education and employment and into the relationships they formed. When it came to spouses for her kids and parents for her grandkids, Mamaw felt, whether she knew it consciously, that she wasn’t good enough.”

“There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.”

“I asked Doc about German poets, and he replied that Goethe was the only one in his opinion who could be considered worthy, but he personally found him a terrible bore and that the Germans put all their poetry to music. He declared I should study the English for their poetry and the Germans for their music.”

“As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings. Okonkwo had clearly washed his hands and so he ate with kings and elders. ”

“Behind [the elders] was the big and ancient silk-cotton tree which was sacred. Spirits of good children lived in that tree waiting to be born. On ordinary days young women who desired children came to sit under its shade.”

“Having spoken plainly so far, Okoye said the next half a dozen sentences in proverbs. Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. Okoye was a great talker and he spoke for a long time, skirting round the subject and then hitting it finally.”

“‘Is that me?’ Ekwefi called back. That was the way people answered calls from outside. They never answered yes for fear it might be an evil spirit calling.”

“Well, but I cannot speak with a woman,” objected Wang Lung mildly. He could make nothing of the situation in which he found himself, and he was still staring about him. “Well, and why not?” retorted the woman with anger.”

“Don’t condemn the culture; redeem it.”

“It would have been beneath him to notice her. Instead he feigned great interest in the clouds and he cried, “That cloud which hangs upon the left horn of the new moon speaks of rain. It will come not later than tomorrow night.”

“All through the long months of winter she lay dying and upon her bed, and for the first time Wang Lung and his children knew what she had been in the house, and how she made comfort for them all and they had not known it.”

“Now father and son could rest. There was a woman coming to the house. Never again would Wang Lung have to rise summer and winter at dawn to light the fire. He could lie in his bed and wait, and he also would have a bowl of water brought to him, and if the earth were fruitful there would be tea leaves in the water. ”

“Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.”

“He gave me the only answer he could—that history proved time and again it was difficult to change what people believed as truth.”

“The same blood runs in every human on the earth. You just have to see past the variations in skin and culture.”

“The experience of coming alive as a man is so rate in our culture right now.”

“The Hundred Poems...this poem is not one of them. She took a great risk hiding this paper, and my grandfather and grandmother took a great risk keeping it. What poems could be worth losing everything for?”

“They decided our culture was too cluttered. They created commissions to choose the hundred best of everything: Hundred Songs, Hundred Paintings, the rest were eliminated. How can we appreciate anything fully when overwhelmed with too much?”

“In all their guises, the Lost Generation shared another thing - they experienced firsthand the seismic shift in culture that signaled the painful birth of the Modern World.”

“It was a story of white selling black, of black cultures “contaminating” white ones with a single cell in an era when a person with “one drop” of black blood had only recently gained the legal right to marry a white person. It was also the story of cells from an uncredited black woman becoming one of the most important tools in medicine.”

″‘I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?‘”

“When an ancient temptation or trial becomes a feature in the culture, a way of life that is expected and encouraged, Christians have a stumbling block put before them that is hard to recognize for what it is, for it has been made into a monument, gilded with bronze and bathed in decorative lights.”

“The bottom line on culture and grit is: If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you’re a leader, and you want the people in your organization to be grittier, create a gritty culture.”

“All cultures throw certain stumbling blocks in the way of those who pursue gospel realities.”

″‘When a man consorts much with a people,’ continued Hawk-eye, ′ if they are honest, and he no knave, love will grow up atwixt them.‘”

“When I look back, I realize she raised me like a white kid—not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered.”

“This little man, five-foot-nine at most and not even American, was going to teach them about cowboys?”

“You’re the kind of girl I should have married. ”

″‘It is later than you think’ could not be expressed in Martian—nor could ‘Haste makes waste,’ though for a different reason: the first notion was inconceivable while the latter was an unexpressed Martian basic, as unnecessary as telling a fish to bathe. But ‘As it was in the Beginning, is now and ever shall be’ was so Martian in mood that it could be translated more easily than ‘two plus two makes four’—which was not a truism on Mars.”

“Around a minor G-type star toward one edge of a medium-sized galaxy planets swung as they had for billions of years, under a modified inverse square law that shaped space. Four were big enough, as planets go, to be noticeable; the rest were pebbles, concealed in the fiery skirts of the primary or lost in the black reaches of space. All, as is always the case, were infected with that oddity of distorted entropy called life; on the third and fourth planets surface temperatures cycled around the freezing point of hydrogen monoxide; in consequence they had developed life forms similar enough to permit a degree of social contact.”

