Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.
Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now.
The Chinese have made a faustian pact with the government, agreeing to forsake demands for political and intellectual freedom in exchange for more material comfort. They live prosperous lives in which any expression of pain is forbidden.
When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
I am opposed to a multicultural France. I think that those who have a different culture and who arrive in France have to submit themselves to French culture.
Assimilation, not success, is the American end game.
Where I grew up in Dallas, things might be a little more traditional. People have the same things in mind. They're supposed to grow up, go to college, get a job, get married, and have children, grandchildren. That's the world I grew up in.
I deal with gay and black conservatives who don't want to be called Uncle Toms of their politically correct Marxist multi-cultural unit structure. And they come to me saying, 'What can I do?' And I say, 'Lay low.'
Everywhere the fatal spirit of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates and threatens to blight whatever of original growth might adorn the soil.
God's Word will never pass away, but looking back to the Old Testament and since the time of Christ, with tears we must say that because of lack of fortitude and faithfulness on the part of God's people, God's Word has many times been allowed to be bent, to conform to the surrounding, passing, changing culture of that moment rather than to stand as the inerrant Word of God judging the form of the world spirit and the surrounding culture of that moment. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, may our children and grandchildren not say that such can be said about us.
We are citizens of an age, as well as of a State; and if it is held to be unseemly, or even inadmissible, for a man to cut himself off from the customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, why should it be less of a duty, in the choice of his activity, to submit his decision to the needs and the taste of his century?
To her credit, Madam Walker discerned that black women wanted to conform to white Victorian models of beauty. She was aware of the double- sidedness of her products - helping black women appear more European in look, with straight hair - but she always maintained that she was simply selling products that promoted hair growth.
The sin of worldliness is a preoccupation with the things of this temporal life. It's accepting and going along with the views and practices of society around us without discerning if they are biblical. I believe that the key to our tendencies toward worldliness lies primarily in the two words “going along”. We simply go along with the values and practices of society.
If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.
Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame.
David and his followers taught no new doctrines, in their dispersion or when they came to power, that can be brought to countenance thee at all in shaving off thy beard.
As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
The more civilized a nation, the more conformed its population, until that civilization's last age arrives, when multiplicity wages war with conformity. The former grows ever wilder, ever more dysfunctional in its extremities; whilst the latter seeks to increase its measure of control, until such efforts acquire diabolical tyranny.' - Traveller
I grew up at the time of Social Realism in Poland, when everyone was supposed to be 'writing for the workers.' But I soon became allergic to this. I have never written for audiences. I like it if they appreciate my music. But I would never change my style for them.
Diversity" is a difficulty to be overcome, not an advantage to be sought. True, America does a better job than most at accommodating a diverse population. We also do a better job at curing cancer and containing pollution. But no one goes around mindlessly exclaiming: "Cancer is a strength!" "Pollution is our greatest asset!
I decided to live as an individual and as I grew older, and thought more, and read more and experienced more, my views became more conservative. But my group is liberal. Not only that, they say, 'If you're not liberal and not a Democrat, you're not black. If you're conservative, you're a sellout.' Here, then, I'm living with that kind of a pressure against my individuality.
I think if you live in a country, basically you share the dominant values of a country although you may disagree on issues all the time.
The intellectual world is deeply conformist... We talk a lot about the crimes of others. When it comes to our own crimes, we are nationalists in the Orwellian sense.
There's not a lot of room for thinking in popular culture; there's not a lot of room for being conflicted.
