I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.
I'm a hybrid, from a cultural perspective, but I don't think in these terms. I'm more simple than that. I'm a mammal who will live 70 years, more or less, who believes in God and likes his life.
The absence of God in most spheres of life is perceived to be normal, and even Christians feel it as normal - which is why absorbing the culture all around us and its priorities is so dangerous.
In Europe they call geeks 'smart people,' and frankly I think we live in a culture that doesn't value intelligence enough; so I am very proud in saying that I am a geek.
George Tenet has been the director of central intelligence since 1997, time enough to have changed the Agency's culture. He has failed. He should go.
Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion.
The conductor is the artistic leader and sometimes cultural arbiter of his or her community. It is their leadership that is looked to and should anything go wrong, they are the persons taking most of the heat.
The point is that there is tremendous hypocrisy among the Christian right. And I think that Christian voters should start looking at global warming and extreme poverty as a religious issue that speaks to the culture of life.
We expected that people were just waiting for the collapse of the Soviet Union, or at least for its retreat, and they were going to be full of initiative in all areas of life - in culture, in economy and in politics.
A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.
My second record was all about big ideas - I was trying to make big statements about the culture, about life. I think in a certain way, I was a 27 year old kid with a guitar.
I think we live in a culture where it is really difficult to get privacy because everything is so accessible. It's very difficult to maintain your comfortable life with a sort of mystique.
There are some liberals eager to embrace a culture void of morals, but the majority of America is made up of honest, hard-working families who turned out in droves to protect the traditional way of life.
I feel that there's a lot of would-be guardians of the culture who think that high-minded literary purpose and the life that gets chronicled in the gossip columns, that these two things are incompatible.
The United States Jewish population has made many vital contributions in all areas of our society in such ways as helping to develop the cultural, scientific, political and economic life of our country.
We in Illinois are very fortunate to have a number of historic structures that have added immeasurably to the cultural life of the state, to the tourism industry of the state which by the way is our number one industry.
The misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it.
Women are outperforming men in almost every sphere of life in our society and the women of East Indian ancestry are no exception to this rule. They have broken the cultural mould.
Middle-class Pakistani cultural life is what I've seen, what I know - they're not all screaming faceless mullahs. It's disturbing that in American films, the character on the other side is not even named.
What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.
Once you have a certain amount of money, it ceases to be an issue. I'd rather put my cultural imprint on the fabric of life. After money, all you want is immortality.
