National Labor Tribune Quotes

I speak pretty fluent American, though I do so with a strong British accent, and I love America: The scale and the variety of it are astonishing to someone not born there, and I'm convinced that its energy and generosity have somehow rubbed off on me and affected my writing. For the better.

I am not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture - rule of law, universal suffrage - is preferable to Arab culture. That's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic.

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

But again, we, I think, over the years have set the example for a lot of nations that may not have had the same values, the same type of coming out of the same culture that we as Americans have and enjoy. But we can be an example, a role model for them.

The Hispanic culture is finding its way into the American culture. Places like Miami are going to be centers for that influence - places like Los Angeles and, certainly, cities in Texas.

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

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

So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids.

Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage.

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.

What will remain of our cultural identity if audiovisual Europe consists of ... sitting in front of Japanese TV sets showing American programs.

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

The unifying characteristics that make us Americans are becoming more and more diluted now because new immigrants want to set up ethnic enclaves to retain their culture and language.

America is transplanted Europe, but a Europe that has not been disintegrated and scattered in the transplanting as in some Dispersion. Its colonies live here inextricably mingled, yet not homogeneous. They merge but they do not fuse.

Russians would make charming visitors at New-Yorke, and civilize that part of America wonderfully.

If you want to talk about cultural appropriation, we have to go back to the Greeks.

Being South Asian in the U.K. is like being Latino in the U.S., I would guess. It's a bit more hood. You see things; things happen. I was bouncing between worlds. You're acting from a very early age, when you have to code-switch like that. I'm a hybrid, a mongrel. I think many people live that life.

I always feel like people misunderstand the difference between an Asian story and an Asian-American story. That's completely different, too. I have friends who grew up in Asia, and our experiences are so different. Even though we might look the same, I feel like being Asian and then being Asian-American is completely different.

If there is cultural imperialism, it is definitely American.

Doing any kind of culture in America in which you are not trying to affirm a European aesthetic is war.

I was raised in France, and the American culture was present everywhere. On TV, on the radio.

The mainstream consumed our culture.

We have taken so much from your culture, I wish you had taken something from ours...For there were some beautiful and good things within it. Perhaps now that the time has come, We are fearful that what you take will be lost.... I shall grab the instruments of the white man's success: His education, his skills, and society.

The ideal is a synthesis of the different cultures that have come to stay in India, that have influenced Indian life, and that, in their turn, have themselves been influenced by the spirit of the soil.

I would not describe myself as a political writer except in the sense that the personal is political, which is something that I do strongly believe. And in that sense American Gods is a very personal novel and a political novel. I was trying to describe the experience of coming to America as an immigrant, the experience of watching the way that America tends to eat other cultures.