Quotes About Culture

The educated negroes have the attitude of contempt toward thier own people because they are taught to admire the Hebrews, the Greek, the Lati and the Teuton and to despise the African.

The present system under the control of the whites trains the Negro to be white and at the same time convinces him of the impropriety or the impossibility of his becoming white.

You would never thereby learn that Africans first domesticated the sheep, goat, and cow, developed the idea of trial by jury, produced the first stringed instruments, and gave the world its greatest boon in the discovery of iron. You would never know that prior to the Mohammedan invasion about 1000 A.D. these natives in the heart of Africa had developed powerful kingdoms which were later organized as the Songhay Empire on the order of that of the Romans and boasting of similar grandeur.

Negro teacher instructing Negro children is in many respects a white teacher thus engaged, for the program in each case is about the same.

If the "educated Negro" could go off and be white he might be happy, but only a mulatto now and then can do this. The large majority of this class, then, must go through life denouncing white people because they are trying to run away from the blacks and decrying the blacks because they are not white.

They do not like to hear such expressions as "Negro literature," "Negro poetry," "African art," or "thinking black"; and, roughly speaking, we must concede that such things do not exist. These things did not figure in the courses which they pursued in school, and why should they? "Aren't we all Americans? Then, whatever is American is as much the heritage of the Negro as of any other group in

Tarikh Es-Soudan.

Three Russian Ideas: Russian Word, Russian Space, and their meeting ground in the human face

Nervously I looked around, but most of the audience joined in. They seemed unaware that they were praying. They didn't realize they were invoking and praising an Indian deity.

the world—have been sucked up into the phantasmagorical pages of a novel by Neal Stephenson, the shy West Coast

President Obama's friend and counselor Ta-Nehisi Coates, from his perch atop the bestseller lists and at the pinnacle of power in America, denounces the American Dream, in terms that echo Obama's previous spiritual guide, Pastor Wright in Chicago, as a "genocidal weight of whiteness.

she says it's a tradition --- which must mean all those things people do that they don't know why they do 'em." from the novella Christopher O'Connor's Romances

It is unwise to make your personal happiness dependent upon your first having created a more civilized human culture. Because your hoped-for culture is most probably dependent for its creation upon your first having personally achieved greater happiness yourself.

No cultural habit ever totally fades out of human life. It just loses market share.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Within this very myopic perspective, immigrants fill the labor slots that need filling, and those foreign-born workers play no other role in our country's cultural, political, social, or economic life. Our children's schools are unaffected, the welfare state is untouched, the balance of political power is unchanged, and daily life in

We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact in the world as we do.

Language was a kind of passport. You could go where you like if you had a clean record. p.155

If you ain't native to a place, you have a better chance of becoming a gentleman in it.

Your religion of origin has such a bone-deep hold on you that, as with a native language, it's your only hope for true religious fluency.

Popular music is not history, but it can be read historically, dialogically, and symptomatically to produce valuable evidence about change over time. Popular music can mark the present as history, helping us understand where we have been and where we are going.

Mexican people never say they're sorry. My grandmother, when I was young, hit me with her car. I was in the driveway–pang! "You know where I park, cabron. Mira, where the oil is." Did she say she was sorry? "Ta loco, he's seven. When he starts paying the bills, then I'll say sorry."

Lippmann declared that "if what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what the individual 'chooses' to 'invent', then we are outside the traditions of civility.

Since God works among imperfect human beings in historical settings, "pure" or "perfect" Christianity can seldom if ever exist in this world. God in his grace works through our limitations; for that very reason we should ask for the grace to recognize what those limitations are. So we may—and ought to—carefully identify the cultural forces which affect the current versions of Christianity.