#culture

No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.” It is more rewarding - and more difficult - to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about “us.” But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter). ↗

— Edward W. Said

#culture #humanity #imperialism #labels #survival

There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic. ↗

— Lily Tomlin

#culture #endangered #leopard #much #plastic

I'm very influenced by landscapes, not so much the way places look as the way the names sound. In this country we've got so many cultures, and the place names - the Spanish names and the Indian names, which are so incredibly musical. ↗

— Emmylou Harris

#cultures #got #i #incredibly #indian

Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs. ↗

— Martin Heidegger

#bombs #camps #chambers #corpses #countries

It's trite to say that the world has gotten smaller in the age of globalization, but my travels have told me that it's wrong to think this means there is some kind of uniform world culture. ↗

— Norman Spinrad

#culture #globalization #gotten #kind #me

In 1998 I invested in the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at Strathclyde Uni and subsequently put more capital into enterprise education to try and help change the culture. ↗

— Tom Hunter

#centre #change #culture #education #enterprise

I think it's particularly a distinctively American concept that resonates with American culture through biker culture. A motorcycle is an independent thing. You're like, 'I don't want to ride in a car with this person. I want to be independent and ride by myself. But, let's ride in a group. Let's be independent, together.' ↗

— Ryan Hurst

#american culture #car #concept #culture #distinctively

Australians are coffee snobs. An influx of Italian immigrants after World War II ensured that - we probably had the word 'cappuccino' about 20 years before America. Cafe culture is really big for Aussies. We like to work hard, but we take our leisure time seriously. ↗

— Hugh Jackman

#after #america #australians #before #big

And this fear that US models are replacing everything else now spills over from the sphere of culture into our two remaining categories: for this process is clearly, at one level, the result of economic domination - of local cultural industries closed down by American rivals. ↗

— Fredric Jameson

#categories #clearly #closed #cultural #culture

My parents kept the best aspects of the Asian culture, and they Americanized the family. My mother was a great example for me. She was a working mother with a good career. ↗

— Andrea Jung

#asian #aspects #best #career #culture