Quotes About Culture

I'm Asian-American, and I was the only Chinese girl growing up in a white school in San Diego. So I understood what it was like to be different, to always want to fit in and never feel like you ever could.

Although I was always very happy in Britain, I never stopped thinking of America as home, in the fundamental sense of the term. It was where I came from, what I really understood, the base against which all else was measured.

I never understood the realism of an imaginary circumstance. While I was doing 'Smoke Signals,' I relied on my instinct and what I grew up with. I had this energy, but it was a one-dimensional thing.

One of the threats to Christianity in the 21st century is this idea that religion is best understood as a kind of aesthetic experience, and that you can get all your morality from that.

In Georgia, people had already understood that communism couldn't survive, and I came to the institute in Moscow, and people still believed in it. They were completely different people, and I found it very difficult psychologically.

Once I was embraced by gay culture, I finally started to feel I was fitting in. I was understood by those people in a way I had never predicted or courted.

I've always felt that Americans are very in the moment. There's not so much melancholia and mystery as there is in France. Everything must be understood. Everything must be analyzed.

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

Hubbard set up the Church of Scientology in Hollywood in 1954 for a reason. He understood that celebrity was increasingly a feature of American public life, and celebrities themselves were going to be worshiped as minor deities were in the ancient world. The idea was: if you could get them, think how many people would follow.

I saw a '60 Minutes' piece on Google as a place to work. It was such a foreign concept from what I understood as a regular job. There's free food, sleeping pods, Ping-Pong. I'm the kind of guy who likes to get involved in everything - I'd be all over the Ping-Pong.

You know, even growing up going to school, I had teachers that were against bilingual teaching. I never understood that. My parents always had me speak Spanish first knowing I was going to speak English in school.

Richard Holbrooke is known for many things, but I will remember him as an impressive, sometimes even intimidating diplomat who understood the value of culture in diplomacy.

In the fall of 1978, I left the religious, conservative, biracial, slow-paced culture of South Carolina for the secular, liberal, multi-ethnic, intense culture of Princeton University. Like most immigrants, I was looking for a better life in a place I only half understood.

Growing up in Beirut, I used to go to the souks with my mother to buy fabrics... I understood fashion at an early age, and my first designs were when I was five.

Metaphors, similes, puns - all manner of metonymy - I'm interested in language that cannot be parsed by a machine - language that can only be understood through acculturation.

My uncle is a Southern planter. He's an undertaker in Alabama.

I must say that books in India are not only underpriced but are also undervalued.

Guns are going to be here until the end of time; the underworld is going to be here until the end of time. It's just a sad reality that dumb people use them.

Anybody who has been to Chicago has a very positive view. But not everybody has come to Chicago, and in many ways, Chicago is an undiscovered treasure. It punches below its weight internationally.

Western classical music had long known syncopation. But no one had felt compelled to snap his fingers to music before American jazz and musical theater, which sent a previously undiscovered current coursing through the body, demanding outlet.

Patriarchy doesn't just make men out to be ogres. Women buy into the patriarchy as well, and women make those comments as well, like, 'Boys will be boys.' Women have to undo that stuff, too.

Most analysts would agree that if all the undocumented immigrants in California were deported in one day, our state would experience a severe economic downturn. This does not even consider the many cultural and spiritual gifts these immigrants bring to our state and nation.

In Tagalog, we call undocumented people 'TNT,' which means tago ng tago, which means 'hiding and hiding.' So that's literally what undocumented means in Tagalog. And that kind of tells you how Filipinos think of this issue, and really any culture, right?

I have to expend an awful lot of energy actively undoing the impact of my name. Understandably, people assume that I have at least some connection to Iran. The truth is that I don't. I have very little knowledge about the culture, the language, the history. I've never been to Iran. I've never even been inside a mosque.