When you do have songs where you’re going to say something, some kind of statement about cultural or social stuff, that in general people love it. People love to be challenged in that way.
In Denmark, the annual Christmas party is probably the most important cultural institution in the country.
Even political insiders recognize that years of political effort on behalf of Evangelical Christians have generated little cultural gain.
Even if you aren’t a believer, there are incredible stories in the ‘good book’ that I guarantee you will keep you glued to the page. The Bible is no less a part of our cultural heritage than Shakespeare is – and by the way, Shakespeare’s plays are absolutely loaded with Biblical references.
Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
There are cultural issues everywhere – in Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa, wherever you go. But somehow when we talk about cultural differences, we magnify those differences.
I’m a big fan of cultural music, and that’s how I try to expand my playing, by listening to music that is not conventionally American.
For to change the norms, the very foci of attention, of a cultural system is a difficult task – far more complex than that of changing an individual’s attitudes and interests.
When you’re out of your own cultural context you have conversations with yourself that you just don’t have at any other point in your life. When you’re in a hotel room on the border between India and Nepal you can really discover things about yourself.
I have never read any Tolstoy. I felt badly about this until I read a Bill Simmons column where he confessed that he’d never seen ‘The Big Lebowski.’ Simmons, it should be pointed out, has seen everything. He said that everyone needs to have skipped at least one great cultural touchstone.
Quality is the result of a carefully constructed cultural environment. It has to be the fabric of the organization, not part of the fabric.
In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.
I wouldn’t necessarily say she is a country artist. I mean, obviously Taylor Swift started in country, but she morphed into somewhat of a cultural icon, so, who am I to judge what she is?
While designed to visually seduce, Dune is not primarily a formal exercise but a social, ecological, cultural one.
I don’t believe in post-racial or post-gay or post-anything, but I do think within a certain group of friends, what matters less is the specificities of race and sexuality, and what matters more is the shared experience, shared language and shared cultural touch points.
I truly believe in cinema’s potential for cultural impact. I have a clear idea what I want to do – to enrich people’s lives.
The cultural war of words has actually been won by the most dispossessed people in the Western world, the urban American blacks.
The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.
In terms of cultural upbringing, I’d be at the temple at the weekend – I’m a Hindu – but I’d also be at the Saints game as well on a Saturday – you do everything, you do both.
People who grow up in a region doubtless have a better cultural awareness of their own cuisine, but it’s also true that a lot of locals go to McDonald’s, Applebee’s and the like.
Data adds concrete information to a teacher’s observations and intuition, but it will never replace experience, personal relationships, and cultural understanding.
Perhaps ‘photography’ has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps ‘photography,’ as a meaningful cultural trope, is over.
Some of us claim that New York City is the capital of the country, indeed the capital of the world. Now, that may be a bit much for those who don’t come from New York, but clearly we are an important city for reasons of our cultural advantages.
Living gives you a better understanding of life. I would hope that my characters have become deeper and more rounded personalities. Wider travels have given me considerably greater insight into how cultural differences affect not only people, but politics and art.
Few of my classmates looked like me. While we shared similar aspirations and many good times, there’s much to be said for making any challenging journey with people of the same cultural background.
Tower Records was a place to meet your friends, your co-workers or a place to meet new friends who shared a common love of music, literature and all things cultural.
Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it’s not acceptable.
I basically get stereotyped a lot in terms of being a girl and writing ‘chick’ music for teenage girls or something. I think, if anything, the press kind of, because of my gender and my age, tends to kind of relegate my work to this sort of special-interest group. It’s part of the cultural dynamic, I guess.
I was an anthropology major in college, and I’ve had a lifelong fascination with Egyptology, mummies, and all sorts of bizarre cultural practices.
For decades, Indians have immigrated to the United States, joined our communities, and raised their families while maintaining their cultural heritage.
One of the most stubborn barriers to patient empowerment is the cultural assumption that since the way professionals learned was hard, you must need to be really smart, and you need to be taught in a carefully thought out, methodical sequence.
We have a disturbing cultural appetite for novelty, and it seems to me wrong each new laureate should dislodge the ideas of his or her predecessor, especially when they’re still unfolding.
Your mom is the first person you fall in love with, so it’s loaded forever and carries all this baggage. There’s almost always a communication barrier in place. In my case it’s a language and cultural barrier, but other times, it’s because your mother’s love is conditional or because you’re fundamentally different.
There are the further difficulties of building a population out of a diversity of races, each at a different stage of cultural evolution, some in need of restraint, many in need of protection; everywhere a bewildering Babel of tongues.
My documentary ‘Split Decision’ examines Cuban-American relations, and the economic and cultural paradoxes that have shaped them since Castro’s revolution, through the lens of elite Cuban boxers forced to choose between remaining in Cuba or defecting to America.
Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean share a cultural heritage based on centuries of common history. And what is more, we share the same values and world view. We believe in a world order that is based on cooperation, on regionalism, on multilateralism.
Looting has an immense impact on our ability to understand our global cultural heritage; once these objects are gone, so too is our chance of piecing together humanity’s shared story.
‘Prison Notebooks’ gives me a basic understanding of how power can influence people through cultural products and intellectual groups, so they will voluntarily support the hegemony.
Hip-hop is a cultural expression – it’s embracing.
The nature of power in the modern world is that it is also constructed in relation to political, moral, intellectual, cultural, ideological, sexual questions.
In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early ’60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.
Increasingly, over the past ten years, I’ve come to take the view that a cultural perspective is intrinsic to the future of language teaching and learning, especially in the case of English, as it becomes increasingly global.
With a book called ‘Keeping Score,’ I really did want to write a book about the Korean War, because I felt that it is the least understood war in the American cultural imagination. So I set out with the idea that Americans didn’t know much about the Korean War and that I was going to try to fix a tiny bit of that.
China is a place where you can experience two very contrasting things coexisting. First, the rich, cultural history of the country – and, second, rapid urbanization.
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).
Ralph Ellison’s essays were models for me when I began my life as a critic. Slipping cultural yokes and violating aesthetic boundaries, he made criticism high-stakes work, especially for a black critic.
My perspective is cultural and world-based. It’s always been a global perspective.
The apparent pointlessness of fashion may be just what makes it so strong as a zeitgeist sensor. Even I, a designer, do not know why a certain proportion feels dated or why another one feels exciting at a given moment. I leave that to the cultural historians and theorists.
Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation, and our job here is to teach and to research and to create knowledge on Asia in conjunction and in cooperation with scholars as well as with political, intellectual, and cultural leaders in Asia.
