Culture Identity Quotes

Just as some cultures have a hundred words for 'snow,' there should be a hundred words in our language for all the ways a black boy can lie awake at night. ~ Saeed Jones

Languages, just like people, are worlds within themselves. They have the incredible ability to provide us with a clearer, more profound and detailed perspective of a culture and its views on life, nature, and death. ~ Orge Castellano

Anthropologist Gary Weaver suggested looking at culture as a kind of iceberg: one portion is clearly visible above the surface of the water, while the much larger chunk of ice is hidden below. The part above the water can be considered surface culture––what we can physically see or hear, including behavior, words, customs, language, and traditions. Underneath the water, invisible to all, is the deep culture. This place includes our beliefs, values, assumptions, worldview, and thought processes. ~ David C. Pollock

It's also important to read the newspaper every day to see how the pope is doing. Here in Rome, the pope's health is recorded daily in the newspaper, very much like weather, or the TV schedule. Today the pope is tired. Yesterday, the pope was less tired than he is today. Tomorrow, we expect that the pope will not be so tired as he was today. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

It seems to us that one of the deepest divisions between the Russians and the Americans or British, is in their feeling toward their governments. The Russians are taught, and trained, and encouraged to believe that their government is good, that every part of it is good, and that their job is to carry it forward, to back it up in all ways. On the other hand, the deep emotional feeling among Americans and British is that all government is somehow dangerous, that there should be as little government as possible, that any increase in the power of government is bad, and that existing government must be watched constantly, watched and criticized to keep it sharp and on its toes. ~ John Steinbeck

She tried to explain to them it wasn't the place that made people uncultured but their attitudes. ~ Vivian Arend

We are each a product of our biological endowments, culture, and personal history. Culture ideology and cultural events along with transmitted cultural practices influences each of us. We are each the product of our collective interchanges. Our county's domestic and interlinked international conflicts fuse us together. We are each a molecule in the helix of human consciousness joined in a physical world. We form a coil of connective tissue soldered together by cultural links. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I come from a country and also a continent whose identity is in the making. We're a very young culture, and I think that things are not yet crystallised. ~ Walter Salles

To be a woman is to be more than our parts.
It is to be more than the length of our lashes or the plumpness and color of our lips. ~ Leah Darrow

The reason we life black people isn't because they're black. We like them because they're not as grey as we are. ~ John Cage

I realised with a prickle of discomfort why he bothered me: it was not so much that I resented the hearty backslapping bonhomie of English upper-class gentlemen, for I could tolerate it well enough in Sidney on his own. It was the way Sidney fell so easily into this strutting group of young men, where I could not, and the fear that he might in some ways prefer their company to mine. Once again, I felt that peculiar stab of loneliness that only an exile truly knows: the sense that I did not belong, and never would again. ~ S.J. Parris

Seattle is for people who love culture, but refuse to sacrifice their wild nature to attain it. ~ Kimberly Kinrade

We're all human, we should be respectful of others, and tolerant with each other. This matters more than whether we eat the same food or speak the same language. The skin colour does not make us different. It's easier to be with people that are different to you but have the same values than to be with people who appear similar to you but have different values." Sophie ~ Angela Nicoara

It's the lifestyle that's being packaged and sold rather than the actual meaning. ~ Rain Cooper

America had shifted from what the influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality ~ Susan Cain

When we think of the word culture, obvious representations such as how to dress, eat, speak, and act like those around us come to mind. But learning culture is more than learning conformity to external patterns of behavior. Culture is also a system of shared concepts, beliefs, and values. It is the framework from which we interpret and make sense of life and the world around us. ~ David C. Pollock

Since the end of the postwar economic boom, certain strategies have been intensified to stimulate consumption, especially strategies aimed at American youth that project sexual activity as instant fulfillment and violence as the locus of machismo identity. This market activity has contributed greatly to the disorientation and confusion of American youth, and those with less education and fewer opportunities bear the brunt of this cultural chaos. ~ Cornel West

Who defined me? My culture, a culture of mercy, a living codex. I am a unique culture of one, from everywhere. I am her map and her self. I am everyone in the story; I am the story. ~ Alice Notley

Don't you ever just think of yourself as American? ~ Sabrina Vourvoulias

The whole point is to take from our native culture and from contemporary culture without using one art form to mimic the other, so that our native identity remains the native identity, the contemporary identity remains the contemporary identity, and the mixing of these two musical identities creates a third musical identity. ~ John Trudell

