The world looks different and is understood differently at every spot on earth. Without accepting this simple truth it is hard for us to grasp the behavior of others, the motives and aims of those actions.
The two ethnic groups that remain fundamentally different from the Han Chinese - in terms of history, culture, language, religion and physical appearance - are the Uighurs and Tibetans. In these two groups, the Han Chinese come face to face with difference.
The conception of what is normal varies not only with the culture but also within the same culture, in the course of time.
It has to be understood that the world doesn't exist with people who are exactly like us.
Poetry does so many different things, it's difficult to say anything definitive about its role, which of course varies from culture to culture. It can range from being stories of the tribe to the private lyric, to being as W.H. Auden said "the clear expression of mixed feelings" to nonsense verse.
The numbers of distinct human societies or nations, when our race is twice its present age, may be far greater than the total number of all the men who have ever lived up to the present time.
There is no monolithic black culture. It's completely different for someone born in Harlem to someone born in Houston or London with one exception, which is that people contributing to black culture have the experience of being black.
There's no such thing as a good or bad culture, it's either a strong or weak culture. And a good culture for somebody else may not be a good culture for you.
Human cultural diversity is vast; the range of cultural practices, beliefs, and languages that we speak is vast.
Men are at every stage of evolution, from the most barbarous to the most developed; men are found of lofty intelligence, but also of the most unevolved mentality; in one place there is a highly developed and complex civilisation, in another a crude and simple polity.
Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia, everywhere you go is completely insane.
Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.
Every country is different, every league is different - all the culture.
Hip-hop is not one thing!
I have books I like very much, but I don't think there are any books that everyone should read. I prefer a world in which some people read this, and others read that.
American Danish can be doughy, heavy, sticky, tasting of prunes and is usually wrapped in cellophane. Danish Danish is light, crisp, buttery and often tastes of marzipan or raisins; it is seldom wrapped in anything but loving care.
There is endless variety in the details of the customs and laws which prevail of the world at large.
Joseph ben Matthias
The crucial differences which distinguish human societies and human beings are not biological. They are cultural.
I discovered that the people of the North are different and there's no way you can make a person from the North similar to a Southerner. They're two different worlds.
When I speak of artistic universals, I am not denying the enormous role played by culture. Obviously culture plays a tremendous role, otherwise you wouldn't have different artistic styles - but it doesn't follow that art is completely idiosyncratic and arbitrary, either, or that there are no universal laws.
In our contemporary world, no one can think or work with a single picture of what a family is. No one can fit all human behavior, all thought and feeling, into a single pattern.
The whole idea of 'One size fits all' is not going to work in India with a billion people.
Morality is not merely different in different communities. Its level is not the same for all the component groups within the same community.
Western civilization presents one of the most difficult tasks for historical analysis, because it is not yet finished, because we are a part of it and lack perspective, and because it presents considerable variation from our pattern of historical change.
An observer will see the bizarre developments of behavior only in alien cultures, not his own. Nevertheless this is obviously a local and temporary bias. There is no reason to suppose that any one culture has seized upon an eternal sanity and will stand in history as a solitary solution of the human problem. Even the next generation knows better. Our only scientific course is to consider our own culture, so far as we are able, as one example among innumerable others of the variant configurations of human culture.
