Cultural Boundaries Quotes

With immigrant parents, they've had to sacrifice so much to survive, and they're trying to preserve the culture they lost, so there are just so many boundaries.

There is a Canadian culture that is in some ways unique to Canada, but I don't think Canadian culture coincides neatly with borders.

The English don't like concepts, really, not from a pop star. It's alright if they come from an 'intellectual,', but from a pop star you're getting ahead of yourself. Part of the class game is that you shouldn't rise above your station, and to start talking about concepts if you're in the pop world is getting a bit uppity, isn't it?

I think '60s are appealing to creative people, because it seemed to be a time of endless possibilities, when the boundaries of what could be considered popular culture were being expanded almost by the week. It doesn't feel like that anymore. At times, I wish it were so. Radio is a perfect example; good God, I mean, back then the most interesting songs were also hits, and that's just not true anymore. It hasn't been true in a long time.

The most beautiful thing about music is that it transcends most anything.

Artists, in theory, should not be limited to their personal experience, culture, identity, and worldview. But they must also accept that the degree of difficulty in imagining beyond their own borders is steep, and the failure rate is high.

I think there's very little interesting in art that is not transgressive in some way. And I don't think that's a very revolutionary thing to say.

Drag should push the limits of what is considered fashionable or beautiful.

I really didn't want to be boxed into becoming a certain kind of film-maker - becoming the Maori story film-maker because I had made those short films.

The great achievement of Western culture since the Enlightenment is to make many of us peer over the wall and grant some respect to people outside it; the great failure of Western Culture is to deny that walls are inevitable or important.

Gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don't tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren't even national boundaries when you get down and walk around. They're just imaginary lines we draw on maps. I just get fascinated by people who assume that things that are imaginary have no relevance to their lives.

There are those people who basically don't like those who are different. Now, that is a prejudice and it's a prejudice that's dangerous because in the world today, the world works through connectivity. It works through going across the boundaries, but faith and culture and race in a nation.

Why can I write 'South' with some assurance that you'll know I mean Richmond and don't mean Phoenix? What is it that the South's boundaries enclose?

The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.

There's a gray area between Conservative and Orthodox people, for whom you don't screw around with the mezuzah, you don't mess with the holy melodies.

Further strengthenings of the self-centered instinct for survival recruit even greater numbers of people into some sort of ring of fellowship (church or gender, red state or blue) by populating the terra incognita outside the ring with enough barbarians to verify the existence of a civilization within--to define the preferred stock by what, as all good people agree, it decidedly is not.

Human nature is deeper and broader than the artificial contrivance of any existing culture.

A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.

You can be tops in Australia and be unheard of everywhere else.

Sometimes my humor does offend people, and I've said it before: I don't write jokes to be offensive. I write jokes to be funny, and I guess what I find funny are things that other people sometimes find offensive. I would love nothing more than to never offend anyone, but it just doesn't seem to work out that way.

All divisions are man-made.

Civilization, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.

We don't evaluate what's right and wrong, we live in a society. We live in a culture. We have to live within the culture.

These ballot initiatives remind us that America is the land where people are free to dream whatever they want, so long as that dream doesn't make Midwesterners feel icky!

There is no way you can think outside of your culture.