Cultural Adoption Quotes

Can one name a single nation that has not turned to the West in its quest for civilization?

We must insist on assimilation - immigration without assimilation is an invasion. We need to tell folks who want to come here, they need to come here legally. They need to learn English, adopt our values, roll up their sleeves and get to work.

Only a few years after the permanent settlement of Virginia, some fifty missionaries arrived to begin the massive task of converting the heathen. The Indians on their part, did not respond with alacrity to the idea of adopting a culture that to them, in many cases, seemed barbarous, indeed.

Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used the phrase just for the Happening, to have a catchy name for it; and then it immediately got taken up and brought into use. There's no defence against that - and really it's no bad thing.

The sport was right in the center of these changing social dynamics. It was a game invented by blue-collar people in Scotland but adopted by the elite in England and America. All of those conflicts were coming into the open. I was amazed to find out how much was played out in golf as well.

Five o'clock tea" is a phrase our "rude forefathers," even of the last generation, would scarcely have understood, so completelyis it a thing of to-day; and yet, so rapid is the March of the Mind, it has already risen into a national institution, and rivals, in its universal application to all ranks and ages, and as a specific for "all the ills that flesh is heir to," the glorious Magna Charta.

I understand Christmas, and I understand Easter. But Halloween is one of those things where, if you don't grow with it? The French, they tried Halloween for a few years, and I think they're dropping it.

There is no nation which so readily adopts foreign customs as the Persians.

Opera became popular in Texas the same way it did in a lot of previously isolated regions of the nation. It started with money. In the case of Texas, it was oil money, and it made a lot of people very rich, very fast.

I'm the only one in my family who doesn't cook, but I can do a Swiss dish called frittatensuppe. You make a thin omelet from eggs, flour and parsley, then roll and cut it in the shape of tagliatelle and add broth. It's a tradition we adopted.

I think Russian people are learning that democracy is not an alien thing; it's not a western invention.

In the final analysis, change sticks when it becomes the way we do things around here.

Fact is, given a choice to erase or embrace Western popular culture, most Muslims would gleefully embrace it.

When I was 13, I decided I was British and was going to stay that way.

You can still see the shadow from when the Zeppelin floated over America; it took like Islam in the desert . . .

Indian food has been huge in the UK forever and ever, but that's because it has a historical rooting. America, I think is really ripe for it. There's been so much interest in Indian culture.

The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.

For 500 years the West patented six killer applications that set it apart. The first to download them was Japan. Over the last century, one Asian country after another has downloaded these killer apps- competition, modern science, the rule of law and private property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. Those six things are the secret sauce of Western civilization.

White people couldn't do black music back in the day because they weren't funky or bad enough. They weren't from the ghettoes, but hip-hop and R&B changed all of that because white kids want to be down with it. They wanted to learn it so they studied the culture. It's kind of a cool thing because we shouldn't be so separate.

Following the West is not surrendering. Following the West, the best of the West, is following originality.

Holland was one of the first countries to adopt dance music into their culture, and we were the first ones to have really big raves. I grew up in that atmosphere in the early 1990s, and I was very interested in how dance music was made.

Progressive music probably wouldn't even really exist if not for the people of the United States having picked up on it and nurtured it in the way they did. It really is an American form of music in the sense that it was nurtured here. So it belongs here. It has become part of the fabric of American musical culture.

I grew up listening to hip hop and embracing black culture, probably because it was 'outsider art.'

I adopted England as least as much as England adopted me.

There's people who actually have a whole science devoted to what makes a sticky meme and that idea of that question of why some ideas about how civilizations work catch on and others don't.