culture quotes

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t spend a whole lot of time following soccer. But as I have traveled around the world to better understand global development and health, I’ve learned that soccer is truly universal. No matter where I go, that’s what kids are playing. That’s what people are talking about.

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.

I don’t think culture is something you can describe.

There are plenty of people who are, I think, completely racist who love hip-hop.

‚WASP‘ is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it’s inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.

I’d always somehow felt slightly as if I’d been born in the wrong country.

Traditions are a common part of our lives. They can be good, and not all traditions are wrong, but sometimes they can take the joy out of life.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

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

The Iraqis have become invested in their nationhood.

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

Pop music will never be low brow.

Say ‚Toronto‘ or ‚Ontario,‘ and the immediate thought associations are with a somewhat blander version of North America: a United States with a welfare regime and a more polite street etiquette, and the additionally reassuring visage of Queen Elizabeth on the currency.

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.

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

I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society.

Quacks are a part of our culture, and we all fall prey to them. Who among us can say, for sure, that even our own personal physicians are honest and competent?

It’s important to love in hip hop.

India does not need to become anything else. India must become only India. This is a country that once upon a time was called the golden bird.

I really love the culture of hip-hop.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

Compton got such a legacy in hip-hop.

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

When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

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.

Being a Puerto Rican artist, I support all kinds of projects that are developed on my beautiful island that in some way or another put our Puerto Rican flag up.

I don’t think even ungodly people realize what a society would be like that had no godly influence at all.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

Obscenity comes from grime.

People who bowl vote. Bowlers are not the cultural elite.

The people of England are the most enthusiastic in the world.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

People from all over the world come to London wanting to make their own mark on it, and they add to the energy and vitality of the capital. It’s got a bit busier since the ’60s, but the more the merrier!

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

I feel Anglo-American.

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

People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice… they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.

We live in a culture that relishes tearing others down. It’s ultimately more fulfilling, though, to help people reach their goals. Instead of feeling jealous, remember: If God did it for them, He can do it for you.

Unlike Europe, China can’t be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they’ve been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don’t see any need to.

The mainstream is always under attack.

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

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

I play a nobody in Japan.

Many Tibetans sacrifice their lives.

America is just downright mean.

I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.

Nobody’s ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there’s some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway.

Football fans share a universal language that cuts across many cultures and many personality types. A serious football fan is never alone. We are legion, and football is often the only thing we have in common.

The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence.

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.

As I got older, my pops tried to keep me involved with the culture by telling me the stories of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, how he came to America, and about our family back home, because all that side of my family – my aunties, grandparents – is in Africa.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

Many people in the western world are spoiled by the conveniences of our culture.

The more people smoke herb, the more Babylon fall.

Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.

I realized the power of hip-hop. I realized how influential this music and this culture are.

The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy – the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities – which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.