The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

People are all exactly alike. There’s no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we’d be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian...

Science works because the phenomenon being described can be relied on to remain the same. Even in quantum physics, where phenomena are changed by observation, the way in which observation interferes is regular and falls...

I’m not the kind of writer who’s able to block out the world around me. I’m mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about...

Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’....

Beauty” and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be “beautiful” to be sexual. That of course is not...

We have a name for the sum of grievances and compromises, this sheer normality of life lived among other people. We call it civilization. Culture, society, the workaday interactions of ordinary time.

In order to live without creating any serious problems for the group’s harmony, people avoid expressing their ideas clearly, even the point of avoiding giving a simple yes or no answer. If a person really...

We must be compelled to hold this doctrine to be false, and the old and new law called the Old and new Testament, to be impositions, fables and forgeries

The full measure of a culture embraces both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel their lives. And no description of a people can...

A modern culture built on the back of dying gods immerses me.

Literature, art, science, and religion degenerate when polemical struggle supplants the independent creation of ideas.

Recognizing that God has called you to function as his agent defines your task as a parent. Our culture has reduced parenting to providing care. Parents often see the task in these narrow terms. The...

To know your way round a library is to master the whole of culture, i.e. the whole world.

I was very impressed with the culture of the committee. You leave your hat at the door, so to speak, and do the best that you can with the material that’s in front of you....

When you do music concerts at Taj Mahal and the Acropolis, you have to be careful about your performance being appropriate with the place that surrounds you. It has to be appropriate to the culture...

My happiness is being able to present my talents for people to see, and I feel like I’m an ambassador of Thai history and Thai culture on film so that people can see Muay Thai.

Paranoia is just having the right information.

get that”, we will forever be a society that thinks Beautiful Mind was a spy movie and every stranger is really a friend on Facebook.

We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish “me, me, me” culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a...

Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.

I think it’s even harder because I think as always, Hollywood is sort of glamour central for the world, and the entire world looks to it for not only entertainment, but the whole idea of...

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that’s why it survives.”[Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit...

Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

As a culture, we are not comfortable with mortality. We do not accept it the way other cultures do. We cling to youth, and we don’t want to die. It’s like, ‘Well, too bad, we...

I have a feeling that we’ve seen the dismantling of civilisation, brick by brick, and now we’re looking into the void. We thought that we were liberating people from oppressive cultural circumstances, but we were,...

‎”I feel certain that Conservatism is through unless Conservatives can demonstrate and communicate the difference between being concerned with [the unemployed, the sick without medical care, human welfare, etc.] and believing that the federal government...

Whenever royalty visits, I think it is something that really excites people, gets them interested in heritage and culture.

Imagine going to work every day to do only and exactly what you love!! All the work gets done because of the abundant diversity of your team. Different skills, interests and talents are woven together...

I respect traditional people – they have the eyes which see value in the tarnished. This is a gift in itself. Tradition requires a wealth of discipline in order to be adhered to, hence it...

The formal definition of impact is a forcible contact between two things, and God has designed our lives for a collision course with the world.

The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.

Virtues are common, but the virtuous are very few. This is because ordinarily, people know but do not apply what they know. To break the culture, look for more information; learn more and apply more....

Nations rise and fall, flourish and decay, by what they believe in and by what their culture stands for.

The bad thing about this flap is that people will point a finger at Salt Lake City and a culture that should not be credited that way. People will say it’s Salt Lake City, but...

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools,...

. Die Wörter entstanden erst, wenn die Sache verschwunden war.

Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it sank into submission, marked the end of their resistance.

James Taylor may be an all-American boy but he isn’t Horatio Alger, and the lionizing of many rock stars by the rock press has as much to do with old fashioned rags-to-riches stories as does...

I think the church has done a pretty good job at reaching the “down and outers” but not a good job at reaching the “up and outers.” I feel like one of my mandates is...

Charity is one of those remarkable words that helps to identify the fault lines of a culture.

Cookbooks are almost a substitution for a lost sense of culture. People want some other life than the one they’re living, so they buy a cookbook with pictures and imagine themselves as part of that...

Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily...

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings

Like the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria or the supremely ignorant incineration of stacks of invaluable Mayan codices, the loss of knowledge we are experiencing as the last of the traditional elders pass...

Enron was becoming a virtual cult of creativity, often placing swagger over substance. New ideas were celebrated for their newness, for their potential; tried and true businesses like the pipelines were almost derided.

Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders. Eating disorders are complex, but what they all seem to have in common is the ability to distract women from the memories,...

For hundreds of years Iranians have been migrating to many parts of the world. They took Islamic culture to other parts of the world and established it there.

Celebrity culture is an aspirational culture regardless of how much you don’t want it to be.