Cultural Retardation Quotes

While recognising the possibilities offered by the reformulation of classical Arab culture in the light of contemporary theoritical trends, while applauding the many efforts being made in this direction, and while feeling as much pride in this culture as any other Arab intellectual, it seems to m important nevertheless to retain the problem of "cultural retardation" at the centre of our thinking ~ Abdallah Laroui

The statements of certain western officials show that contrary to their absurd claims, westerners are disqualified, and impetuous, lacking any cultural background. ~ Hamid-Reza Assefi

At the risk of sounding hopelessly romantic, love is the key element. I really love to play with different musicians who come from different cultural backgrounds. ~ John McLaughlin

Perhaps these ancient observations perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what's going on in the sky. To us, a simple rock alignment based on cosmic patterns looks like an Einsteinian feat. But a truly mysterious civilization would be one that made no cultural or architectural reference to the sky at all. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I guess I was very fortunate; I had a very very, lets put it this way, I had very wonderful upbringing and a childhood where my parents, of course, exposed us to many cultural aspects, not only of India but other parts of the world. ~ Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

It was a woman in Minnesota who clarified this shift for me. She pointed out that her mother called herself a housewife. She, on the other hand, called herself a stay at home mom. The change in nomenclature reflects the shift in cultural emphasis: the pressures on women have gone from keeping an immaculate house to being an irreproachable mom … Back in the fifties, women were told to master the differences between oven cleaners and floor wax and special sprays for wood; today they're told to master the differences between toys that hone problem solving skills and those that encourage imaginative play. ~ Jennifer Senior

Fiction, if done right, can bridge cultural divides. Stories can be a footpath for a reader to step into another land and view its indigenous practices and beliefs through a local lens, instead of a telescope. ~ Nadia Hashimi

I always say I'm Catholic - but a cultural Catholic. I wouldn't say I'm a spiritual person, although I pray every day. ~ Kiki Smith

They now endure incessant cultural appropriation by a majority society in the United States that celebrates an idealized American Indian but ignores reservation life - the economic blight and marginalization of what are, in effect, national internment zones, exacerbated by federal inattention and mismanagement. In Indian country there are also thriving cultural traditions and creative genius, but these often receive little more recognition than the problems. - ~ T. J. Stiles

As Dalla Costa put it, women's unpaid
labor in the home has been the pillar upon which the exploitation of the waged workers, "wage slavery," has been built, and the secret of ies productivity (1972:31). Thus, the power differential between women and men in capitalist societry cannot be attributed to the irrelevance of housework for capitalist accumulation - an irrelevance belied by the strict rules that have governed women's lives - nor CO the survival of timeless cultural schemes. Rather, it should be interpreted as the effect of a social system of production that does not recognize the production and reproduction of the worker as a social-economic activity. and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies it instead as a natural resource or a personal service, willie profiting from the wageless conclition of the labor involved. ~ Silvia Federici

Pakistan hasn't been cast in the role of ... interesting cultural place or, you know, land of great comedians. ~ Mohsin Hamid

I like what Barcelona is doing. This city almost perfectly combines its natural advantages with cultural attractions, IT parks and first-rate educational opportunities. The same applies for Dublin, which manages to achieve a blend of complexity, tolerance and artistry and makes a point of not devoting every part of the city to the tourism industry. Sometimes creativity also means forgoing short-term profits and simply saying no. ~ Charles Landry

Americans who want to perform in Europe face a cultural and vocal uphill battle. We're considered good students, very professional and often technically sound; but though there are droves of us to choose from, a European singer is almost always going to be the first choice of a European company - and often, of an American company as well. ~ Renee Fleming

I feel like the thing we can do is celebrate people doing great work and create more cultural momentum and awareness that this is an important thing in the world. So when the next economic crisis hits and people are talking about where to cut from the budget, science isn't the thing. ~ Mark Zuckerberg

Nowhere else in the world do the laws on firearms become the playthings of politicians and lobbyists intent on manufacturing cultural conflict. Nowhere else do elected officials turn the matter of taking a gun to church into a searing ideological question. But then, guns are not a religion in most countries. ~ E. J. Dionne

But I couldn't quite believe that sex was the motivating force behind all human behavior, and that I was left out of the great cultural conversation because I had not been initiated into the mystery. ~ Carlene Bauer

The history of the bagel suggests that Americans' shifting, blended, multi-ethnic eating habits are signs neither of postmodern decadence, ethnic fragmentation, nor corporate hegemony. If we do not understand how a bagel could sometimes be Jewish, sometimes be "New York," and sometimes be American, or why it is that Pakistanis now sell bagels to both Anglos and Tejanos in Houston, it is in part because we have too hastily assumed that our tendency to cross cultural boundaries in order to eat ethnic foods is a recent development - and a culinary symptom of all that has gone wrong with contemporary culture.

It is not. The bagel tells a different kind of American tale. It high- lights ways that the production, exchange, marketing, and consumption of food have generated new identities - for foods and eaters alike. ~ Donna Gabaccia

it is important to stress that history is always constructed, not absolute or unchallangeable. Histories are stories about the past, and reconstructing the past ill involve elements of mythologising from the cultural, political and theoretical stances of both the historian and the informants. ~ John O'Toole

The Beats are really nothing more than a troop of malevolent Boy Scouts trying to earn badges for cultural arson. ~ Carlene Bauer

How we ask our questions affects the answers we arrive at. Light appears as a wave if you ask it "a wavelike question" and it appears as a particle if you ask it "a particle-like question." This is a template for understanding how contradictory explanations of reality can simultaneously be true.
And it's not so much true, as our cultural debates presume, that science and religion reach contradictory answers to the same particular questions of human life. Far more often, they simply ask different kinds of questions altogether, probing and illuminating in ways neither could alone. ~ Krista Tippett

Not one person would admit that they didn't want me to wear a bikini because of their aesthetic preference - a preference that is shaped by our cultural perceptions of what is and isn't beautiful. ~ Jennifer Armintrout

I avoided one-on-one situations, eye contact, and healthy relationships. Instead I took refuge in drinking too much, cheap sex, and sarcasm. ~ Jason Najum

I realize that we are often wary of making these kinds of broad generalizations about different cultural groups
and with good reason. This is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take. We want to believe that we are not prisoners of our ethnic histories. But the simple truth is that if you want to understand ... you have to go back to the past ... it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where you great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The inherent prejudice in unnaturally-produced nationalism causes a form of cultural blindness, which prevents us from seeing the obvious ways we could co-exist in the world as a co-operative human family. ~ Bryant McGill

I try to watch a movie a day, if not more, and through movies, I learned about so many different political themes I hadn't been interested in and cultural things I hadn't been aware of and economic factors I hadn't thought about. ~ Hideo Kojima

My upbringing has always been quite equal in terms of cultural influences. But it's unlikely that anything could prepare you for a job that involves belting out Proclaimers songs on camera, in Edinburgh and in public. ~ Antonia Thomas

Translation work involves knowing not just the structure of the language to be translated, but the cultural framework
that surrounds it. ~ Corinne McKay

We hang on to our values, even if they seem at times tarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives, we have betrayed them more often that we care to remember. What else is there to guide us? Those values are our inheritance, what makes us who we are as a people. And although we recognize that they are subject to challenge, can be poked and prodded and debunked and turned inside out bu intellectuals and cultural critics, they have proven to be both surprisingly durable and surprisingly constant across classes, and races, and faiths, and generations. We can make claims on their behalf, so long as we understand that our values must be tested against fact and experience, so long as we recall that they demand deeds and not just words. ~ Barack Obama

What amazes me is when I see people in their twenties who have families or live a life that seems of a much older person. But that's such a demographic, a socio-economic, cultural, class thing. ~ Meghan Daum

Paradoxically, since gay men rarely have gay parents, cultural transmission must come from friends or strangers (a problem since the generations so seldom mix in gay life). ~ Edmund White

The problem was that, from the very beginning, Christian values were always more popular in American culture than the Christian gospel. That's why one could speak of "God and country" with great reception in almost any era of the nation's history but would create cultural distance as soon as one mentioned "Christ and him crucified." God was always welcome in American culture. He was, after all, the Deity whose job it was to bless America. The God who must be approached through the mediation of the blood of Christ, however, was much more difficult to set to patriotic music or to "Amen" in a prayer at the Rotary Club. ~ Russell D. Moore

It is interesting to me to note that those who most frequently call for fair play are those who are advantaged by the play as it currently is, and that only when that position of privilege is endangered are they likely to benefit from the change required to "play by the rules." What if the "rules" are inherently unfair or simply wrong, or a greater good is to be accomplished by changing them? When the gospel says, "The last will be first, and the first will be last," despite the fact it is counterintuitive to our cultural presuppositions, it is invariably good news to those who are last, and at least problematic news to those who see themselves as first. ~ Peter J. Gomes

Our life stories are at one and the same time reality, fallacy and fantasy ... ~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

If you marry an African, you will marry a man who takes his responsibility for the family seriously ~ Sunday Adelaja

As we've seen the rise of cultural, environmental and educational tourism in adventure travel, we've also seen the rise of female participation. Part of that is due to changes in women's attitudes about their own abilities. As more women participate in such things as fly-fishing, whitewater kayaking and bicycling, we're also seeing concurrent growth in those areas in adventure travel. ~ Christopher Doyle

If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender's performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality. ~ Judith Butler

It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as a farmer who is uninterested in health. Our fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure, because it is our disease. The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole alone. It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or impoverished soil. ~ Wendell Berry

But in public school i learned that it was not only natural but desirable that i should make my own decisions. it was not a matter of cultural background or personality or abilities; it was simply what was true and right ~ Sheena Iyengar

I watch a lot of teen TV and read a lot of YA novels. I also talk to teens whenever I can. There are cultural differences between when I was a teen and now, but emotions - anger, angst, love - are the same. ~ Sarah Mlynowski

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. ~ Rick Perlstein

But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. 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. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. ~ Aaron Swartz

When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray. it must have got tired of the soul's constant nagging and whining and the anxiety-driven intellectual web-spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them: music and painting and poetry and plays. Sublimation, all of it; nothing but sublimation, according to the body. Why not cut to the chase?
But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance. ~ Margaret Atwood