Mark Twain Quotes

Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.

Culture is the air we breathe all around us.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.

Virtually every civilized society today holds sacred the right to peaceably bury their dead.

Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.

It amazes me that the most Christian funerals are the most barbaric funeral rites of passage that are celebrated anywhere in the world.

Funerals are a pagan rite. There's not any doubt about it.

The universal practice of closing the eyes of the dead may be thought to have originated in the desire that he might be prevented from seeing his way.

In modern Western culture, the new is considered better than the old, and thus change itself is considered good; in tradition bound Arab cultures, the old is considered better than the new, and thus the retention of the existing order is good.

In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent community and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today we cannot count on any such inheritance.

Culture is more important than politics.

You need to figure out other societies, where they came from, what the people believe in, what they do, how their ethnic divisions work, which is often very different from our own; then design your policies around that. Pay attention. I think that's the simple answer, which is just to realize that not everybody is like the United States. Whether you study history or sociology, or anthropology, journalism, there's room for seeing there are other cultures and other ways and other structures.

… a country's laws are written upon paper, and that its customs are engraved upon brass. One may play with the one, but not with the other. It is less risky for a stranger to dance upon our Constitution in the public square than to affront one of our solidified customs. The one is merely eminently respectable, the other is sacred.

Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.

People are honest, that's the culture. East Coast, but specifically Boston. People are just good people.

There are a lot of things that people learn and live through culture first, and politics comes afterward.

We have a unique culture.

Culture in general is important, and people's identify is tied up in it. It's how we connect with others.

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

Culture is coded wisdom

Our customs, behaviors, and values are byproducts of our culture.

A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.

I don't personally feel any association with a kind of culture related to state, or culture related to power, which I think is always disgusting.

The civilization of a country consists in the quality of life that is lived there, and this quality shows plainest in the things that people choose to talk about when they talk together, and in the way they choose to talk about them.

We need to create a society in which civility rules over cynicism and apathy.