Johnetta B. Cole Quotes

You should be a person inside the world with knowledge of your terrain. And if you lock yourself into the 2,000-by-3,000-square-mile, lower-48 box of the United States, you're going to be frustrated by its limitations. You gotta think outside the box.

My perspective is cultural and world-based. It's always been a global perspective.

I absolutely do believe that we need to not be so myopic. We ought to throw open widely the windows on the world in order to learn more about it.

Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors.

Look, see, learn, become a citizen of Mankind, not just Hannibal, Missouri. That is the message of [Mark] Twain.

Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world

You can have a lot of New York and still see what's going on in the rest of the world, I think - like in China.

I grew up in Africa surrounded by a lot of culture. It's made me aware that the world is a big place.

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

The more places I go to, the more I realize I understand so little about the world.

The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.

Let me put it this way: when I read, I learned the world was not as small as my house. And that everybody in my home town was not representative of the way people in the world were raised. And that was what saved me.

I think my kids are pretty well-rounded citizens of the world.

Traveling in Europe made me understand that America has an island mentality: No one exists except us. There's a whole other world out there, but most Americans - all they know is America, the marketing plan.

If we are going to lead the world, we have to know where it is.

For being in a place that's landlocked, Minnesotans have a real sense of the wider world. Teachers, friends, neighbors - everywhere I went in Minnesota, people put their heads up and looked out to the horizon.

I talk about my dad and the American dream, and I just want to say to Americans how fascinated we are by America. We would love Americans to look at the rest of the world that way sometimes.

It's hard to be judgmental once you've been around the world... it's pretty hard to be anything but understanding, and I think it's good for everybody to get out and see someplace other than where you grew up.

My mother was a free-spirited clinical therapist, and I had the most hard-working father, a television lighting director by trade. My mum raised me to be a global citizen, with eyes open to sometimes harsh realities.

When you go out of your country and meet people, you get a wider perspective.

It's nice to know there's a big world with many perspectives. I tend to get so stuck in my own small world easily, and going out into the world reminds me that I'm not the center of the world - in a good way.

In the end, playing for England means very little if you don't see the rest of the world around you. It is why I hate prima donnas and arrogance.

It's important that we have a global perspective and look abroad and learn from our neighbors.

I travel all the time. And as I go around the world, I try to learn a little something and not just take up all the available air.

There are other people, other economies, governments, cultures, religions, and destinies going on at the same time as yours. You have to widen the scope of your lens and start seeing more. Because Americans, it's easy to make us freak out. When the going gets rough, you have to get conservative. That's what's happened to America in the last eight years. I just try to point out that there's more going on than most people pay attention to.