Quotes About Culture

Music, in the past few years... anything singable or understandable is square.

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.

To be frank, it sometimes seems that the American idea of freedom has more to do with my freedom to do what I want than your freedom to do what you want. I think that, in Europe, we're probably better at understanding how to balance those competing claims, though not a lot.

If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City, as they call it - London, the people of the south.

You get more churches burned down in the United States in the last two years than in the last hundred, because of the lack of understanding of culture and diversity and the beauty of it.

In every ancient culture, there are rituals to mortify the body as a way of understanding that the energy of the soul is indestructible. The more I think about energy, the simpler my art becomes, because it is just about pure presence.

In such diffused changes of culture two factors are necessary: contact and understanding.

At its best, Aboriginal art has been effective in translating an entire culture and the understanding of an entire continent. Indeed, the more we interpret Australia through Aboriginal eyes, through the experience of their long and epic story, the more we allow ourselves to understand the land we share.

People who come out of the liberal arts don't have an understanding of science and technology, and the people in science and technology have very little experience with liberal arts and the traditions of a liberal democracy.

I am convinced that there are few, if any, American people that could even start believing or understanding what living in a socialist country does to a person.

I did study religion at Northwestern, and it was a very interesting time for me because I think it was the beginning of my personal journey in this understanding of the purpose that religion serves in our culture and in our individual lives. It serves to ground us and be our moral compass.

I think travelling teaches you that there is a change which is constant and you have to develop an adaptive nature to be part of this celebration and to be a part of this journey called life. It gives a great understanding of people and their culture.

Thanks to nanny, I've got a deep understanding of Russian tales.

Travel early and travel often. Live abroad, if you can. Understand cultures other than your own. As your understanding of other cultures increases, your understanding of yourself and your own culture will increase exponentially.

When I think of my work, I'm aware that I'm American and African at all points and times. And without a doubt, my experience and understanding of America was shaped by having immigrant parents.

God manifests himself in each historical period according to the understanding of the people of the era.

Doing a film with somebody who's from a different country or culture than you is very fulfilling because they bring with them different insights, experiences, cultural norms, and expectations. All of those things can sort of broaden your own understanding of things or provide a different perspective.

People in the Middle East may consider the U.S. an evil hegemony that has tainted their culture, but when I look at the growth of racial and ethnic tolerance and understanding in my generation in the U.S., and see those sentiments make it around the world, it makes me feel proud.

When a film is created, it is created in a language, which is not only about words, but also the way that very language encodes our perception of the world, our understanding of it.

The American understanding of China is filtered through years of politics; we rarely see the culture on its own terms.

There is a slam-dunk case for extending foreign language teaching to children aged five. Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages, and we just need to speak louder in English.

Whether we live in Sri Lanka or Malaysia or India, the U.K. or the U.S., we face similar issues of understanding, remembering the past that has made us and seeing the future we want.