What really binds men together is their culture, the ideas and the standards they have in common.

Man is born a barbarian, and only raises himself above the beast by culture.

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.

Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture.

Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

Humans become human through intense learning not just of survival skills but of customs and social mores, kinship and social laws-that is, culture.

Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.

In the Anthropology Club, as I understood it, you were permitted, if not required, to despise only one thing, and that was your own culture, that of the West.