Cultural Quotations

Poets are accepted in Canada as practically nowhere else in the West because of their place in an officially supported and popularly endorsed Canadian culture. Yet, they are still bitter and argumentative, as poets elsewhere are, because they have no audience as such, only a sanctioned role in the cultural scheme of things.

Readers anticipate that a significant element of every story will be additional exposure to the ways of the Ojibwe. The truth is that I enjoy this aspect of the work. Although I have no Indian blood running through my veins, in college I prepared to be a cultural anthropologist, so exploring other cultures is exciting to me.

It's so interesting that when I finished 'The X-Files' in 2002, the - call it the political and cultural climate in America - was one of fear, and trust of government. Because we put ourselves in the hands of the authority who was going to protect us. And, you know, we gave up a lot of our liberties to Homeland Security, etc.

Confucius would give his seat to an old woman. Communist cadres, on the other hand, took the best seats and called it a cultural revolution.

What would you do in order to marry Sophia Loren? I think anyone would become French to marry Sophia Loren. Love was more important than nationality. The cultural heritage of that country and my parents is so interlaced that it really doesn't matter that a piece of paper tells them they're French.

To me, in retrospect, it was amazing that 'Seinfeld' was a show that had such mass appeal. At first it was a disaster in the ratings, but then it became a cultural phenomenon. I don't know if that's possible anymore, but I don't try for that.

Whether we consciously realize it or not, the biodiversity with which we are most familiar, and the biodiversity with which we have most intimate historical, cultural and biological connections, is that associated with food plants.

Conservatism is, among many other things, a culture. The most important glue binding it together is a shared sense of cultural grievance - the conviction, uniting conservatives high and low, theocratic and plutocratic, neocon and paleocon, that someone, somewhere is looking down their noses at them with a condescending sneer.

I was bringing the whole music, hip-hop, art, break dancing and urban cultural thing to the downtown table.

People aren't used to thinking of cultural forms spreading out across the full range of formal interactions - or what is called the 'text' in literary terms.

In these confused times, the role of classical music is at the very core of the struggle to reassert cultural and ethical values that have always characterized our country and for which we have traditionally been honored and respected outside our shores.

I think of magazines as cultural entities rather than boxes of corn flakes that can be sold and shipped around.

I believe in traditions; I believe in the idea of things being passed between generations and the slow transmission of cultural values through tradition.

My father left me with his love of Jewish studies and cultural life. To this very day, along with several physicians and scientist colleagues, I take regular periodical lessons taught by a Rabbinical scholar on how the Jewish law views moral and ethical problems related to modern medicine and science.

I think women of our generation went through Cultural Revolution, went through hardship, coming from nowhere, and suddenly see China's amazing opportunity. So women just seized the opportunity.

I think I started writing about identity, and I used to believe that identity is the story. But now I'm not so much subscribed to that. I mean, with 'Mr. Fox,' it has a feminist agenda as well. And so, as I sort of been away from writing about identity, I still feel that kind of tug of roots and, you know, cultural background.

I don't think the Internet has replaced cities in any significant way, nor really could it. Cities are dynamic - and deeply seductive for the people who flock there - because they broker all sorts of fantastic and useful connections, cultural and economic and social.

It's always a challenge whenever you have to nurture more than one culture inside an organization. When I say culture, you have one group that will have one set of priorities, and another with another set. It creates a different cultural environment.

I'm Cherokee, and there were times when social expansion was something that is needed by a cultural group or a national group.

I've always been curious about how much of our cultural baggage we bring to what and how we read. I suspect we bring a lot, although we like to think we don't.

Because it's not only that a child is inseparable from the family in which he lives, but that the lives of families are determined by the community in which they live and the cultural tradition from which they come.

I love new places, new people, new ideas. I love cultural differences, and I'm fascinated by the truth - all the different versions of it.

