Cultural Limitation Quotes

If fathers wish to educate their daughters beyond what is customary, for want of trained older women and on account of the extreme negligence which has become women's sad lit, since well-educated older women are unavailable, they are obliged to bring in men teachers to give instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, playing musical instruments, and other skills…. As a result of this, many fathers prefer leaving their daughters in a barbaric, uncivilized state to exposing them to an evident danger such as familiarity with men breeds. All of which would be eliminated if there were older women of learning

I feel pretty stupid that I don't know any foreign languages. I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese.

The ethnic enclave’s warm embrace becomes an economic stranglehold.

What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.

America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of; our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.

I had a feeling about what I wanted to say, and I wasn't really qualified to discuss real things out of America because I didn't grow up there.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

I don't speak any other languages, which I'm kind of ashamed about, actually.

The Germans are incapable of any conception of greatness: proof Schumann.

Like books you will never have the chance to read, there are languages you do not know, and you're not going to get a chance to learn, so you'll never really know what was written, only the approximation.

Black artists are encouraged to explore their identity but are then pigeonholed according to their ethnicity. We may have seen the decline of old racism, but we are witnessing a new kind of racialising.

America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind.

New Orleans is a place where people are deliberately undereducated so that they can be a labour class - the economy there is tourism, and one of the only outlets that black males have traditionally been allowed is to play jazz music, y'know?

When I criticize Joseph Beuys or Francis Bacon, nobody calls those opinions anti-male. Putting female artists or their subject matter off-limits is itself sexist and limiting.

The white Christian church never raised to the heights of Christ. It stayed within the limit of culture.

It's dangerous when music gets cornered by anything.

To demand that people find their assigned narrow corridors of culture or ethnicity or gender, expecting people to forevermore stay in that lane, is to limit our human potential. It's oppressive.

Because I didn't have any queer, lesbian, female role models I hated my own femininity and had to look deep within myself to create an identity that worked for me. Pop culture just doesn't hand us enough variety to choose from.

A smattering of English is worse than useless; it is an unnecessary tax on our women.

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.

I'm sure one of the frustrations of being a Western enthusiast of Japanese food and culture is you're confronted every day with the absolute certainty that you will die ignorant.

There were things I wanted to do that I wouldn't be allowed to because of where I was born.

My boyhood life in New York City has impressed me with the popular ignorance and also with the great need of something better than local lore and weather proverbs.

You can always buy something in English, you can't always sell something in English.