Quotes About Culture

I believe that London is the most exciting food city in Europe.

Italian food is all about ingredients and it's not fussy and it's not fancy.

Half the time I feel like I'm appealing to the downer freaks out there. We start to play one downer record after another until I begin to get down myself. Give me something from 1960 or something let me get up again. The music of today is for downer freaks, and I'm an upper.

Bare empty space is a relative new conception — one that would be alien, unfamiliar, and incomprehensible to people of primal and ancient cultures. If we think of these earlier views of space and time as naive, misinformed, and anthropomorphic, we must at least recognize the sense of home, security, and support the earlier conceptions of space gave to those who believed and dwelt in them. We have given up this nourishing quality of space — of our abode — at our peril.

The sum of the whole matter is this, that our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually

Some Americans need hyphens in their names because only part of them has come over.

He is not a true man of the world who knows only the present fashions of it.

I don't want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.

The reason so many people are unhappy is, for the most part, delusion. They believe the predominant myths that our culture propagates about happiness.

I travelled among unknown men in lands beyond the sea . . .

They all liked California, but they thought the people were cold.

Ma il comunismo, Steve, qui non attaccherà mai, te lo dico io, non solo perchè ci stiamo noi, ma perchè gli italiani sono troppo pigri, gli piace troppo vendersi il futuro per arrangiare il presente, guadagnarsi la giornata e ingravidare tutte le femmine che toccano. No, Steve, niente comunismo qua. Troppa fatica.

In those clubs, I learned that everything my town had taught me about race was absolutely wrong. The memories of that time in my life on Auburn Avenue are great ones, and they're all mine.

Every culture I've ever been subjected to appears to be frightened," he explains. "I've been working as a psychotherapist for 20 years, and if I could boil down every problem that ever walked through any office that I've occupied—and this includes when I've been alone in the office—every human being suffers from two things in varying degrees of intensity, two things that are taught to us. They're called self-doubt and fear.

A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere.

The English certainly and fiercely pride themselves in never praising themselves.

My words are not that powerful. I started saying in 1985 I don't think we should have a music talking about ni**ers and b*tches and h*es. It had no impact. I've said it. I've repeated it. I still repeat it. To me, that's more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee.

Rap Is More Damaging Than Confederate Statues

In all technologically "advanced" countries, fashion has replaced tradition, so that involuntary membership in a society can no longer provide a feeling of community.

You catch any white man off guard in here right now, you catch him off guard and ask him what he is, he doesn't say he's an American. He either tells you he's Irish, or he's Italian, or he's German, if you catch him off guard and he doesn't know what you're up to. And even though he was born here, he'll tell you he's Italian. Well, if he's Italian, you and I are African even though we were born here.

I don't even consider myself an American. If you and I were Americans, there'd be no problem. Those Honkies that just got off the boat, they're already Americans; Polacks are already Americans; the Italian refugees are already Americans. Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren't Americans yet.

Something is wrong here: sex has been with us since the human race began its existence, yet I would estimate that 90 percent of human beings still suffer enormous inhibitions in this area.

During the long process of history, by relying on our own diligence, courage and wisdom, Chinese people have opened up a good and beautiful home where all ethnic groups live in harmony and fostered an excellent culture that never fades.