Quotes About Culture

I think my dad is the only Arabic descendent who is an unsuccessful businessman.

I don't think a lot of Korean people even make kimchi. My mom certainly didn't, so it's a very extra thing to do in the same way that I guess baking bread can be an even longer process that you're unsure about for a long time.

Tizi-Ouzou is the capital of Kabylia and makes an excellent base from which to explore these culturally untapped and very beautiful mountains. Conquerors from time immemorial have driven the Berbers inland from their coastal settlements and these mountains have become one of their strongholds.

You're a Catholic in Italy when you're born, it's unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.

My mother is black, from Grenada, so my blackness was always there, but It wasn't until I started hanging with the upperclassmen black actors at my high school that I really got my roots in being a black American, which is a distinctly different identity and experience.

We had a lot of difficulty in getting the French to accept the pyramid. They thought we were trying to import a piece of Egypt until I pointed out that their obelisk was also from Egypt and the Place des Pyramides is around the corner. Then they accepted it. The pyramid at the Louvre, though, is just the tip.

I didn't know exactly what a hipster was until we were in Brooklyn. It's like a species. On first seeing it, I was like, 'Oh my God, oh my God...' Pre-tt-y fun-ny.

I was born in London and raised in Rome until I was 4. Then we went back to London, where I went to school.

This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Every ethnic group has a mythology... Until 'Roots'... there was nothing in the popular culture to refute the paragraph in elementary school history class that said, 'Slaves picked the cotton, were happy and life wasn't so bad.'

I remember my father playing a cassette for me when I was fifteen - Amjad Ali's 'Durga.' He said, 'This is from our part of the world. You must listen to it.' And I continued rewinding it and listening to it from early evening until midnight. By the end of it, I was nearly in tears.

I had never seen an avocado until I came to London in 1994. They just weren't a feature of southern Italian cuisine.

I had good parents. My mother had morals and standards and she brought us up to be good kids - some of the families around were just laws unto themselves, it was really tribal.

I think of L.A. as truly the melting pot. It's basically a mini-country unto itself.

With an older generation, there's some weight carried with the Beatles. There's almost like an untouchable, god-like force field around them.

Scientists are very much entangled in their culture and this culture is not pristine, untouched by other cultures and practices.

India has so much to offer in terms of raw untouched beauty.

A lot of subjects are untouched by the Indian Television.

It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.

If I were to call it black music, that would be untrue. I don't know what that is, unless it would be some African drums or something.

The argument that all Jews have a heartfelt investment in the state of Israel is untrue. Some have a heartfelt investment in corned beef sandwiches.

In Morocco, there is an insistence on authority. Children are not encouraged to speak up in front of their parents. My parents were not like this. I was the kind of girl who could tell her father, 'No, what you are saying is totally untrue, and I don't agree with you.'

I know plenty of people my age that will never get married because they genuinely believe the false cultural meme that marriage has sadly become. There's only one problem. It's completely untrue.

People think that South Africa and Australia are culturally similar but, having worked in both environments, I found that theory to be untrue.