The cultural contrast I saw between religions… Catholics have a lot of mediators, going through saints and Mary or whatever. Protestants in general say things to God directly.
I think the blues is the best literature that we as blacks have created since we’ve been here. I call it our ‘sacred book.’ What I’ve attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and give them to my characters.
If modernist naturalism were true, there would be no objective truth outside of science. In that case right and wrong would be a matter of cultural preference, or political power, and the power already available to modernists ideologies would be overwhelming.
Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don’t have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science.
The fashion industry is an immense cultural and social blight that only gets a free pass because its would-be detractors are scared it’ll start criticising their haircut.
While we welcome people of all faiths in America we cannot be so naive as to expect all countries to do the same. But we cannot allow their cultural mores to snuff out our religious freedoms or the freedom of women to have equal rights.
Richard Hoggart’s cultural analysis ‘The Uses of Literacy’ was published in 1957, but its influence still hovers over anyone setting out to write seriously about people’s affection for things that aren’t serious, such as the products of pop culture.
In Europe, unlike the States, they have a cultural policy.
If there is a ground zero in the cultural wars, it is Missouri, a state where pro-life groups are strong and well organized and their agenda dominates local politics.
Religion is simply one of a multitude of factors – economic political, cultural, social, tribal, racial – which shape and drive human action and reaction and often is the least important of those factors.
Miami is one of the great cultural melting pots in the world. I love working and living here.
At some point we must realize that actively defending against radical Islamic teachings is not a matter of cultural relativity. It is a matter of universally recognized human rights.
There are two Americas – separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed.
I love the movies. Everyone always says the same thing about the shared cultural experience, seeing things on the big screen, the church of the cinema… But on top of all that, as a filmmaker, I love having people be trapped in a movie theater, forcing them to watch what I made.
Bullfights are a very cultural thing. I know many people think it’s cruel, but so many things are cruel. Hunting, the electric chair, wars. These are all cruel things as well.
With ‘Downsizing,’ a lot of the discussion hasn’t been about the film itself, but about cultural and political conversations happening outside of it. It’s being digested in the context of the time.
I did not enjoy Cambridge. But I shouldn’t blame Cambridge alone. I wasn’t ready for university or for the wrench of leaving home. It was a big cultural shock.
Rebecca Eaton has made an enormous contribution to the cultural life of America, and, more than that, she is one of the most fun people I know.
Paradoxically, those who call for family values also tout the wonders of an unregulated market without observing the subtle cultural links between the family they seek to regulate and the market they hold free.
If, hypothetically, Western Catholicism were to review the issue of celibacy, I think it would do so for cultural reasons, not so much as a universal option.
When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it’s so embedded in what we do that we don’t have to think about.
I used to represent Mount Carmel College in cultural activities, and a friend in the team told me to try my hand at acting.
The roots of India’s soft power run deep. India’s is a civilization that, over millennia, has offered refuge and, more importantly, religious and cultural freedom, to Jews, Parsis, several varieties of Christians, and Muslims.
There’s no cultural revolution by mistake.
We have to get out of this cultural mindset of putting badges on ourselves and playing the martyr spinning 1,000 plates. We need to be spinning six plates, and doing it well. Otherwise plates tumble and break.
In the past, a great library was the result of librarians functioning as guardians of culture, tending and caring, selecting and recommending works that maintained and nurtured a cultural heritage.
I have to write people who feel honest but also push our cultural ball forward.
We have cultural expectations that everyone needs a dining room, yet they’re only used three times a year. But if I put a bone handle on the door of an upper-end brick home, I’m making an outlandish statement.
I don’t believe that economic and cultural interaction automatically brings greater peace and understanding, although it may help in that regard.
I think the idea of the social construction of beauty – this idea that beauty is simply whatever culture or society says it is – is on the run. Of course, beauty does arise in a cultural context. No one ever denies that. But there’s also a natural response people have to it.
As the graying of the country continues its march forward, many retirees are now relocating to dense urban centers for the cultural and social opportunities, access to public transportation, and the ability to shop nearby for food and household needs without depending unduly on others.
Small unit autonomy, breaking the right rules, cultural influence, and relationship building has always been the heart Special Operations. Something must be done to ensure these are not lost to the big machine of SOCOM.
In the business of war, the role of women is really to maintain normalcy and ensure that there is cultural continuity.
Cultural comparisons are good because they can tell you about what’s similar, but also sometimes they make it easier to see obvious differences.
The advance of standard English culture was less assisted by government policy than by the sheer weight, wealth, and number of England’s well-established cultural institutions.
Gaming is our cultural bogeyman – we blame it for everything from child obesity to violence to short attention spans. But any explanation that fits every situation ultimately explains nothing.
It’s a melting pot, southern Africa. You find these cultural collisions that result in art and music, and it’s pretty amazing.
Over the last 50 years or so, we have seen an increasing cultural diversification across the country. Accents are a reflection of society, and as society changes, so accents change.
The term ‘new queer cinema’ and the films of mine that were associated with that term are from a very, very different time, one almost entirely defined by the AIDS era. It was a very different social and cultural regard for the lives, the experiences, the worth of gay people.
I’m a big believer that science is part of a larger cultural thing. Science is not all by itself.
English country towns are often seen as a cultural wasteland, but the more cut off you are, the more the need to create things, to make your own culture.
There’s a tradition – in New Orleans it still exists – where people play in the street. People play outside of the venues. Food, music, and that cultural exchange, it happens anywhere.
So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us.
My job is to notice echoes and notice resonances. Scientists are not supposed to do the same thing that cultural critics do.
Chinese people of my parents’ generation who lived through the Cultural Revolution knew so much of death at such a young age, and the psychic toll those experiences left was immense. I knew the stories of the Cultural Revolution before knowing what the Cultural Revolution was.
I am appalled by the notion of cultural wars.
Whenever societies do well, they believe that there is something in their cultural DNA that made it happen.
‘Pride’ is my first film with a happy ending. Before, I naively thought they were a cop-out, but now I’ve come to believe that happy endings and wish fulfilment are an incredibly important part of our cultural life.
As a surfer, I am interested in the ocean. And I am concerned and interested in all of these natural and cultural rumblings underfoot as well.
Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn’t about, and I don’t mean writing style, but cultural style.
In a continent but recently settled, many parts of which have as yet little historical or cultural background, the material for this volume has been gathered from a section that was one of the first to be colonized.
Perhaps some of the appeal of the dangerous-but-yummy paranormal anti-hero lies in his scorn for societal expectations. Yes, women have come a long way, but there are still some cultural stigmas more associated with women than men.
When you buy into the cultural idea of what’s acceptable and unacceptable, you reinforce negative stereotypes and prejudices. That wouldn’t work for me. I don’t love to give advice to anyone, because we all have to make our own choices, but I’d want to live my life in truth.
