Tradition is the illusion of permanence.

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you’ve become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that’s the height of intelligence.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

We just seem to have lost all our morals and principles and values these days.

Rastafari not a culture, it’s a reality.

There is a level of snobbery and fickleness in L.A.

The reason why I wear gold – I wear gold for three reasons. One, when Jesus was born, three wise men came from the east: one brought frankincense, one brought myrrh, the other one brought gold. The second reason I wear gold is I can afford it. The third reason I wear it, it’s symbolic of my African heritage.

Britishness is just a way of putting things together and a certain don’t care attitude about clothes. You don’t care, you just do it and it looks great.

We’re so immaturely cynical as a culture. We’re not wise enough to look at an institution like marriage and to really things about what it means and what it signifies. It signifies a place where people can tie the ropes of their lives together so that they’re stronger. It signifies a place where people can tell the truth to one another.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe.

Y’all are so cute and y’all talk so proper over here. I love England.

So there’s no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn’t necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn’t necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

The great moments of rock ‚n‘ roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto.

I definitely think, generally, rap is misogynistic.

Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Cinema reflects culture and there is no harm in adapting technology, but not at the cost of losing your originality.

Coffee is a language in itself.

Honolulu is a melting pot.

Autobiography is awfully seductive; it’s wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass – the slave narrative – speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying ‚I,‘ meaning ‚we.‘

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.

The Iraqis have become invested in their nationhood.

The mainstream is always under attack.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

A lot of churches have not moved with the times.

Hong Kong is a wonderful, mixed-up town where you’ve got great food and adventure. First and foremost, it’s a great place to experience China in a relatively accessible way.

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

I’ve come to the conclusion that mythology is really a form of archaeological psychology. Mythology gives you a sense of what a people believes, what they fear.

In hip-hop, there’s not a lot of love. There’s not a lot of love being spread. It’s always like ‚I’m stuntin‘ on you raps, or I’m better than you raps.‘ It’s not a lot of ‚Yo man, I idolize you raps.‘

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

In a long meter hymn, a singer – they call it ‚lays out a line.‘ And then the whole church joins in in repeating that line. And they form a wall of harmony so tight, you can’t wedge a pin between it.

My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.

If you have fear, you are bound by tradition, you follow some leader or guru. When you are bound by tradition, when you are afraid of your husband or your wife, you lose your dignity as an individual human being.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it’s popular, it’s not culture.

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

My parents had us in church every Sunday, every Wednesday. It was more of a tradition at that point; I didn’t have a personal relationship with the Lord until I went to the altar call one Sunday, and the youth pastor told us to make a decision for ourselves.

The more people smoke herb, the more Babylon fall.

The secret to film is that it’s an illusion.

I’m not afraid to look like a big, hairy, smelly, foreign devil in Tokyo, though I do my best not to, I really do.

It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.

In today’s world, having money has allowed people who are extremely uncool to think that they’re cool and carry it like that. People who really are cool and people who really are artists and have ideas have to literally turn in their cool card to society just to make it past the age of 28.

Pop music will never be low brow.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

One of the things that I have admired about India is the spiritualism of the people.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.

When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people – along with despair about its future.

Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

The intensity of the football and how the people live football in Liverpool – it is not a usual.

I have spent every New Year’s Eve since 1992 in Lourdes. I spend the hour of my birth every year in the grotto. It’s a place with meaning for me.

Many Tibetans sacrifice their lives.