Quotes About Culture

Hong Kong has created one of the most successful societies on Earth.

The Native American cultures on this continent, most of them, were matrilineal, and some women were the chiefs. Societies were about balance.

Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies.

And what are we going to leave for future generations? Are we going to leave them only buildings, cars? Or are we going to create more empathetic, more diverse societies more open to diversity?

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

Al Jazeera should understand the societies, should understand the culture of the civilisation, should understand the dynamics of the societies, should be part of this understanding; and on the other level, Al Jazeera should concentrate on the margin rather than the centre. It means that Al Jazeera should be close to the public.

If a male primate is mean to a female primate, her whole family will come after him. We don't have that sort of accountability in industrial societies.

Whatever their relative valuation of the single and married states, most societies in history made sharp distinctions between those who married and those who remained single: They were seen as mutually exclusive ways of life, with different legal rights and social obligations.

Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Plato, and Cicero, just to name a few, all lived in pagan societies. Some of the greatest political and military leaders of all time, such as Alexander the Great, Pericles of Athens, Hannibal of Carthage, and Julius Caesar of Rome, were all pagans, or else living in a pagan society.

I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.

All societies are historical.

So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be 'blackish' - really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features.

In a world of democracies, in a world where the great projects that have set humanity on fire are the projects of the emancipation of individuals from entrenched social division and hierarchy; in such a world individuals must never be puppets or prisoners of the societies or cultures into which they have been born.

The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down.

If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well - better, in many ways, than devout ones.

Sharing food has always had a central place in civilized societies; it's no accident that so many of our cultural, religious and patriotic rituals are involved with eating.

One of the problems we're facing is, in my view, that there are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies.

Punitive murder by the police and by vigilantes has existed in all societies at some point, and probably still exists in most.

Because the traditional mode of dress for Muslim women is so distinct - the headcovering, which is not there for guys - women carry a greater burden of representation than Muslim men do in non-Muslim societies.

We're all functions of our societies, right? And we all become who we are because of the invisible forces that mold us.

My films have often looked at the whole dilemma of identity as a straitjacket for people, for societies, for cultures, for historical moments.

Over the ages, some societies have accorded far less value and respect to singles than to married individuals.

When I speak about 'we,' it gets very complex very quickly. Having grown up in the United States, but also being very much a member of Nigerian societies and also different parts of Nigerian societies, I understand that we construct particular 'we's.'

Food is interesting to me because it's a way of understanding culture and societies and history. I would never write about food just as food. Just like I would never write about baseball just as baseball.