Thanks to the competence, love of God, our country's security and stability, endowed wealth, integrated infrastructure and quality services, the U.A.E. turned into the world's renowned destination for tourism, investment and business management: the interface of choice for hosting major cultural events, artistic and sports, in the world.

Our cultural diversity has most certainly shaped our national character.

My parents genuinely loved Vienna, and in later years I learned from them why the city exerted a powerful hold on them and other Jews. My parents loved the dialect of Vienna, its cultural sophistication, and artistic values.

Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.

I think in all cultural organizations there has to be renewal. I'm also of a certain age that someone new can come in with a breath of fresh air. Things change, and I think that's important.

In a continent but recently settled, many parts of which have as yet little historical or cultural background, the material for this volume has been gathered from a section that was one of the first to be colonized.

In Mexico, wrestling is part of the cultural fabric. The guys wear masks and they are real-life superheroes.

Culture is mix. Culture means a mix of things from other sources. And my town, Istanbul, was this kind of mix. Istanbul, in fact, and my work, is a testimony to the fact that East and West combine cultural gracefully, or sometimes in an anarchic way, came together, and that is what we should search for.

Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space.

The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.

In the United States, nobody needs to remind people of their own role or their own power in creating the future they want to see. Perhaps it is something that is almost written into your cultural DNA: a desire to answer your Founding Fathers' call to create a 'more perfect union.'

During the Cultural Revolution, the communists came in, and what they wanted to do was eradicate all sense of traditional Chinese culture.

Being Italian, I have a very special relationship with the culinary arts. One my projects was to share Italian cultural food with my colleagues.

Ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to avoid change; they couldn't entirely do so, of course, but did preserve a cultural continuity for almost four thousand years.

Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation, and our job here is to teach and to research and to create knowledge on Asia in conjunction and in cooperation with scholars as well as with political, intellectual, and cultural leaders in Asia.

My novels are about a generation of Americans who lived between 1940 and 2000, who resisted the postwar political and cultural forces by choosing a wandering life of impoverishment and wonder. Inevitably, race and economics are a big part of their stories. Childhood, childishness, and children are never far.

We're using satellites to help map and model cultural features that could never be seen on the ground because they're obscured by modernization, forests, or soil.

When you ask your white friends what their cultural heritage is, they don't just say white. They give you a math equation. 'Well, I'm a third German and a fourth Irish and one-sixteenth Welsh and one-fortieth Native American for college applications.'

And not only that but... when the station is completed, there will be an international crew made of astronauts coming from different cultural experiences, speaking different languages, but working together for a common goal.

When I was growing up, kids used to talk about snitching... It never extended as a cultural norm outside of the gangsters.

The railroads once were a dominant power in American life, for good and for ill. There's something inevitably nostalgic about a train book today. Trains attract us, but part of that attraction is cultural memory.

It avoids a self-conscious relationship to the act. We live in the most self-conscious society in the history of mankind. There are good things in that, but there are also terrible things. The worst of it is, that we find it hard to give ourselves to the cultural process.

'Prison Notebooks' gives me a basic understanding of how power can influence people through cultural products and intellectual groups, so they will voluntarily support the hegemony.

I would point out that the cultural advance of these people has been suppressed in the past and continues to be suppressed in the present by policies designed to keep them in ignorance.

Cultural values are, in themselves, neutral as well as universal, and so much depends on how individuals or ethnic groups use them. Values are influenced by so many factors such as geography, climate, religion, the economy and technology.

The religious imagery and fairytales that formed our shared cultural references have been replaced by the cult of celebrity. Marilyn is the sex goddess, Camilla Parker Bowles is cast as the wicked witch, Che Guevara is the revolutionary. Celebrities have become visual shorthand for narratives that shape our lives.

Just as we acquaint ourselves with materials, and just as we must understand functions, we must become familiar with the psychological and spiritual factors of the day. No cultural activity is possible otherwise, for we are dependent on the spirit of our time.

We have to allow ourselves the freedom to make mistakes, including cultural mistakes, in our first drafts. I believe it's okay to get cultural details wrong in your first draft. It's okay if stereotypes emerge. It just means that your experience is limited, that you're human.

