Terry Eagleton Quotes

Culture is the air we breathe all around us.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

What people will - or will not - laugh at is mainly determined by their social conditioning.

Culture is your operating system.

Culture is everything you don't have to do.

If someone were to put a proposition before men bidding them choose, after examination, the best customs in the world, each nation would certainly select its own.

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

One of the things about the modern world is that the public and the private - which is not the same as the public and the personal - but the public and the private... it's very, very much harder than it used to be to have things that are private and things that are public.

There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.

To me, I learned along the way, you know, culture is behavior. That's all it is; culture is people's behaviors.

Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.

In Africa... age is not important over there. They don't care.

You can only judge anything that happened in the times, in the times that that happened.

A mind cannot be independent of culture.

Culture is more important than politics.

There is endless variety in the details of the customs and laws which prevail of the world at large.

I don't understand anything about America's culture.

Culture is more important than politics and government.

I am almost neurotically private myself. Because I think it's an important distinction to make between privacy and public sphere.

In the U.S., women smile more than men. In the U.K., there's no difference between men and women.

It's a very ancient culture, British culture. You can't be seen to be too wealthy, and you certainly can't be seen to be giving away any of your wealth either because that's sort of vulgar, too. It's funny, that, because in New York, if you are wealthy, you have to be philanthropic to be successful.

Americans are locked into our traditions.

You know, people come from cultures all around the world. Many of those cultures, you know, are not terribly successful. You can tell because you go to the countries and they're doing really poorly, and a lot of why they're doing poorly is because of the outlook, mind-set, and behavior of the people.

In the Western standards of modesty, there are different guidelines.

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.