Quotes About Culture

We're not here as a black band playing white string band music. You know, we play stuff in the Appalachians, we play stuff in the white community, but we really highlight the black community's music.

I remember when I was coming up, the music stores where you could get guitar strings was where I got my records from. Now the place where you get your records from is where you can get your DJ mats and your mixers.

New York has always been a city of change and a city about change, and it is a back-leading development. Nobody's going to want to come to New York if it looks like another strip mall.

When you're biracial, you can feel like you're fully neither, not fully both. But I won't strip away my heritage for anyone's comfort.

I'm in East L.A., like Mount Washington, Highland Park. There's a little strip that they're gentrifying, trying to make a hip spot, but you go there, and it's just kind of barren. Nobody hangs out anywhere in L.A. There's no loitering in L.A., so I don't know what to do with myself.

The more I photographed Muslim women, the more I was able to metaphorically strip away the burqas and hijabs, and start chipping away at the profound misconceptions that existed in other parts of the world about these women and their culture.

L.A. is a great city to get lost in. The best thing to do is to drive in any direction, find a strip mall, and go from one store to the next. I guarantee you will see a collision of cultures you never imagined.

Someone on the Scottish side of the family got me one and I never took it off. I would be down the country park playing in a Celtic strip in England.

Stripes are very French - who doesn't love a good stripe?

You can conclude from the glossy surfaces of 'The L Word' that L stands for latte or Lexus and stop there. Or you can notice that in some of its less flashy moments, the show has staked a claim on Large - as in a larger, denser, more ambivalent imaginary world, populated by imperfect and riveting citizens of all sexual stripes.

We go to Europe, and they think we're totally prejudiced 'cause we hang the bars and stripes. But for us, the bars and stripes doesn't mean we want to see anybody in slavery or anything like that. It's just our heritage. To us, the bars and stripes means grits, 'y'all,' and the beauty of the South. There's no prejudice at all in that with us.

It comes down to this: black people were stripped of our identities when we were brought here, and it's been a quest since then to define who we are.

Our generation has become somewhat stripped of identity by the homogenizing effect of technology. So, more than ever, people want to project their own individuality.

When you never see yourself in the mainstream format, you are stripped of the strength of your identity.

Though I'm a very broad-minded girl, I don't think any parent would appreciate their daughter stripping on-screen.

I think the corporate world is pretty starved for personality. The reason you have comic strips like 'Dilbert' and sitcoms like 'The Office' is that people just can't be genuine human beings in a corporate environment. So if you can really be your own self, even if it's a little bit different, I think people are really drawn to that.

About the only way you can find out about the common man, his slang, what he looked like, what he thought, is through the comic strips. It's a powerful way for young people to learn history.

As artists, we must not go down to the level of the masa; we should bring them up, intellectualize our languages, create classics out of our folk arts. We can do this if we are true to our roots and strive for excellence.

Sadly, black people disassociate ourselves from the things which make us who we are, identifying them as lesser, or inferior. It's a form of self hate. So, with reckless abandon, we strive to be like the majority.

I'd like to think that we strive in film and theatre to tell great stories, and I believe in the power of storytelling in our culture.

I'm heavily influenced by a lot of people like Dre, Pharrell, and Kanye. They're all big-time tastemakers and trendsetters, just for culture, period. So I strive to do that as well.

Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.

The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.

Sometimes stereotyping happens not because of any nefarious reasons but rather because people don't know who you are or where you come from, so they go for the broad strokes about you, your culture, your faith, all that.