Cultural Distinctiveness Quotes

Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly uptill now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.

There in the midst of German life is an alien and isolated race of men. Loud and self-conscious in their dress, hot-blooded and restless in their manner. An Asiatic horde on the sandy plains of Prussia. Forming among themselves a close corporation, rigorously shut off from the rest of the world.

But the English are different, and they don't know how to be other than different.

The Canadian is often a baffled man because he feels different from his British kindred and his American neighbours, sharply refused to be lumped together with either of them, yet cannot make plain his difference.

Sometimes when you're in different countries, everything has become so homogenised and there's a Starbucks and McDonald's everywhere, and you could feel like you're in Florida. But in Japan, you know you're there.

The Greek language seems different than other languages. I'm not the only person to think this. Usually, I come up with some kind of dopey metaphor for why it's different. But it seems, somehow, more original, more like being in the morning of language.

But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think.

I am a Californian, and we have twice the individuality and originality of any people in the United States. We always get quite huffy when we are spoken of as merely Americans.

The Jews remain what they have been at all times: an elite people, self-confident and domineering.

England is better only because I stand out there as 'unusual'.

There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

Saudi Arabia will have to decide its own path, and I don't know if it will decide a path like any other nation in the region or if it will design something that is unique to Saudi Arabia.

Every place you go to, they have their own little flair.

Just as the Romans were the only nation that was truly a nation, so our age is the first genuine age.

The world's five thousand extant languages are products of our shared ability, but the five thousand cultures they create are separate from each other.

You don't find anyone like Texans anywhere else in the world.

Americans continue to rapidly homogenize ourselves into a neutered oblivion. For a country founded on the protection of the unique, we relish our sameness.

The idea of an Afrikaner people as a cultural entity and religious group with a special language will be retained in South Africa as long as civilisation stands.

In a country like India, we don't want to put everyone in one big mixture. We have a different language, culture and cuisine for each region, even though we are united in the larger context. We are more like a fruit salad, where each ingredient has its own specialty, each fruit its distinct flavor, and together, the salad makes a tasty dish, without losing the individuality of each constituent.

American culture is kind of an international culture, isn't it? British culture is a bit more unique. I think funny things are sort of funny around the world, really.

Hawaii is a unique state. It is a small state. It is a state that is by itself. It is a-it is different than the other 49 states. Well, all states are different, but it's got a particularly unique situation.

Cornwall, peopled mainly by Celts, but with an infusion of English blood, stands and always has stood apart from the rest of England, much, but in a less degree, as has Wales.

Ireland still remains the Holy Isle whose aspirations must on no account be mixed with the profane class-struggles of the rest of the sinful world ... the Irish peasant must not on any account know that the Socialist workers are his sole allies in Europe.

Nationality is not a universal human principle but an historical, local fact...Every nation, even a small one, has its own character, its own particular way of life and manner of speaking, feeling, thinking, and behaving. These distinctive features are the essence of nationality, the product of a nation's entire history and conditions of existence. Every nation, like every individual, is of necessity what it is, and has an unquestionable right to be itself. So-called national rights consist precisely of this.

They [the Jews] stand alone among nations in their stiff-necked resistance to kings.