Quotes About Culture

To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.

Go to the place where the thing you wish to know is native; your best teacher is there. ... You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken, you study mineralogy best among miners, and so with everything else.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

We Germans will never produce another Goethe, but we may produce another Caesar.

If Jesus was Jewish, how come he has a Mexican name?

The Ethiop gods have Ethiop lips, Bronze cheeks, and woolly hair; The Grecian gods are like the Greeks, As keen-eyed, cold and fair.

For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.

How can you govern a country with two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?

The glory that was Greece.

In some remote regions of Islam it is said, a woman caught unveiled by a stranger will raise her skirt to cover her face.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.

Most convicted felons are just people who were not taken to museums or Broadway musicals as children.

I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.

A man's rootage is more important than his leafage.

A people without history is like wind on the buffalo grass.

We are governed not by armies and police but by ideas.

I love rap, and part of hip-hop culture is being excessive and absurd, and I can't be excessive and absurd without sounding corny. So I have to do it in a very truthful, weird way.

Truthfully, I'm pretty stuck in the '80s.

When I choose a role, what I'm looking for is the ability is to tell our stories. Me being a black woman, that's just a given. It's going to be a part of any role I do, making sure I tell it truthfully and nuanced and in a way that many people can relate to.

When you grow up in New Orleans, like, the only way to be an artist is to be a 55-year-old black musician. That's basically what we wanted to be. If you had asked me very truthfully what I wanted to be when I was 16, the answer would've been, 'I want to be a 55-year-old black musician.'

Folk tales and myths, they've lasted for a reason. We tell them over and over because we keep finding truths in them, and we keep finding life in them.

No one wants to die, and no one wants to die poor. These are the two fundamental truths that transcend culture, they transcend politics, they transcend economic cycles.

Our American heritage is greater than any one of us. It can express itself in very homely truths; in the end it can lift up our eyes beyond the glow in the sunset skies.