“I love Indians. I love our songs, your dances, and your souls. And I love your art.”

“Television does not extend or amplify literate culture. It attacks it.”

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.”

“If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.”

“Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.”

“I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.”

“Your job is to bow as low as you can, and don’t look them in the eye.”

“What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.”

“There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live. Surely these should never be confused in the mind of any man who has the slightest inkling of what culture is.”

“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture or violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. ”

“No person, in any culture, likes to be bullied. No person likes living in fear because his or her ideas are different. Nobody likes being poor or hungry, and nobody likes to live under an economic system in which the fruits of his or her labor go perpetually unrewarded.”

“In my culture, parents were sacred. We at least owed them an answer.”

“Call Me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.”

“The novel was about the end of the world in the year 2000, and the name of the book was 2000 A.D. It told about how mad scientists made a terrific bomb that wiped out the whole world.”

“Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction.”

“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”

“In a culture which holds the two-parent patriarchal family in higher esteem than any other arrangement, all children feel emotionally insecure when their family does not measure up to the standard.”

“A doctor who didn’t understand local culture would probably mistake many patients’ complaints for bizarre superstitions.”

″ When you make the choice to come to America, you become black. ”

“A doctor who knew nothing about local beliefs might end up at war with Voodoo priests, but a doctor-anthropologist who understood those beliefs could find ways to make Voodoo houngans his allies.”

“Its walls had been lined with human remains, piled to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of Paris.”

“I’ve been thinking . . . all this time, while I was sitting in my chair. Those white doctors haven’t helped you at all. Maybe we had better send for someone else.”

“Though Chicago was rapidly achieving recognition as an industrial and mercantile dynamo, its leading men felt keenly the slander from New York that their city had few cultural assets.”

“Chorus: If only Apollo, Prince of the lyric, had put in our hearts the invention Of music and songs for the lyre Wouldn’t I then have raised up a feminine paean To answer the epic of men?”

“Some [cultures], like our own, have such low, casual, take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards marriage as to make the biblical vision seem ludicrous to other people.”

“In the summer of 1922 a family friend gave him a biography of Leonardo da Vinci that so inspired him he transferred to Columbia University to ‘shift my interest from science to cultural history’ and the humanities.”

“It’s certainly not always unspoken. The religions of your culture aren’t reticent about it. Man is the end product of creation.”

“What do you look at while you’re making up your mind? Ours is not a reflective culture, we do no raise our eyes up to the hills. Most of the time we decide the critical things while looking at the linoleum floor of an institutional corridor, or whispering hurriedly in a waiting room with a television blatting nonsense.”

“This is gospel-humility, blessed self-forgetfulness. Not thinking less of myself as in modern cultures, or less of myself as in traditional cultures. Simply thinking of myself less.”

″...death itself is not only a state, but a complex symbol, the significance of which will vary from one person to another and from one culture to another.”

“The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up.”

“When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent, but it will frame all relationships as power struggles.”

“Parents, educators, other adults, institutions- the culture itself- may say one thing to children about nature’s gifts, but so many of our actions and messages- especially the ones we cannot hear ourselves deliver- are different. And children hear very well.”

“I was one tiny pulsar in a swirling, luminous galaxy of Iranians, held together by the gravity of thousands of years of culture and heritage.”

Mr. Tudor’s uncle had married an English lady who was third cousin to a living lord, and Amy regarded the whole family with great respect, for in spite of her American birth and breeding, she possessed that reverence for titles which haunts the best of us—that unacknowledged loyalty to the early faith in kings which set the most democratic nation under the sun in ferment at the coming of a royal yellow-haired laddie, some years ago, and which still has something to do with the love the young country bears the old, like that of a big son for an imperious little mother, who held him while she could, and let him go with a farewell scolding when he rebelled.

“Haydée is a very uncommon name in France, but is common enough in Albania and Epirus; it is as if you said, for example, Chastity, Modesty, Innocence,—it is a kind of baptismal name, as you Parisians call it.”

“The whole system of culture, the chief element in the condition of the people, must be completely transformed. Instead of poverty, general prosperity and content; instead of hostility, harmony and unity of interests.”