Rhiannon Giddens Quotes

In Malaysia, where Western culture was extremely influential, I'd grown up listening to Elvis and the Beatles and watching American movies. People wanted to be like Americans. In contrast, when I got here, I saw prosperous middle-class American college students wanting to somehow join the Third World.

The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.

In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernize, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things.

We are guilty for sending teams into foreign countries to advise them how to be like us.

My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws of Western culture.

Over the past thirty years Europe’s influence has transformed Cairo. Now…we are civilized.

How can one ignore the role of Islamic culture in European civilization?

The things and ways the West took to the rest have become the ways of the world.

To those who say derogatory things about colonialism, I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing. It spread civilization to Africa. Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing.

Is it, perhaps, possible that there are two kinds of Civilization--one for home consumption and one for the heathen market?

We should be obliged to admit that Europe is Americanizing herself with disconcerting rapidity.

It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?

If there is cultural imperialism, it is definitely American.

As an American writer, the literary tradition that I draw on the most is the Anglo-American one, and when you are writing in this tradition, the Orientalizing Western gaze is something you have to constantly push against as well as compromise with.

Youngsters in Punjab have a borrowed mindset, music and fashion sense from Canada and Hollywood because a large number of our relatives are settled abroad.

The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.

Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.

Fantasy is the tendency of Americans, going back to colonial times, to look at the Middle East as a type of fractured mirror of the United States - a type of mirror that could look a lot more like the United States, if, say, a Middle Eastern George Washington would emerge.

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

We've had American TV shows in Britain for years and that hasn't affected our culture at all.

My thinking is that if we're going to take from a culture, let's take from a culture that has exemplified success for thousands of years.

Scientists are very much entangled in their culture and this culture is not pristine, untouched by other cultures and practices.

I don't have doctrinaire views about how we should relate to Asia. But novelists reflect the world they live in, and that world propels you, to some extent. I'm a creature of the British Empire, and of the period of transition from the Empire.

It is through the European that civilization arrives ... precisely because of their superiority, the civilized people our responsible for an evolving world.

It is urgently necessary that we recognize our own limitations as a moral and ideological force among the Asiatic peoples. Our political philosophy and our patterns for living have very little applicability to masses of people in Asia. They may be all right for us, with our highly developed political traditions running back into the centuries and with our peculiarly favorable geographic position; but they are simply not practical or helpful, today, for most of the people in Asia.