Quotes About Cultural tension

In many ways, these three basic "fault lines" of division—the economic, racial, and political lines Obama outlined, plus a fourth line on gender and sexuality—had always been part of the national experience. For much of the twentieth century, however, strong centripetal forces pushed back against these traditional sources of discord and tension.

Anytime a culture is in economic stress, ugly things start happening.

Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.

Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.

This election is tearing the country apart as it is.

This crucial day may be the day on which an Algerian taxi driver tells him how it feels to be an Algerian in Paris. It may be the day on which he passes a café terrace and catches a glimpse of the tense, intelligent and troubled face of Albert Camus.

For my mother, everything stands in relation to her Welshness; the fact she married an Englishman seems to be something of an issue. She's kind of anti-English... anti-imperialist.

We're living in weird times, Streak. I bet forty percent of the country wouldn't mind firing up the ovens as long as the smokestacks are blowing downwind.

Cultural blackmail has gone on for decades, with the artist loudly blaspheming everything his patrons hold dear-while suckling at their teats.

When I hear the word "culture"… I reach for my pistol.

The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps.

When she started to fill the entire glass, he jerked the bottle out of her hand. She swirled on him, staring at him hatefully. "How dare you! You're not my brother, my father, my husband—" "That's right, Christa, I'm no one but a filthy Yank. And you're going to turn into a southern lush if you're not careful!

Anyone intent on moral clarity might want to find another book and, in fact, might not want to go anywhere near the enduring chasm of race in the United States.

Society is at odds with itself.

Damn you, you Indian bastard! You're not leaving me to tell Lily of your death. You're going to get up and walk out of here if it's the last thing I do. But

America is seething at all times. It's like a Gaza Strip that's three thousand miles long.

Like so many other young South Asians in America, I am the product of two cultures whose conflicting values pull at me with equal urgency. Never have I felt as torn between the two as I do about the question of marriage.

Whole villages of Muslims had been hacked to pieces by drunken Christian youth, and as foreigners, we should have been pulled out by the organization. But the U.S. government supported the Christian tribes, just as the French had all through the colonial days, and to pull us out would have meant admitting that things weren't as stable for their puppet government as the western companies, trading in Ivory Coast for cocoa, rubber, and timber, and selling Coke and cigarettes, wanted to hear.

I've definitely seen huge shifts, but the church is a little afraid of hip-hop, and hip-hop is a little afraid of the church. It's a weird middle area I'm often stuck in.

The third fact is that Jesus was a member of a minority group in the midst of a larger dominant and controlling group. In 63 B.C. Palestine fell into the hands of the Romans. After this date the gruesome details of loss of status were etched, line by line, in the sensitive soul of Israel, dramatized ever by an increasing desecration of the Holy Land.

He studied me. "You were in Nam?" I nodded. "Yep." He turned to Lolo. "Hey, Chief, how many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" She stared at him. "I don't know." He pointed his cigar at her in an agitated fashion. "That's right, because you weren't there, man!" We

Lily did have her .22 holstered under her toggle coat, which unnerved Bryan. He was a flatlander originally--a Masshole, even--so always seemed vaguely panicked at the very concept of a well-regulated liberal.

When the modern consciousness suspends its economic routines, it only oscillates between political anguish and sexual obsession.

The ancient church teaches us that the church sustains three relationships to culture all at once: It is part of it; it is an antithesis to it; it is called to transform it. These relationships are always held in tension with culture.