cultural reevaluation Quotes

That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good - the atavism of an old ideal.

Seeing sites and features in places where we never looked or never thought things might exist is causing archaeologists across the world to think deeper about their sites or entire cultures.

What smells strongly of crap to one generation - Victorian penny dreadfuls, the music of the Archies, the Lone Ranger radio show, blaxploitation films of the seventies - so often becomes a fruitful source of inspiration, veneration, and study for those to come, while certified Great and Worthy Art molders and fades on its storage rack, giving off an increasingly powerful whiff of naphthalene.

Now more than ever the world has to come together to make changes. Just because certain cultures have had long-standing traditions does not mean that in today's world they are acceptable any longer. The world and the environment are evolving and that means we must change our ways as human beings as well.

Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth.

Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing - he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.

The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next.

Culture shouldn't be a pacifying thing. It shouldn't be something that you just passively accept. I think it should be something that, in some ways, is quite disruptive - makes you think and question things, and actually sparks debate.

Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

That morning was when I first began to reappraise the 'white man.' It was when I first began to perceive that 'white man,' as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions.