Quotes about culture

Culture hides more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.

The real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own.

[C]ontradictions are culture’s engines, responsible for... creativity and dynamism... Just as... clashing musical notes... force... music forward.., discord in... thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, reevaluate and criticise. Consistency is the playground of dull minds.

Myths and fictions accustom... people... to think in certain ways, to believe in... certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. ...[T]hereby ...artificial instincts ...enable millions of strangers to cooperate ...This network of artificial instinct is ...'Culture'.

The painted, engraved, and carved images of prehistory are threads from past cultures, and we are foreigners trying to interpret their meaning. Perhaps more than anything else, art can be fully understood only in the context of the culture that produced it.

A culture is a total way of life. It embraces what people ate and what they wore; the way they walked and the way they talked; the manner in which they treated death and greeted the newborn. Obviously, unique features came into existence in virtually every locality with regard to all social details. In addition, the continent of Africa south of the great Sahara desert formed a broad community where resemblances were clearly discernible. For example, music and dance had key roles in “uncontaminated” African society. They were ever present at birth, initiation, marriage, death, as well as at times of recreation. Africa is the continent of drums and percussion. African peoples reached the pinnacle of achievement in that sphere.

Culture is like a smog. To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated.

There is nothing worse than a cultural barbarian with pretensions.

Today, the culture can hardly, if at all, reflect the society in which people live.

Modern culture is defined by this extraordinary freedom to ransack the world storehouse and to engorge any and every style it comes upon.

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

Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.