Cultural Restriction Quotes

Citizenship and ethnicity can become, in certain contexts, restrictive, and perhaps that's one reason I was interested in people who feel compelled to mask their origins and thereby circumvent the restrictions.

Hip-hop is limiting itself and that also goes for editorially. Magazines and websites are the gatekeepers of what people think hip-hop is, but they actually end up limiting what hip-hop can be.

Since it was announced that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has condemned my works and criticized them harshly. All of my works are now banned from getting into China or being published in China. What author would want to return to a country that banned his or her books?

The concept of cultural appropriation is nothing less than an intellectual fence: Keep out.

Shaking hands with the strangers of opposite sex is forbidden

Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.

I reluctantly concluded that there was no way for me to help bring into being the Muslim culture I'd dreamed of, the progressive, irreverent, skeptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid culture which is what I've always understood as freedom.... Actually Existing Islam ... which makes literalism a weapon and redescription a crime, will never let the likes of me in.

Didgeridoo was something I picked up while I was on tour in Australia with Peter Gabriel in '93. I found out later that it's only meant to be played by men.

Music in Iran is considered a safety valve for the state …. We don’t have music in Iran.

I was growing up in a communist time, especially, and the other music, the western music, was banned, so on radio half of the music was Chopin. So my colleagues and I were a little bit allergic to this music because it was everywhere - everywhere!

While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others.

That DMC Act is a disgrace. And the problem with independent art in this country is that independent artists have been economically blacklisted.

It is not necessary to have a broad understanding of history to realize that the church is the foe of knowledge….In every branch of learning, our gains have been made through secular agencies; and, naturally, this has been so, for the church has never been interested in the development of knowledge, regarding (in this showing its shrewdness of self- interest, at least) the spread of culture and free thought and realistic curiosity as unfavorable to the purposes of the church.

Both the nationalists and the communists disapproved of jazz and feared it. They thought it would weaken people's resolve to fight off the invasion. And most Americans know, China did ban all Western music for about 30 years, starting in 1949. This is where it started.

A segregated spiritual subculture does women no good, even if it does have adorable butterflies in the logo.

The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early '60s, and I was coming out of it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society in thought and behavior and dress.

The expenditure of county funds for the purpose of utilizing any language other than English, or promoting any culture other than that of the United States is prohibited.

I just get the feeling that if Jesse Helms was in charge of art in America, you'd go into a museum and see nothing but prints of dogs playing cards.

There are some societies where women are not even allowed to drive a car, and that restriction is based in the name of religion and tradition. There are other countries where a woman can be punished if she does not cover her head.

If you want to do what you want to do, you cannot work. So art is going to be finished, and this is the will of the Islamic republic: to not have any artists or art and close the doors of all the cinemas and music and everything.

This belief in the necessity of English training has enslaved us. It has unfitted us for true national service.