David Byrne Quotes

It just so happens that I was born and raised in Washington. Had I been born in Chicago or San Antonio, the streets and places would have figured into whatever I wrote. Just so happens that it's Washington, D.C.

Once we accept violence as an adaptation, it makes sense that its expression is calibrated to the environment. The same individual will behave differently if he comes of age in Detroit, Mich., versus Windsor, Ontario; in New York in the 1980s versus New York now; in a culture of honor versus a culture of dignity.

I do think that when you're specifically working in a country like South Africa, you have to be able to be aware of the cultural truth of what people are raised in and believe in and how they function within their society.

We don't grow up in vacuums. We grow up in societies.

Customs form us all, our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed beliefs; are consequences of our place of birth.

You can go down the list of great artists and kind of understand that they are products of their environment. Whether it's U2 or Henry Rollins or myself or Johnny Lydon, they're gonna be products of their environment.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

It's the community that helps form our moral compass. It's those attitudes that I've remembered through my entire lifetime.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.

I like to say that the greatest handicap of deafness does not lie in the ear, it lies in the mind. I hope that through my example, such as my role on 'The West Wing,' I can help change attitudes on deafness and prove we can really do everything... except hear.

Every different social group that I encountered had its different set of rules, so you learn very quickly how to pick up the nuances and change yourself accordingly. When you are not from anywhere, you have to try to find what's universal. You are always trying to fit in.

Whether I'm a bit of an old soul or not, I am who I am, and that doesn't change, whether I'm with adults or with my friends.

Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them.

Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so that we recognize or acknowledge.

The family you were raised in, the time period you were born in, and the part of the country you're in absolutely shape your view on sex, which shapes a huge part of anybody's personality.

That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the Right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the Right comes around, too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.

If you want to change attitudes, start with a change in behavior.

We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I don't think there's any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry - if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaphors like that.

For to change the norms, the very foci of attention, of a cultural system is a difficult task - far more complex than that of changing an individual's attitudes and interests.

It's true that your environment influences how you write.

The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.