Quotes About Culture

At international meetings, Americans and Brits often mistake the extraordinary privilege of being able to speak in their mother tongue for intellectual superiority. Because no one is going to disagree with them in broken English, they are rarely disabused of this notion.

Cultural diversity does not only imply geographically separated cultures. It can also include ethnic, class, professional, or organizational cultures. The mere fact that an individual is different from most people around him promotes more open and divergent, perhaps even rebellious, thinking in that person.

Cultural diversity does not only imply geographically separated cultures. It can also include ethnic, class, professional, or organizational cultures. The mere fact that an individual is different from most people around him promotes more open and divergent, perhaps even rebellious, thinking in that person. Such a person is more prone to question traditions, rules, and boundaries—and to search for answers where others may not think to.

When we revolt it's not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for a variety of reasons, we can no longer breathe

Introducing someone as a "Negro poet with a University degree" or again, quite simply, the expression, "a great black poet." These ready-made phrases, which seem in a common-sense way to fill a need-or have a hidden subtlety, a permanent rub.

One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it.

To speak...means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

there is an extraordinary power in the possession of a language.

It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the negro who creates negritude.

The colonized intellectual is responsible not to his national culture, but to the nation as a whole, whose culture is, after all, but one aspect. The colonized intellectual should not be concerned with choosing how or where he decides to wage the national struggle. (168)

National culture is the collective thought process of a people to describe, justify, and extol the actions whereby they have joined forces and remained strong. National culture in the underdeveloped countries, therefore, must lie at the very heart of the liberation struggle these countries are waging. (168)

The passion with which native intellectuals defend the existence of their national culture may be a source of amazement; but those who condemn this exaggerated passion are strangely apt to forget that their own psyche and their own selves are conveniently sheltered behind a French or German culture which has given full proof of its existence and which is uncontested.

Self-criticism has been much talked about recently, but few realize that it was first of all an African institution.

Such a colonized intellectual, dusted over by colonial culture, will in the same way discover the substance of village assemblies, the cohesion of people's committees, and the extraordinary fruitfulness of local meetings and groupments. Henceforward, the interests of one will be the interests of all, for in concrete fact everyone will be discovered by the troops, everyone will be massacred—or everyone will be saved.

There can be no such thing as rigorously identical cultures. To believe one can create a black culture is to forget oddly enough that "Negroes" are in the process of disappearing, since those who created them are witnessing the demise of their economic and cultural superiority. There will be no such thing as a black culture . . .

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.

I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.

When we revolt it's not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe

A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

There is no fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man. A close connection between race and personality has never been established.

The behavior of an individual is therefore determined not by his racial affiliation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment.

I believe the present state of our knowledge justifies us in saying that, while individuals differ, biological differences are small. There is no reason to believe that one race is by nature so much more intelligent, endowed with great will power, or emotionally more stable than another that the difference would materially influence its culture.

Ä°lkel ve soyutlanm?? kabileler bize stabil görünürler; çünkü rahat ve müdahale edilmeyen koÅŸullarda deÄŸiÅŸim oldukça yavaÅŸt?r.

Kültür, büyük ölçüde, insanlar?n iç yaÅŸant?s?yla alâkas? olmayan d?? etkenli hadiseler ile belirlenir.