For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present.
Quotes on culture
Americans are interesting creatures. They criticize those who speak their language with a slight accent but have no issues with butchering most other languages, my name included.
Several centuries ago it was believed that the fly agaric, combined with the bufotenin-containing mucus of toads, was an ingredient of witches’ brews, which made flying on their broomsticks possible. Even Santa Claus and Father Christmas are connected to Fly Agaric and their reindeer, which, by the way, like their portion of fly agarics and ‘living’ water.
Death would be an extremely bad thing like most of us paint it, if being dead were painful.
A faithful leader shall surely become a fruitful leadear
Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis.
In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane.
You get what you expect and you deserve what you tolerate.
Je mehr Kultur, desto weniger Freiheit, das ist ein wahres Wort.
I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong.