Cultural Constraints Quotes

Our democratic culture does not prioritise protecting an individual's right to live life her way, especially if that is not our way or the way of the community.

The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for a variety of elaborate rewards, new forms in which sexual spontaneity is still possible, and women must learn to discipline their receptivity to a thousand other considerations.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.

In today's Britain, the weakest among us are often assumed to be minority communities. In fact, the weakest are those minorities-within-minorities for whom the legal right to exit from their communities' constraints amounts to nothing before the enforcement of cultural and religious shaming.

Human relationships are patterned and cross-patterned and restricted and limited and delimited and caged and freed again by the elaborate conventions, rules and games which we call civilisation. They're often absurd and farcical, and sometimes they're tragic, yet we acknowledge that they are necessary.

It is the emotions to which one objects in Germany most of all.

We are not supposed to have an opinion. If we have an opinion, it has to be controversial – that is how we are always projected. It is difficult.

We Latin women are liberated from the neck up, not the neck down.

When a man is born...there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

Every quirky girl doesn't have to be the best-friend character. It's a very limiting and self-fulfilling prophecy. People only write things that will get green-lit, so they write to those stereotypes.

You were not supposed to show off in Negroland because you are supposed to be perfectly decorous and well behaved. You were also not supposed to tell any stories that reflected badly on the group because that reflected badly on the race. I use past tense, but it still feels like present tense.

There's not a lot of room for thinking in popular culture; there's not a lot of room for being conflicted.

You can't expect to be on MTV and critique George Bush. You can't expect to be on BET or the cover of 'The Source' advocating Jesus Christ or Buddha or Hindu Krishna or Moses. As a conscious rap artist, you have to play in the arena that you're supposed to be in. What is that arena? That arena is the college market. The conscious rap artist woos the college market, even though the college market is the wildest, most sexed-out, drug-driven market in the country, possibly the world.

It's so acceptably easy for a woman not to strive too hard, not to be too adventure-crazed, not to take too many risks, not to enjoy sex with full candor ... It isn't seemly for a woman to have that much zest.

'Who Fears Death' addresses the push and pull in African culture that powerful women face when their culture has certain duties and beliefs that can stifle them.

Why are people making it so difficult for girls to live the way they want to in India? Let's not make India a place where a girl has to think 10 times before going out or wearing what she wants.

In America there's no way I can make the kind of movie I like to make.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking.

I was raised Catholic in the Midwest, so I can't enjoy anything.

Culture, far from giving us freedom, only develops, as it advances, new necessities; the fetters of the physical close more tightly around us, so that the fear of loss quenches even the ardent impulse toward improvement, and the maxims of passive obedience are held to be the highest wisdom of life.

And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.

The public must suffer untold pangs from the stiffness, the deliberate stifling of emotion, on the part of many British actors.

Muslim women had to go out in purdah, that heavy sheet that covers even the eyes. Hindu women had to go out in the doli, a kind of closed sedan chair like a catafalque. My mother always told me about these things with bitterness and rage.

The ladies pass the timee with gossip and hearsay. This is what they have in place of freedom- gime and gossip. Their lives are small and careful. I do not wish to live this way. I should like to make my mark. To venture opinions that may not be polite or even correct but are mine nonetheless. If I am to be hanged for anything, I should like to feel that I go to the gallows on my own strength.