Quotes About Culture

I come from a country and also a continent whose identity is in the making. We're a very young culture, and I think that things are not yet crystallised.

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.

I wanted to be a skinny little ballerina but I was a voluptuous little Italian girl whose dad had meatballs on the table every night.

Mixed martial arts was invented by Brazilians, whose families had been trained by the Japanese. Those Brazilians came to the U.S., where their invention was bought out, gussied up and presented to the world, which found it good.

Unfortunately, we are living in an era where plenty of songs with vulgar, objectionable lyrics are also becoming popular. It's a disturbing trend, and I feel really sad when I see small kids dancing to such numbers in television shows. In my career so far, I have refused any song whose lyrics I haven't been comfortable with.

People often look up to actors. It is not right on their part to do songs whose lyrics are not good. Actors have social responsibility.

All those people whose faces decorate the shopping bags of Barnes and Noble, with a few exceptions, would never get published today.

For more than a century, New York City has been home to a constellation of department stores whose openings, closings, and transformations have charted the fortunes and foibles of the city itself.

When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.

No one ceases to be a man, no one forfeits his rights to civilization merely by being more or less uncultured, and since the Filipino is regarded as a fit citizen when he is asked to pay taxes or shed his blood to defend the fatherland, why must this fitness be denied him when the question arises of granting him some right?

I love Milan, and I'm not just saying that. It's a city that gives me a great sense of euphoria. I can't explain why, but I feel a special energy there.

If a man's from Texas, he'll tell you. If he's not, why embarrass him by asking?

I'm not a hockey fan, which is probably why I had to leave Canada in the first place.

Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.

Globalisation means many things. At one level, it talks of trade, which since the 16th century has exchanged goods and now, increasingly, ideas and information across the globe. But globalisation is also a view of the world - it is an opinion about man and why men are on the world.

Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind.

Why buy a book when you can join a library.

My Latin temper blows up pretty fast, but it goes down just as fast. Maybe that's why you seldom hear of ulcers in Latin America.

Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology - looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

My audience went, 'Wait, why is she singing jazz? What's going on?' And then they went, 'Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.' And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.

It's odd, that's why I don't like telling people I played field hockey. It's real big in Australia for guys. But I say I played in America, and everybody goes, 'Oh, you girl!'

Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.

Why, der language down dar in de far South is jus' as different from ours in Maryland, as you can think. Dey laughed when dey heard me talk, an' I could not understand 'dem, no how.

My father loved biographies. He loved the true tales of interesting people that were shaping our culture. I get why he dug 'Vanity Fair.' You feel smarter, somehow, for reading it.