Cultural Perspectives Quotes

I like the movies that embrace the complexity of the human condition.

You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion [Islam] too would have been more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?

I quite like the idea - just as an abstract idea - of 12 people's collective life experience and wisdom being this formidable thing. People say juries can be led - I think 12 people from different backgrounds, different races, different genders, different ages, it's hard to hoodwink.

'Homeland' is great at challenging our preconceived ideas.

It's written into the Constitution that you're allowed to pursue happiness. In England it would be considered a frivolous objective.

When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I'm gone.

I decline to accept Hebrew mythology as a guide to twentieth-century science.

I've always been very enamored of European newsmagazines - the 'Spiegel' kind of magazine, which has an energetic, high-low approach to news.

In the East, they contemplate the forest; in the West, they count the trees.

We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.

There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?

In spirituality the Americans are very inferior to us. But their society is very superior to ours.

Everything I've experienced, things that my friends have experienced and we talk about, things that are on the news - all aspects of life are in my message.

When I go to Europe or South America, they laugh at things that are totally different than what Americans would laugh at. It's just so crazy how we're so different in personalities with other people.

I don't think for example that the Indians look at [what is right and what is wrong] that way [the Palestinians do]. There are a billion, 200 million people in that part of the world. Why? They suffer from terror. People that do not suffer from it don't understand what I'm talking about, you know?

I think we're living, in terms of media, in a very democratic age, but I think that we still look at everything through the lens of 'Vogue' and through our own point of view.

Europeans have a different take [on nudity] than American actors do. They're not quite as hung up.

A society that feels life is the most precious thing [jars against] a society that prefers death over theft, over loss of pride, over inconvenience, and so much else.

There are those who argue that the concept of human rights is not applicable to all cultures. We in the National League for Democracy believe that human rights are of universal relevance. But even those who do not believe in human rights must certainly agree that the rule of law is most important. Without the rule of law there can be no peace.

As a Canadian, I've always approached international history as an outsider, neither attacking nor defending key decisions - those were made by actors who are also major figures within national historical traditions for American and British scholars.

It is much more easy for a Spanish person to love themselves than a Canadian person.

Not everybody wants to call sin 'sin'! Some call it mischief. Some call it rebellion. And hardly anybody can agree where we should draw the line. ... Our courts are ... trying to define pornography, yet moral law is very specific to any reader of God's Word.

Reincarnation contains a most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe.

We all, to some degree, absorb the mythologies around us, our vision refracted by the prisms of our particular time and place.

In writing of Indian culture, I am highly conscious of my own subjectivity; arguably, there is more than one Indian culture, and certainly more than one view of Indian culture.