'Winnie The Witch' transgresses all cultural boundaries. Amusingly, there have been attempts to deconstruct the meaning of the books - that Winnie represents society and Wilbur the disabled - but I think it's just a great story.

We have a disturbing cultural appetite for novelty, and it seems to me wrong each new laureate should dislodge the ideas of his or her predecessor, especially when they're still unfolding.

Music is such a great communicator. It breaks down linguistic barriers, cultural barriers, it basically reaches out. That's when rock n' roll succeeds, and that's what virtuosity is all about.

There's a certain kind of cultural energy pursued by the gatekeepers of elite discourse, who want to argue that Americans fundamentally agree with each other, and that's the health of the nation.

Libraries are at a cultural crossroads. Some proffer that libraries as we know them may go away altogether, ironic victims of the information age where Google has subverted Dewey decimal and researchers can access anything on a handheld device. Who needs to venture deep into the stacks when answers are but a click away?

Australia and Canada were settled by adventurers, they had to break new ground. I think that is indelibly etched on our cultural spirit.

What I discovered in Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history.

Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation.

Foreign students add cultural value to their British peers, who need an international outlook.

Content that's generated out of America, whether it be film or music, has, in my opinion, much greater impact in sustaining our credibility and our place as a cultural capital. This is our great export.

When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.

In the first speech I delivered as health secretary, I made one thing perfectly clear: we need a cultural shift in the NHS: from a culture responsive mainly to orders from the top down to one responsive to patients, in which patient safety is put first.

If my colleagues stop eating donuts and are more active, it saves me money on next year's insurance premium, and I get to work with people who have more energy and creativity each day. Yet most organizations fail to make health a cultural priority. Instead, they treat healthcare like any other expense.

We are witnessing a very slow and painful cultural shift. Some male gamers with a deep sense of entitlement are terrified of change. They believe games should continue to cater exclusively to young heterosexual men with ever more extreme virtual power fantasies.

It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.

I usually make sure that my stories are from Africa or my own background so as to highlight the cultural background at the same time as telling the story.

In 1986, human nature in America started to change. That year, 'The Oprah Winfrey Show,' based in Chicago, became nationally syndicated, and the country entered the beginning stages of a quiet cultural revolution.

There is no singular 'reason' why Africans use fractals, any more than a singular reason why Americans like rock music. Such enormous cultural practices just cover too much social terrain.

I wouldn't call myself religious. I'm spiritual. Everybody's a bit more so as you get older. I'm a cultural Catholic; it's inescapable, but I think I have to believe.

In 1981, while doing postdoctoral field work in cultural anthropology, Bonnie A. Nardi lived with villagers in Western Samoa, trying to understand the cultural reasons that people there have an average of eight children.

Historically and culturally, New York City and our entire nation simply would not be the same without the infusion of Asian traditions. Whether it is food, art, language or any other facet of cultural life, Asian Americans have made our city and our country stronger and richer.

What crime writers are doing connects deeper into a cultural hunger. Crime is important. When you open up a book that has a body that's dead, that matters. It matters more than a certain level of suburban angst; it really does.

One person's going to win, and everybody else is going to not win. So let's not feel like we're losers. Let's utilize the cultural opportunities, get to know the other players on the other team, look around you, enjoy your world series.

This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.

In the past, a great library was the result of librarians functioning as guardians of culture, tending and caring, selecting and recommending works that maintained and nurtured a cultural heritage.

When you work with web design companies in San Francisco, you end up with a bunch of twenty-somethings who have their own cultural peculiarities, including obscurity for its own sake. You give those guys a website for a banking institution and they screw it up, because they are designing for themselves.

From 1945 to 1991, China was engaged in a series of wars that nearly broke them. This generation has been through hell: the Great Leap Forward, hunger, starvation, near collision with the Russians - the Cultural Revolution gone mad. I have no doubt that this generation wants a peaceful rise.

