Quotes About Culture

the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them.

What I see especially among the Navajos and the Zunis and the Hopis is a culture of people who have been smart enough to learn a lesson that we're awfully slow to get... They know that being rich doesn't have any damn thing to do with how much money you've got. It's got to do with are you happy and are you content.

I'm into looking at things from the other point of view. And if you look at who votes in the Oscars, mostly older Jewish guys, they're going to vote for stuff they relate to. Do they relate to NWA? I doubt it.

In a time of fractured politics, our need for unifying cultural events is more acute, and particularly our need for creators who do not deny the people their art because of the votes they cast.

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

You ask people what their ethnicity is, and a lot of Scots-Irish people either don't know or if they know it they just don't acknowledge it. It's not something they really identify with. They're just plain old Americans, plain vanilla. I don't think they are a self-conscious voting bloc.

As we look at Hollywood and the controversy around the Oscars, it goes back to the voting block and the lack of people who come from that culture. For example, the NWA movie is a fantastic, fantastic movie. You need people who can look at a piece of art like that and understand the artistry in it.

I took a vow that I would see a Bengali film song playing at a nightclub.

My brothers and sisters and I spoke in a language called Egg Latin. In the early '50s in Canada, this became a fad way of talking among certain people. It's based on the concept that in every syllable before the vowel and after the preceding constant you insert the word 'egg.' So, my name Phil would be 'Pegghil.'

My family is from Liverpool, so I have some of those vowel sounds, I've got the slack tone of someone from Birmingham, and then I was raised in Bedford, which is just north of London. So my accent, if it's possible, makes even less sense to a Brit than to an American.

The fact that I am Latino is not a secret. There's not much I can do about that. It is what it is. I think people know that my last name ends in a vowel. What can I tell you?

I really knew when I started photographing I wanted it to be a way of knowing different cultures, not just in other countries but in this country, too, and I knew I wanted to be a voyeur.

Too much comedy today is vulgar, not clever. I say that as a comedian and as a consumer.

Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns.

The capacity to be intrinsic and vulgar is American.

Lyrics of some songs are vulgar... I feel they are not good for the society.

Romantics consider common sense vulgar.

I didn't like the '80s at all; it was a vulgar moment of fashion.

As a little girl in the '50s, I couldn't wear a purple-and-white flowered skirt with a red blouse - those colors were too loud. My parents were not into that 'We are Negros that wear all beige,' but there was a line you could walk over that could signal vulgar, crass, rather than clever use of color. And that outfit crossed over the line.

I am against vulgar lyrics. No one should feel ashamed while listening to a song.

I think the most vulgar thing about Hollywood is the way it believes its own gossip.

As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.

I love British cursing - the cadence of it, the joy in the sound of the words, and the vulgarity of it.

I guess I'm concerned that vulgarity has now officially entered the mainstream of our culture, and I think people have to respectfully stand up and say, 'No thanks.'