Quotes About Culture

It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.

Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest. That's not the way my people rear their children. They let them experience the world as it is.

Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance.

If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?

As a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.

There are two streams in the minds of our people: one in which women are really oppressed and given very low status and one in which they are given very high honour, sometimes even greater honour than men, at least if not in fact, in language and metaphor.

A chief does not hurry.

Where I come from in the Eastern Region, life is still -- well, things are changing very fast but if one is interested, one can still see signs of what life used to look like.

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

When the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt.

In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.

The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.

There is no story that is not true, [...] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.

A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.

If I hold her hand she says, 'Don't touch!' If I hold her foot she says 'Don't touch!' But when I hold her waist-beads she pretends not to know.

Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.

People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.

Culture change is difficult and slow. To have any chance to succeed, the meeting needed to deliver a jolt.

In 2016, the $148 million allocated to the National Endowment for the Arts accounted for .004% of the federal budget expenditures ($3.9 trillion). Suppose we eliminated it in response to criticism? Trying to balance the budget by eliminating the NEA would be like editing a 90,000-word novel by eliminating 4 words.

Employees as cast members" is a generative metaphor that has worked for Disney for more than fifty years.

The Heart of Change, by John Kotter and Dan Cohen [Business and organizational change].

If you want to change the culture of your organization, you've got to get the reformers together. They need a free space.