Quotes About Culture

It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn't mine. I felt as if I was living out someone else's romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.

Nested in the soft, forgiving bosom of America's consumer culture, I felt safe; it was as if I had dropped into a long hibernation.

Human beings are members of a whole In creation of one essence and soul. Ben informed me that those lines were written by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa'adi, one of the most beloved figures in Iranian culture. We found this ironic, given how much of my time at UNGA was devoted to trying to curb Iran's development of nuclear weapons. Apparently, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad didn't share the poet's gentle sensibilities.

I was talking to my lawyer and he was saying we have to meet with somebody right away because they really want to get something done. I said, okay, how about tomorrow? He said, 'Well no, it's going to take at least two weeks.' And I had to explain, 'Where I'm from, right away means if we don't do something in half an hour somebody dies.

we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial, religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape. And instead of resolving these tensions or mediating these conflicts, our politics fans them, exploits them, and drives us further apart.

In the battle for Russia's identity, fear and fatalism usually beat out hope and change.

For I'm convinced that the pandemic we're currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can't help but collide.

African American boys or white boys. They don't have rituals, road maps, and initiation rites into a clear sense of a male strength and energy that is positive as opposed to just dominating.

The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person…

common courtesy spoke across cultures

Ben informed me that those lines were written by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa'adi, one of the most beloved figures in Iranian culture. We found this ironic, given how much of my time at UNGA was devoted to trying to curb Iran's development of nuclear weapons.

I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant

A literate society depends on three things: culture, communication, and choice. One could add that culture is also faith and morality, that communication is also social interaction and equality, and that choice is both individualism and political action.

For Americans, the idea of living in another country has not only exotic, but let us be frank, vaguely unpatriotic connotations. But having to explain what is after all one's own self over and over again makes the American abroad more ferociously patriotic than he would ever dare to be at home.

We don't usually talk about American nationalism, but it is a mark of how deep it runs that we apply the word "nationalism" to Serbs, Russians, and others, while believing ourselves to possess a uniquely superior version called "patriotism.

We may imagine that the mind houses a singular self, an essence of I-ness, distinct from all other selves and consistent over time. But attend closely to your thoughts and you find they are thoroughly colonized by the thoughts of others, through language, culture, and mutual expectations. The answer to the question of what I am, or you are, requires some historical and geographical setting.

We don't usually talk about American nationalism, but it is a mark of how deep it runs that we apply the word "nationalism" to Serbs, Russians, and others, while believing ourselves to possess a uniquely superior version called

Hasta el ámbito académico, que uno podía considerar un reducto seguro para los gruñones y misántropos, está empezando a sufrir las incursiones del pensamiento positivo.

Our culture's official rejection of the Crone figure was related to rejection of women, particularly elder women. The gray-haired high priestesses, once respected tribal matriarchs of pre-Christian Europe, were transformed by the newly dominant patriarchy into minions of the devil. Through the Middle Ages, this trend gathered momentum, finally developing a frenzy that legally murdered millions of elder women from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries.

There are real problems, not just money and power, in my own lands.

once you pack in all the Lafrenières, Borés, Macartys, Chauvins, Viellards, Boisclaires, Boisblancs, and Lebedoyere connections, even if they don't have dancing afterward—which they will

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.

We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.