#culture

Because we imagine that we are what humanity was divinely destined to become, we assume that our prehistoric ancestors were trying to be us, but just lacked the tools and techniques to succeed. We invest our ancestors with our own predelictions in what seem to us primitive and unevolved forms. As an example of all this, we take it for granted that our religions represent humanity's ultimate and highest spiritual development and expect to find among our ancestors only crude, fumbling harbingers of these religions. We certainly don't expect to find robust, fully developed religions whose expressions are entirely different from ours. ↗

— Daniel Quinn

#culture-indentity #philosophy #religion #imagination

It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. I cannot fathom how he isn't the number-one box office star in America, because every straight girl I know would see her soul to share a milkshake with that motherfucker. ↗

— Chuck Klosterman

#pop-culture #love

In WASP families, if you don't get along with someone, you have as little to do with them as possible. In Jewish families, you move next door, to make them as miserable as possible. ↗

— Doreen Orion

#culture #culture-critique #family #family-drama #family-relationships

The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if you are emotionally detached from it. I have always viewed it from a safe distance, knowing I don't belong; it doesn't include me, and it never has. no matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to. ↗

— George Carlin

#love

Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing. ↗

— Criss Jami

#bandwagon #compassion #culture #fads #flattery

And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems. ↗

— Donna George Storey

#japan #poetry #tourism #travel #japan

The Professor noted two nymphs with strawberries on their heads, a DayGlo Amish lady, a mustachioed man in a rainbow apron. He wrote Saturday Night Fever, then crossed it out and wrote Drag Ball + Bollywood and underlined it twice. ↗

— La Carmina

#hello-kitty #japan #pop-culture #tokyo #travel

From New Year's Eve through the third of January, the streets of Tokyo grew quiet, as if all the people had disappeared. ↗

— Shogo Oketani

#culture #japan #tokyo #japan

One very good way to invite stares of disapproval in Japan is to walk and eat at the same time. ↗

— Andrew Horvat

#japan #travel #japan

The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250] ↗

— Northrop Frye

#poetic-theory #world-culture #mythology