However, whatever frightening mask it might assume, the national spirit in its original state was of pristine whiteness. Traveling through a country like Thailand, Honda realized more clearly than ever the simplicity and purity of things Japanese, like transparent stream water
through which one could glimpse pebbles below, or the probity of Shinto rites. Honda's life was not imbued with such spirit. Like the majority of Japanese he ignored it, behaving as though it did not exist and surviving by
escaping from it. All his life he had dodged things fundamental and artless: white silk, clear cold water, the zigzag white paper of the exorciser's staff fluttering in the breeze, the sacred precinct marked by a torii, the gods'
dwelling in the sea, the mountains, the vast ocean, the Japanese sword with its glistening blade so pure and sharp. Not only Honda, but the vast majority of Westernized Japanese, could no longer stand such intensely native elements. ~ Yukio Mishima

The excesses of identity politics pale in comparison to the monolithic normative realities that dominate our culture. ~ Jamie Arpin-Ricci

Germany was his favorite place to live, he said, because, even as a child, he could tell how much the Germans loved Americans, and it felt great to be loved for his nationality. ~ Imbolo Mbue

A great deal of the global stimuli that we view comes to us without major effort. Daily a person scans and screens a wide barrage of solicited and unsolicited material. What information a society pays attention to creates the standards and principles governing citizens' life. A nation's discourse translates its economic, social, and cultural values to impressionable children. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The few weeks I have had at my disposal have not given me the chance to revive and to work through my old memories in such a way that I might offer you a solid introduction into the psychic life of Indians. ~ Aby Warburg

Religion and culture are two important ways in which we as humans find our identity. That's certainly true for me. ~ Gene Luen Yang

I try to find the core values that are so fundamental that they transcend ethnic identity. That doesn't mean I run from it. I embrace African-American culture and I love it and embrace it, but it is a part of a human identity. So I'm always trying to make a larger human statement. ~ Wynton Marsalis

Cook with butter in the North, olive oil in the South. ~ Alain Bremond-Torrent

I had never said those words because there were no words left. My beloved and I were both exiles from language. Our love couldn't be expressed in words. Our love had been woven into the melodies rendered by his flute, and it was subsumed in the atoms of the air we breathed. It had been consecrated in this shrine. It had never been named. It was an unnamed thing that had remained unspoken, unuttered, unsaid. I did not need to name it when he could already hear it. ~ Faiqa Mansab

We are nothing but bricks from our cultural molds ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

At the limit it could be said that every speaking being has a personal language of his own, that is his own particular way of thinking and feeling. Culture, at its various levels, unifies in a series of strata, to the extent that they come into contact with each other, a greater or lesser number of individuals who understand each other's mode of expression to varying degrees, etc. ~ Antonio Gramsci

We are free falling backward through time, reincarnating ourselves from our past, reflecting the chaotic energy of the present. ~ Lorin Morgan-Richards

The overriding reason why we should take other people's cultures seriously is because God has taken ours seriously. ~ John R.W. Stott

I wrote Dreams of My Mothers because it reveals deep insight into a topic - cross boarder, cross racial adoption - that rarely gets much attention from any quarter, because it represents such a niche subset of our society, but contains within it nearly all the most deeply felt – and held – human themes, passions, values, insecurities, and judgments. And loves. ~ Joel L.A. Peterson

The system of domination is founded on depriving nations of their true identity. It seeks to deprive nations of their culture, identity, self-confidence and in this way dominate them. ~ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

The construction of a new body of knowledge always bears direct connection to the ideology in which it operates. Historical insights that diverge from the narrative laid down at the inception of the nation can be accepted only when consternation about their implications is abated. This can happen when the current collective identity begins to be taken for granted and ceases to be something anxiously and nostalgically clings to a mythical past, when identity becomes the basis for living and not its purpose - that is when historiographic change can take place. ~ Shlomo Sand

Newness only becomes mere evil in its totalitarian format, where all the tension between individual and society, that once gave rise to the category of the new, is dissipated. Today the appeal to newness, of no matter what kind, provided only that it is archaic enough, has become universal, the omnipresent medium of false mimesis. The decomposition of the subject is consummated in his self-abandonment to an ever-changing sameness. ~ Theodor Adorno

I've noticed that women are always punished for their sexuality in popular culture. ~ Jill Soloway

