Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.

I just want to say that the multiculturalism - and especially the cultural relativism which is even worse than multiculturalism, the concept that all cultures are equal - is the worst recipe for any society.

There's a lot of us who do not accept the culture of the bubbles.

I make no claim that Jewish culture is superior to other cultures or that the Jewish song is better than the song of my neighbor.

I plead for conservation of human culture, which is much more fragile than nature herself. We needn't destroy other cultures with the force of our own.

When I was in Holland, the idea was, all cultures are equal and all are to be preserved. My idea was, no, all humans are equal, but not all cultures are equal.

We should never denigrate any other culture but rather help people to understand the relationship between their own culture and the dominant culture. When you understand another culture or language, it does not mean that you have to lose your own culture.

The customs of the [Khmer] barbarians are so different from our own that even if we were to capture all their territory, it would not be certain that we could change them.

The idea of multiculturalism, that every culture is equal - that's not objectively true.

We should wake up and tell ourselves: You're not a xenophobe, you're not a racist, you're not a crazy guy if you say, 'My culture is better than yours.'

Living through the intersections of cultural diversity has given me an intimate understanding of the dynamics of living between the dimensions of East and West, traditional and modern, and political and spiritual.

I asked myself, 'How are you going to change all these people, they have different values, different customs, different language, different interpretations?' So that’s the time I joined the Ku Klux Klan in Miami. The reason I joined is to see if I could change them. So I dissolved that organization in a month-and-a-half, alone. [Applause] Then I joined the White Citizen Council. The WCC hates foreigners – all foreigners. So I joined that organization; I dissolved it in one month.

Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.

A multicultural society does not reject the culture of the other but is prepared to listen, to see, to dialogue and, in the final analysis, to possibly accept the other's culture without compromising its own.

My family was one of the few South Asian families in my community in Illinois. Growing up in the '80s, I remember going to the K-Mart with my mom, when she was wearing her sari, and she'd get made fun of. People would ask my mother, 'Were you born with that dot on your head?'

I feel Delhi always has a problem in understanding different regions and cultures.

There's a difference between being culturally insensitive - being insensitive towards a culture - and being insensitive.

I remember always going to the train station where I grew up, and on the wall was written, 'The real wealth of a nation is diversity of cultures.' Where I grew up, that's what I saw, and that's what I believe in as well - and I still believe it.

A lot of people tell me, 'You are from North; how do you manage to get along in the South?' I don't know what to say to them. I've always felt at home here, and by learning to speak Telugu, my connection with the place has gotten that much stronger.

If migrants from other cultures arrive too fast and in numbers too great for society to absorb and integrate them, they begin to impose those cultures on the host country.

Colombian culture has had a huge influence on me and taught me a different way of looking at things - I was always different from the people I went to school with, and I learned to embrace that.

I think that we in the West expect people to adapt to our culture very, very quickly when they come to our country. But when we go over to someone else's, I don't think we are willing to meet them halfway like we expect them to meet us. I think having cultural sensitivity is a lot more important than we realize.

I grew up with all cultures in the world.

It's very white in Guernsey, not racist, but there's not a lot of understanding about different cultures there. So I grew up there then moved to Brighton and found all these other people with different experiences, different narratives.

A lot of issues that we have in the world today rise from the fact that we do not know enough about each other's cultures, that we don't respect each other's origins and there is so much negativity and strife around because we don't know where the other person is coming from.