Social Context Quotes

Architecture belongs to culture, not to civilization.

You take a 30-year-old. To him, history began the day he was born. He doesn't know how cold it was 70 years ago unless he's told. He doesn't care. He thinks what's happening now is either the best or the worst, whatever it is, ever. Everybody thinks that.

In my situation, every time I write a sentence, I'm thinking not only of the people I ended up in college with but my siblings, my family, my school friends, the people from my neighborhood. I've come to realize that this is an advantage, really: it keeps you on your toes.

My mother is white. My biological father is black. When my mother was 17, she got pregnant. They lived in Waterloo, Iowa, which at the time in 1971 was a very segregated society.

Language allows one to crack the code of culture

Music can bring about different vibes on the field, off the field, urban life, going to church, leaving church. Everything the world may bring, there's a song for it to put you in the right frame of mind.

Circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

I did not, like my children and people today, grow up with television as part of my life.

The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.

Art lies because it's social.

Modern young news consumers want not only to know what happened but why it happened.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

My wife and I come from a Christian worldview.

First of all, when you live in a country like Canada, it's quite different from America in the sense that it's very tied to traditions that were born in Britain.

Malcolm X's separatist ideas were situational. If you think about where African-Americans were in the 1940s and 1950s, we needed to step away because that force, which is still present but more subdued, was very in your face, and we needed to take a step back just to get some clarity.

The world has white people and black people in it. Even in Harlem.

I was privileged because my father was a policeman, and we lived in town. Many people in Malawi are from typical villages. My grandmother insisted I should be in both worlds, and so I needed to be acquainted with village life.

I never went to college and I was raised in Arkansas so there wasn't a lot of academic language being thrown around my house. We weren't idiots, but I didn't have that access to academic feminism. I had to realize, on my own, that feminism is not just about how far ahead you can get in a job and it isn't about not wearing makeup. It isn't about not watching your waistline. I had to recreate the world entirely.

I'm not more or less conscious than any other rapper out there.

My dad grew up really poor in Mississippi. I paid attention to that because I thought that's a healthier thing to pay attention to than, like, some statue of a great-great-great grandfather who has no connection to my life.

Formalist judges needlessly complexity the law in part to avoid the struggle to understand the complex real-world environment that generates much of the business of the modern court.

When I was asked to do a song from 'In the Heights' at the White House in 2009, I chose instead to do 'Alexander Hamilton' because I felt like I was meeting a moment.

Look, I live in the modern world as much as anyone else.

I worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, I was involved in what the Negroes, I mean, blacks were thinking, what they were feeling.

I would think, as an artist, it's inescapable that you'll be affected by the world around you.