I know imitation is the highest form of flattery, but stealing one's identity is totally different. ~ AnnaLynne McCord

Himmler wants to send an expedition to Tibet to look for ancient manuscripts on the Aryans. The man is like a little schoolgirl. What culture is there in an old jug, I ask you? ~ Adolf Hitler

Pop culture is like our subconscious. ~ Hanna Rosin

Love is not the least bit intimidated by our big, fat, hairy problems. He continues to go about
the work of unveiling the diamonds we were made to be. ~ Catherine Toon

Men in our culture have been spoiled, treated with false reverence instead of respect. ~ Marianne Williamson

He was sorry for himself as well, for he was doomed to find life and identity in death letters. ~ Mahesh Poudyal

Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Our culture is definitely the eighth grade. It's run by eighth-grade boys, and the way these boys show a girl they like her is by humiliating her and making her cry. ~ Merrill Markoe

We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room." Here she describes a form of society that doesn't enforce identity but liberates it, the society of strangers, the republic of the streets, the experience of being anonymous and free that big cities invented. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so ... I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games. ~ Haruki Murakami

God chose to introduce Himself to us in the first verse of Genesis as a Creator. And yet so few Christians really understand the power of creativity to influence the culture. ~ Phil Cooke

You know when you eat too many sweets and get diabetes? Paparazzi are the diabetes of materialistic culture. ~ Shirley Maclaine

Mythology is a subjective truth. Every culture imagines life a certain way. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik

There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful. ~ Dave Hickey

I'm not cynical when it comes to things that are important. I'm cynical about pop culture and all that horseshit. ~ Zach Galifianakis

Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero ... ~ Charlotte Bronte

Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane. ~ Kate Millett

I used to take hostages in my relationships and not let people be independent. It always ended in disaster, because you take away people's identity and they end up full of resentment. ~ Elton John

You have been immortal since before you were born and will be long after the body dissolves. The body is Consciousness; never born; never dies; only changes. The mind - your ego, personal beliefs, history, and identity - is all that ends at death. ~ Dan Millman

I think a lot of self-identity and inner-personal development is hampered by consumerism and capitalism because we see ourselves as a reflection of the TV, rather than as a reflection of the people who are around us, truly. ~ Aloe Blacc

In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Religion is so much more than the god you pray to. The religion that you associate with, it's culture, it is family, it is background. That is something that I have always grown up with. ~ Aasif Mandvi

I wanted to do something new. The world is becoming a global village and we have to understand these different cultures. There is a Danish culture, an Israeli culture and so on. So if you want to go to Denmark, then read the book. ~ Enock Maregesi

Chemical products are used in virtually every branch of industry and agriculture and come to the consumer in almost every product he consumes; yet, because they are primarily industrial raw materials which have lost their identity, the average consumer is unaware of them. To him even their names are meaningless. ~ George W. Stocking

Culture is the sum total of shared habits and expectations ~ Atul Gawande

In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality. ~ Steve Erickson

A lot of artists give up because it's just too damn hard to go on making art in a culture that by and large does not support its artists. But the people who don't give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.
They've taken into their hearts the idea that there is enough for all of us, that success will manifest itself in different ways for different sorts of artists, that keeping the faith is more important than cashing the check, that being genuinely happy for someone else who got something you hope to get makes you genuinely happier too. ~ Cheryl Strayed

The point being we used to have a system that wasn't as rigged in how the tax structure functioned. The president [Barack Obama] and I have been trying to get rid of some of these loopholes for some time. Look, we have to change the corporate culture. ~ Joe Biden

A cult leader alone in his beliefs is just a crazy dude with a beard. ~ Caitlin Doughty

Much of what is written on the craft is biased in one way or another, so weed out what is useful to you and ignore the rest. I see the next few years as being crucial in the transformation of our culture away from the patriarchal death cults and toward the love of life, of nature, of the female principle. The craft is only one path among the many opening up for women, and many of us will blaze new trails as we explore the uncharted country of our own interiors. The heritage, the culture, the knowledge of the ancient priestesses, healers, poets, singers, and seers were nearly lost, but a seed survived the flames that will blossom in a new age into thousands of flowers. The long sleep of Mother Goddess is ended. May She awaken in each of our hearts ~~ Merry meet, merry part, and blessed be. ~ Starhawk

[Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, "Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings." But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts. ~ Bill Bryson

The insidious reasons for a brown girl's self-loathing won't be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations - and what they mean about your worth - might not dawn on you while you're playing cricket in the sand. What's at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards. ~ Padma Lakshmi

A history of the working class in the United States should, first of all, give a sense of what is meant by "the working class in the United States." It means most of us who live in the United States of America-which, unfortunately, has not been the focus of a majority of history books that claim to tell the story of this country. This doesn't make sense because without the working class there would be no United States. (From a certain point of view, this history book deficiency does make sense, given the biases built into our business-dominated culture.) ~ Paul Le Blanc

Why do we legislate hard against practices like fraud and not against exploitation of women's bodies? How have we got to a point as a community where we value money over people's dignity? My guess would be because where fraud is taking place, institutions are losing money, whereas where exploitation of images of women's bodies is taking place, institutions are directly or indirectly, making money or, at the very least, not losing any... So where's the economic incentive to defend against the human cost? It is women who pay and culture that suffers. ~ Scarlett Curtis

Yet when we do manage to create ourselves anew, isn't there always a suspicion that the new identity fits over the old like a second skin, at times itchy or uncomfortably tight, not quite covering the most vulnerable patches? ~ Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Peri disliked these dinner parties, which went on late into the night and often left her with a migraine the next day. She would rather stay home and, in the witching hours, be immersed in a novel – reading being her way to connect with the universe. But solitude was a rare privilege in Istanbul. There was always some important event to attend or an urgent social responsibility to fulfil as if the culture, like a child scared of loneliness, made sure everyone was at all times in the company of others. ~ Elif Shafak

In the Culture of Character, the ideal self was serious, disciplined, and honorable. What counted was not so much the impression one made in public as how one behaved in private. The word personality didn't exist in English until the eighteenth century, and the idea of "having a good personality" was not widespread until the twentieth. But when they embraced the Culture of Personality, Americans started to focus on how others perceived them. They became captivated by people who were bold and entertaining. "The social role demanded of all in the new Culture of Personality was that of a performer," Susman famously wrote. "Every American was to become a performing self. ~ Susan Cain

In all cultures, the midwife's place is on the threshold of life, where intense human emotions, fear, hope, longing, triumph, and incredible physical power-enable a new human being to emerge. Her vocation is unique. ~ Sheila Kitzinger

The Romanovs inhabit a world of family rivalry, imperial ambition, lurid glamour, sexual excess and depraved sadism; this is a world where obscure strangers suddenly claim to be dead monarchs reborn, brides are poisoned, fathers torture their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wives murder husbands, a holy man, poisoned and shot, arises, apparently, from the dead, barbers and peasants ascend to supremacy, giants and freaks are collected, dwarfs are tossed, beheaded heads kissed, tongues torn out, flesh knouted off bodies, rectums impaled, children slaughtered; here are fashion-mad nymphomaniacal empresses, lesbian ménage à trois, and an emperor who wrote the most erotic correspondence ever written by a head of state. Yet this is also the empire built by flinty conquistadors and brilliant statesmen that conquered Siberia and Ukraine, took Berlin and Paris, and produced Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky; a civilization of towering culture and exquisite beauty. ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

It is one thing to try to understand how genes influence human identity or sexuality or temperament. It is quite another thing to imagine altering identity or sexuality or behavior by altering genes. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

We're committed, as she gets older, to teaching her about her birth culture. And of course she already loves the rice. Actually, it was her first solid food. ~ Celeste Ng

Statistics show that well over half the married couples in our culture divorce, and many of those who stick it out do so for reasons other than personal happiness - because it's such a hassle dividing everything, moving, having to start over - not to mention children and the emotional and financial aspects of splitting up. ~ Caroline Muir

If beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, value is in the mind of the consumer. ~ Michele Jennae

As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world. ~ Lev Manovich

And the thing about nerd culture being mainstream culture now means that there's no place to just be a nerd among other nerds - without being reminded that you're the nerd. ~ Rainbow Rowell

The evolution of cultures appears to follow the pattern of the evolution of species. The many different forms of culture which arise correspond to the "mutations" of genetic theory. Some forms prove to be effective under prevailing circumstances and others not, and the perpetuation of the culture is determined accordingly. ~ B.F. Skinner

Every master loves to fuck a slave. It is a law of nature, or maybe culture. ~ Annalee Newitz