Quotes About Culture

We don't have a laugh track, which helped Seinfeld a lot, and did kind of tell people when to laugh. It just made it a lot easier. Our show doesn't have that, so it's hard for Middle America to catch on.

I have a book out called 'The Beauty Equation' and it discusses how off track we have gone in considering beauty.

If people can keep track of all the celebrity gossip, there's no reason we can't also assimilate the key concepts of economic philosophy.

Two records put me over the top with hip-hop. One of them was 'Planet Rock,' and the other had no lyrics - it was called 'Numbers,' from a group called Kraftwerk. Every kid in the 'hood in New York and New Jersey was popping, locking, and breaking to that record. It was the hottest track on the street at the time.

I don't listen to much rap, really. I can rarely listen to a whole record of it, because musically, it's very formulaic, and oftentimes it doesn't have the best hooks on every track.

I've been lucky to have made a number of travel programmes with the BBC, the object being to see places off the beaten track. As a result, I've often had a guide who's been able to show me things that you wouldn't see with a tour group.

Build an environment that empowers your team to take risks. Set metrics for what needs to be achieved and measure against them to track progress along the way. If targets aren't being met, challenge your team to reassess and come back with a new strategy. And create a culture where people are awarded for challenging the status quo.

Pop music has a pretty good track record of embracing queer culture.

Music has no language. That's something I've come to believe in even more ever since 'Kolaveri Di' happened. I don't deliberately make separate Tamil, Hindi, or Telugu tracks.

I don't think people really do listen. We plug into music, and we have short attention spans. We tend to download individual tracks from iTunes rather than a whole album. We buy music DVDs and watch them once, and then they disappear into a drawer, or we loan them to a friend, and we never watch it again.

So many shows don't have laugh tracks now that, when you hear it, it can be slightly jarring.

Once, the world was full of mysteries, some of them frightening, some of them wonderful, some of them merely fascinating. Now, it can be a banal and predictable place, the tracks of daily life so well-beaten and defined, our culture awash with the imbecile obvious, our existence suffocating in safety. But mysteries remain.

Nowadays, who actually listens to the tracks on an album, anyway?

The first thing I remember hearing was just the dance music that was in the charts when I was growing up. I don't remember many of the names of specific tracks - they were just kind of early acid house things.

People have looked at all sorts of effects of globalization and blamed trade. But it's lots of things.

Everywhere in the world, whether manufacturing, trade or whatever, it is controlled by one apparatus and one policy perspective. Here we have one prime minister with good intentions, and six ministries running their own empires. This creates problems including the import culture.

We have to change the kind of free trade deals we sign. We would have to change the absolutely central role of frenetic consumption in our culture. We would have to change the role of money in politics and our political system.

Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped.

The Japanese, despite the trade deficit and their ability to build fabulous automobiles, still think that a guy in a monster suit is all that is needed for a monster movie.

When in Rome, I must do as the Romans do. When in America, make Bikram copyright and trademark.

Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent.

I know what I write about seems exotic to a lot of people, but not for me. I pulled up to an old trading post and saw a few elderly Navajos sitting on a bench. I felt right at home.

The real problem at the moment is that the banks - because of their existing culture, which is frankly anti-business, obsession with short-term trading profits, not focusing on the long term - are throttling the recovery of British industry.

People need to understand, we can come together as a nation. We can create a culture of life. More and more young people today are embracing life because we know we are - we're better for it.