Danai Gurira Quotes

My passion is more about bringing the stories out from the African continent mixed with the West.

I like making films about different cultures. I'm interested in things that I've never encountered before. I try to put myself in the audience's position.

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

In America, we have so many movies and so much media about the Islamic world, the sub-continental world, but it's not a conversation, it's a monologue. It's always from one point of view. 'If we don't tell our own stories, no one will tell them' is my mantra.

I really knew when I started photographing I wanted it to be a way of knowing different cultures, not just in other countries but in this country, too, and I knew I wanted to be a voyeur.

I made the film to bring the story of Islam, the story of 700 million of people, to the West.

Readers anticipate that a significant element of every story will be additional exposure to the ways of the Ojibwe. The truth is that I enjoy this aspect of the work. Although I have no Indian blood running through my veins, in college I prepared to be a cultural anthropologist, so exploring other cultures is exciting to me.

Many young Japanese were hearing for the first time the words of Native people from the West.

We travel to learn; and I have never been in any country where they did not do something better than we do it, think some thoughts better than we think, catch some inspiration from heights above our own.

Without television and mass communication, that knowledge wouldn't exist. So I think it actually has the possibility of turning people into more understanding and more empathetic people.

If there is much understanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilization owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure which stems, I think, from the straightjacket of history which we have inherited…. we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society and system of believe, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own society.

It is quite common to meet people that live a few kilometers away from Mexico and that have never been there. We need to revive on many levels an illustrious desire to get to know the world, to learn another language, to understand and create empathy with people that live a few kilometers away from us. It's never late to do this.

We wanna go back to Southeast Asia and just do it right for them.

Getting access to diverse civilizations should be easy, and languages are the gateway to that.

This is my hobby. Reaching out, getting to know other people's cultures, traveling to other people's countries.

The good thing about not speaking the language is you just listen. You listen to everyone, every producer, every writer.

I've always liked that idea of a diverse group of audience members sitting together, rubbing up against each other and taking on the life of a culture that doesn't belong to either one of them.

I can identify with Riho because I was the talent that didn't speak the language in Japan. I'm very excited for the fans to kind of build a relationship with her because it's going to take work from both sides to understand one another.

My heart is filled with love for my new extended family - the billion-plus people in China who have shown me nothing but unconditional love.

We can learn from everybody, man.

There are so many American experiences that we can't know about unless we venture out to create a dialogue, to observe, ask questions, and stay there for a while.

I can empathise with different cultural expressions and am open to things that seem strange at first sight.

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

I have always been intrigued by other cultures, and traveling to foreign lands has always been a part of my personal passion for learning about our world.

Who could think that children from the pockets of Himalaya sing folklore from Scotland and vice versa? Such an education in the initial years develops compassion and mutual respect for each other's skills.