Not surprisingly, there is a cultural divide between American and British actors regarding the self-promotion associated with new media.

I deal with cultural issues whether they be in the Middle East, Far East, the Orient or the West. You broach questions in the context of their culture and then present Christian answers.

Tourists as well as natives want to see cultural achievements - whether it's the Banaue Terraces, the old churches or museums.

Our increasing ability to alter our biology and open up the processes of life is now fueling a new cultural war.

We spend all this energy keeping our lives normal and safe and predictable, and the result is that our approved cultural safety valve is the movies. So in films, anyway, the hero is obliged to represent the continuance of social values and institutions, and his permission to act is much more seriously limited than the villain's.

I'm not a regionalist. Both places have their pros and cons. And the cultural differences are slighter than they are made out to be. L.A. riots, N.Y. shops. Both are good for stress relief.

I don't believe that economic and cultural interaction automatically brings greater peace and understanding, although it may help in that regard.

The notion of the Internet as a force of political and social revolution is not a new one. As far back as the early 1990s, in the early days of the World Wide Web, there were technologists and writers arguing forcefully that the Internet was destined to become the most important tool for cultural change in human history.

I was sure we would never see the adoption of the Euro. Countries giving up their currencies for a common tender was, it seemed to me, completely out of tune with currency being a carrier of people's cultural identity, celebrating national heroes and events, as it had been for hundreds of years.

As a little girl in Arizona, none of the women in my family had a cultural connection with Girl Scouts, but the opportunity resonated with my mother as a platform that would allow me to excel in school.

We have cultural expectations that everyone needs a dining room, yet they're only used three times a year. But if I put a bone handle on the door of an upper-end brick home, I'm making an outlandish statement.

My new play 'Chinglish,' which will go to Broadway, is about a white American businessman who goes to a provincial capital in China, hoping to make a deal there. It's bilingual. And it's about trying to communicate across language and cultural barriers.

Embedded in 'The New York Times' institutional perspective and reporting methodologies are all sorts of quite debatable and subjective political and cultural assumptions about the world. And with some noble exceptions, 'The Times,' by design or otherwise, has long served the interests of the same set of elite and powerful factions.

'Hannity' had a a guy on that said, 'I fathered 20 kids by 14 mothers.' That is s cultural issue which has demeaned our society and has caused our society dearly in terms of imprisonment. Who's going to be the fathers to those children? Who's going to pay child support?

People who study primate societies make a distinction between two kinds of cultural interactions, agonic and hedonic. In agonic societies, you gain status by asserting dominance over others. In hedonic societies, you gain status by drawing attention to yourself. Open source is a hedonic culture.

Every book in the 'Dreams' cycle dramatizes a particular epoch in the ongoing cultural collision between North America's native peoples and its European colonizers.

That President Mohammad Khatami's policies have been blocked is the bitterest incident in the contemporary Iranian history. This means that the wishes of millions of people who voted for Khatami and called for freedom and justice have been ignored... Why should cultural activities and journalism be so risky in Iran?

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book - a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.

The Leadership Training Institute of America is a cultural think tank providing training and opportunity in leadership development and cultural dynamics.

Cross cultural experience teaches us not simply that people have different beliefs, but that people seek meaning and understand themselves in some sense as members of a cosmos ruled by God.

I can understand the Cultural Revolution of Mao Tse-tung.

In 1952, Muddy cut the song 'Rollin' Stone.' It was a nationwide success, and the song echoes down through rock n' roll history. Bob Dylan cut a tribute by the same name, an English band decided to call themselves the Rolling Stones, and the magazine that first embraced music as a serious cultural phenomenon was itself called 'Rolling Stone.'

I would love to be nominated for an award at some point or do something that at least engenders the type of cultural conversation that a role like Giancarlo Esposito on 'Breaking Bad,' or actually any of the people on 'Breaking Bad.' I would love to have a role in a feature film that was a cultural talking point.