Cultural Anxiety Quotes

People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture...

We are in danger of being swamped by Asians.

I am hopeful about any future for whites in this country, but not entirely optimistic.

I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.

I think the general anxiety of the 1960s - '70s spawned our interest in the living dead. When people worry about the end of their world, they need a safe vessel for all their fears. Zombies provide that vessel because they're 'safe.'

After Sept. 11, there was a reticence and worrying about films that touched on war, and even more on terrorism.

The French are very bizarre. There is this collective depiction: 'We're in decline, we're being assailed, we must protect ourselves.'

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.

Remember, taboos are just a map of what a society feels it's acceptable to be neurotic about. Taboos aren't rational.

Back then, in 1968, everything was suspect - family, government, and obviously the family unit in 'Night of the Living Dead' completely collapses. That's what we were focused on.

Ailes built a Kingdom of Yes. That was his genius. He understood the id of many white conservatives - their sense of constant persecution and victimization; and their existential fears of an America whose racial makeup, sexual mores and gender roles were careening in the opposite direction of the country of their childhood.

So what's really behind the 'English Only' Movement? Fear. Fear of being taken over and one day they will have to learn something different. Heaven forbid they would have to learn something new.

There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time.

I grew up with the idea that someone might hate you if they knew what religion you were; being afraid to open my mouth because my accent might make people think something about me. Or even if they didn't, would they understand me?

The teenager seems to have replaced the Communist as the appropriate target for public controversy and foreboding.

If I had to speak in front of a Korean audience, I would be hard pressed to sound other than a little girl.

Really interesting genre films, especially monster movies, evoke the fears of the times intentionally.

These are strange times. I'm 37 and this is the weirdest the world's ever felt. There's a right-wing, nationalistic anger sweeping through Europe and America.

I see Donald Trump as a phenomenon of an expression of certain fears, certain resentments, that have been a running thread in American history.

'Frankenstein' did not invent the fear of science; the novel found its audience because it dramatized anxieties that already existed. Although popular entertainment can, over the long run, shape public perceptions, it becomes popular in the first place only if it addresses preexisting hopes, fears, and fascinations.

Like Trump's presidential bid, the Brexit campaign has been driven largely by fears of cultural penetration, immigrant invasion, and the genuine crisis of Middle East refugees dying to get into Europe, all channeled into a kind of inward-turning form of ethno-nationalism.

We live, in North America in general, if I'm given the indulgence of selling us down the river, in a culture of fear of this connective sense of spirit.

When you're the only Asian in the room, the last thing you want to do is to point out you're Asian. And be the Asian dude.

Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.

I don't go to enough exhibitions, purely because it intimidates me.