Quotes About Culture

Every once in a while I would have to go to a powwow and put on some feathers so you could believe I was a real Indian. But other than that you would think I was smarter and more important if I lived in a big house and owned lots of things. That's just the way white people are. It's the way you are trained.

There is something we don't like, though. It's when people call us Indians and then start calling sports teams and other things Indians. If we're going to have a false name, at least let us have it and then leave it alone. Don't start putting it on beer bottles and ice cream cartons and making it into something that embarrasses us and makes us look like fools. And don't tell us it's supposed to be some honor to us. We'll decide what honors us and what doesn't.

Following the Nez Perce Trail is

Law and order are never enough to keep a people dancing.

We're going to keep trying to strengthen the American family. To make them more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons.

For them, us first-gen Pakistani girls were a forest of green cards. We were groomed like Christmas trees, thinking we were in the beautiful woods, thinking we were growing, but we were just being readied to be cut down. They were coming for us.

A teacher once described the Haitians in her class as very obedient and polite. I said that's because their families will beat them if they get in trouble. Sensing my disapproval, she said it is good that they discipline their kids. Yes, but it can be taken too far when they instill fear of authority and beat the spirit out of their children.

When they hoped for a better future for us, they didn't realize they were giving up a chance to have good Hindu, good Nigerian good Mexican daughters.

There's this trope that repeats itself in the books you and I read to save our lives: that if where you grew up is killing you, you can leave and make a chosen, identity-based fam that takes up where your bio-fam left off.

You'll wear the taweez and drink Zam Zam, but you'll also read.

I really only respect the Arab culture. I ain't really trying to pay no attention to, ya know, these little people in political positions and executive positions that ain't Arab culture oriented people because a lot of the times, what are you really showing all of this concern for?

The history of art is the history of revivals.

I have not the least sympathy for these useless and destructive pastimes, football and politics.

They do not realize that a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows. Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers.

The actual God of many Americans... is simply the current of American life.

Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations...

We have let the house our fathers built fall into decay, and now we try to break into Oriental palaces that our fathers never knew. Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror. What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness.

Every Roman was surrounded by slaves. The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every Roman became inwardly, and of course unwittingly, a slave. Because living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected through the unconscious with their psychology. No one can shield himself from such an influence.

Arab culture had struck me with overwhelming force. The emotional nature of these unreflective people who are so much closer to life than we are

Culture lies beyond the purpose of nature.

I always wonder about people who go to Rome as they might go, for example, to Paris or to London. Certainly Rome as well as these other cities can be enjoyed aesthetically but if you are affected to the depths of your being at every step by the spirit that broods there, if a remnant of a wall here and a column there gaze upon you with a face instantly recognised, then it becomes another matter entirely.

in our civilized life, we have stripped so many ideas of their emotional energy, we do not really respond to them any more. We

The predominantly rationalistic European finds much that is human alien to him, and he prides himself on this without realizing that his rationality is won at the expense of his vitality, and that the primitive part of his personality is consequently condemned to a more or less underground existence.

This is an aspect of the modern "cultural" mind that is well worth looking into. It shows an alarming degree of dissociation and psychological confusion.