Matt Ross Quotes

Even some of us who make movies underestimate their influence abroad. American movies sell American culture. Foreigners want to see American movies. But that's also why so many foreign governments and groups object to them.

In the past, the U.S. was the centre of the world, where everything was happening. I think my stories have always sought to question this, maybe even criticise it.

Europe, mourning the loss of its century-old supremacy, either resorts to insulation (by quotas and “cultural exception” clauses) or seeks solace in the disparagement of American culture as vulgar, inauthentic, or stolen.

The issue of American world cultural dominance is moot. All the international debates on the issue seem to be held in English.

If there is cultural imperialism, it is definitely American.

Seriously, American pop culture must be the most predominant force on the planet, next to pollution and poverty.

My only experience with American things is through movies.

In America we have across the country, the entire world.

You Americans, you have no idea how much your stuff infiltrates the rest of the world!

What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact.

One thing that is not to be underestimated is American culture's influence on the rest of the world.

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

In Canada you grow up - we're next to the United States. We're watching whatever you're watching. We're following your news. It's obvious that we are inundated with American cultural information and political information. Whereas the opposite is not true.

I mean, the nation in which we live - and the world in which we live - is so extraordinarily more like a future than the futures that we're being sold on the screen and on television.

It always trips me out that America, the most powerful and magnificent nation in the history of the world, whose might was built by immigrants from all over the world, only speaks one language.

In the latter half of the last century the impact of the expanding influence of Western culture and economic system brought about in China a severe conflict.

The present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.

The Beijing Olympics were an exercise in Chinese soft power. Americans have the 'Voice of America' and the Fulbright scholarships. But, the fact is, in fact, that probably Hollywood and MTV and McDonalds have done more for American soft power around the world than any specifically government activity.

My greatest contribution to hip-hop was allowing the United States of America to know and understand exactly how far they reach, and how influential they are to children in completely different countries because I am the import.

It was interesting to find how dominating American vision is all over the world. I think there's something to be said about the world's mindset and its economics and all of that, and I think it affects the way we see ourselves and it affects music.

I have found that many other countries will buy off on anything American. As much as they hate us, they want to be us more than anything.

When you start exporting ideas, philosophy, behavior, products, ways of living, it becomes an assault on the culture. Americans have to understand that.

I'd have to say that it kills me that there's a concern that 'Torchwood' has gone to America to become Americanised.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, products and tastes developed in America have increasingly influenced lifestyles in Europe, whereas in previous centuries, it was generally the other way around.

America is the NBA of culture. So to have Asian people in the biggest entertainment market in the world, in Hollywood, is cool.