Quotes About Culture

As I wrote about my childhood, I realized that there was no big tragedy. Being multiethnic is not a tragedy. I didn't have any big life-threatening illnesses, no tumors, no kidney malfunctions... I came from a very poor family. I was chubby as a kid.

A nation that has no music and no fairytales is a tragedy.

All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I first began to think about what profession I should go into. It was 1978. I was seven and had just been handed over by the women of my family to the earnest and self-important gatherings of the men. I was no longer the responsibility of my aunts and older female cousins. I was now a man. This was a tragedy.

Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.

I find myself increasingly forced to think of my ethnic identity instead of the national identity I adopted as a boy in 1976. That is discomfiting for me, and a tragedy for America.

There is something deeply wrong with a political culture which only wants to talk about incarceration in the aftermath of a tragedy.

There are huge pluses in Scottish archaeology that you simply don't get elsewhere. Partly that's to do with the tragedy of the clearances, and that so much of the landscape has been owned by so few people that didn't want it messed around with.

Growing up in Westboro, there was a culture of celebrating death and tragedy... a very calloused way of seeing other people's pain. After I left, it took me a while to be able to really empathize with what it must have been like for the loved ones of people whose funerals we protested.

Flamenco is dark - it's about tragedy and intensity.

Perhaps we could do without tragedy in art - but what about comedy? Is it a coincidence that so many of the best American humorists have been Jewish and African-American?

In the States actors get their own trailers, but in Korea all the actors group up in one room, and stay there together the whole day.

We should train kids in the music and dance of our legends. That's how we can keep the traditions alive.

The one album I can't live without is called 'Cumbolo' by a band called Culture. Every song on their album is deep, but there's one in particular called 'This Train.' I have a tattoo of the lyrics on my left arm.

I grew up in a house full of books, and we belonged to the Country Lending Service - each month the State Library would send us a parcel of books by train.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

The intellectual bourgeois of the old Empire - tepid and unimaginative, mentally slow, arrogant, and incorrectly trained - has proven his incapacity to be the bearer of German culture. His benumbed world is now toppled, its spirit is overthrown, and is in the midst of being recast into a new mold.

I was born and trained to communicate music, just as the sons were born and trained to hunt, and I was lucky to have grown up in Hungary, a country that lives and breathes music-that has a passionate belief in the power of music as a celebration of life.

I was trained to be more technical in Europe because that's the audience. They enjoy a more technical style.

I love the way we do theatre in London: I love the fact that everybody is trained.

I always serve the writer first because I'm English trained, even though I'm American.

I trained in every form of dance - started as a tap dancer when I was a kid, then contemporary, ballet, ballroom, everything. Russian, Swedish.

A lot of what is wrong with corporate America has to do with a culture filled with antibodies trained to expel anything different. HR departments often want cookie cutter employees, which inevitably results in cookie cutter solutions.

I spent ten years in London; I trained there. But because I started in English, it kind of feels the most natural to me, to act in English, which is a strange thing. My language is Spanish; I grew up in Argentina. I speak to my family in Spanish, but if you were to ask me what language I connect with, it'd be English in some weird way.