Sheena Iyengar Quotes

Cultural comparisons are good because they can tell you about what's similar, but also sometimes they make it easier to see obvious differences.

The films I enjoy seeing are those that reveal lives I was unaware of... in different cultures or whatever.

I would love to study cultures and people.

I got to travel to some pretty awesome places, learn other people's customs, and see what works in their world differently than in ours.

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.

Americans don't know a lot about the Middle East - [they] don't know we laugh.

I went to a British Council event a while back and there were lots of German professors of literature. About half of them were convinced I had a German sense of humour and the other half were sure it was British. They are probably still arguing about it now.

I was just fascinated with how everyone else in the world lived, and I was interested in telling their story.

The two cultures of East and West are very different, and the priorities are very different. So when you understand that - if you are from this side or this side - when you understand that the other is different than you, and you respect these differences, you can build communication.

Our incapacity to comprehend other cultures stems from our insistence on measuring things in our own terms.

I've been to Africa three times. All right? You can't bring Western reasoning into the culture. The same way you can't bring it into fundamental Islam.

When you have an American mother from the Midwest and an Egyptian father, you travel back and forth and see such completely different stories in the news about the exact same events. It makes you think, 'How is anybody able to understand or even have a dialogue when the basis of information is just so completely different?'

If you want to judge the performance of the Egyptian people by the standards of German or Chinese or American culture, then there is no room for judgment.

I always spend time exploring the customs and attitudes of the countries I'm using for locations, and interviewing the people who live there. I've visited over 90 countries thus far.

I think some of the best reporters are the ones who can really illustrate the differences between societies, at the same time trying to connect the fact that there are a lot of shared values in addition to those differences.

I'd like to set a story in Australia, but I would need to feel confident my German and U.S. readers, for example, would stay with me.

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.

There is no fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man. A close connection between race and personality has never been established.

We in the so called 'Western civilisations' have so much to learn from other cultures, and they would stand to gain so much by learning from ours. We don't have all the answers - far from it... but nor do any other culture or religion.

I've largely focused on Japan my whole career, so I was interested to see how my music would be received by people of different backgrounds, religions and cultures.

You can't share things about India with Americans, as they don't seem interested. Their culture is different.

Others think their American ways will work in other countries. That's not always accurate and can be disrespectful to the local culture.

Cultural differences can be delicate situations we have to work within the respectful boundaries of.

Every country is different, every league is different - all the culture.

There's a cultural difference between India and the rest of the world.