Tradition is the illusion of permanence.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, ‚Well, what do you need?‘

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

‚Evil men have no songs.‘ How is it that the Russians have songs?

I got a chain letter by fax. It’s very simple. You just fax a dollar bill to everybody on the list.

Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first they have to understand that their neighbour is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a Yeti.

I don’t travel with them, but they can’t be missing in my home. There have to always be dominoes… I used to play with my family – dad, my grandpa, my uncles.

The Iraqis have become invested in their nationhood.

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

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.

Compton got such a legacy in hip-hop.

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

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

Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I’m taking with me when I go.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate, upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

Most of us enter adult life with great ambitions for how we will start our own ventures, but the harshness of life wears us down. We settle into some job and slowly give in to the illusion that our bosses care about us and our future, that they spend time thinking of our welfare.

According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.

I have visited Japan several times and have always been shown wonderful hospitality.

When good Americans die they go to Paris.

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.

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

London is a roost for every bird.

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.

Puerto Rico’s relationship with music is everything. It’s an island full of talent and if you grow up there, you grow up living and breathing music.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin‘ now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

America is just downright mean.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

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

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

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

Dancing was always part of my culture growing up in Barbados. When I shot my 1st video I worked really hard with my choreographer to perfect the routines.

I truly believe the things Notre Dame stands for.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

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

One aim of the Boy Scouts scheme is to revive amongst us, if possible, some of the rules of the knights of old.

Polygamy: An endeavour to get more out of life than there is in it.

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

‚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.

I’m the proof – you can’t throw away tradition.

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.

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.

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

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

The more people smoke herb, the more Babylon fall.

Obscenity comes from grime.

Our society strives to avoid any possibility of offending anyone – except God.

No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.

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

A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

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.

In Puerto Rico we dance to everything.

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

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.