Cultural Attitude Quotes

Being black is not a matter of pigmentation - being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.

There's a lot of anti-intellectualism in Britain. And the writer's views on this or that are really of less importance, as they see it, than that of the man in the street.

There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.

In Russian, ambition is a bad word. It's arrogant.

I have a very European feel about nudity.

America has a tendency to chip away at you if you've been a success for a long time, whereas in Europe, they put you on a pedestal.

The Mexican...is familiar with death. [He] jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it. It is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.

Hip Hop is an idea. It is the pursuit of one's authentic being through the arts. It is not a physical thing; it is an attitude - even an aptitude.

Indians are sometimes accused of being condescending toward Westerners and of being excessively preachy in their attitude toward other nations. That accusation is sometimes correct.

I love American positivity.

The popular culture still ridicules religion and often treats it like the plague.

I think a lot of times our culture has an attitude toward art and the production of art that separates artists from the rest of us, like making art or music or painting or whatever is some magical thing that you have to be inspired to do, and special people do it.

The mentality we have in India is not very sporting.

America is just downright mean.

A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books appear almost accidentally, like a sudden surge in the stock market. There are books of high quality that are a part of the culture, but that is not the same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it anywhere. They may talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that's the standard cultural attitude. But they don't carry any suggestion that insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy.

The French have the reputation of being arrogant. I don't think it's arrogance but a certain authenticity.

Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio - empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how - has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. Here at home - within the family, so to speak - our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.

There's a very go-to kind of attitude in New Zealand that stems from that psyche of being quite isolated and not being able to rely on the rest of the world's infrastructure.

In America, it's quite admirable if someone's done well or been successful at whatever it is. Whereas in Britain, they're not. They only like it when you're the underdog.

Anything that is as old as racism is in the blood line of the nation. It's not any superficial thing-that attitude is in the blood and we have to educate about it.

I get very, very, very irritable with people who complain about getting old, because I know a lot of people who would gladly trade places with us. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm not saying it doesn't hurt your feelings, I'm not saying it's not painful - and physically as well as mentally and spiritually - and it's frightening at times. However, people have really lost perspective, and it's a really bizarre topic of conversation that it's become a cultural peg in our world that aging is a bad thing. It's not logical to me.

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.

I think it has something to do with being British. We don't take ourselves as seriously as some other countries do. I think a lot of people take themselves far too seriously; I find that a very tedious attitude.

What you find when you live in the United States, you live in the West, is that when somebody fails, it's never their fault. They always like to blame somebody other than themselves for a failure.

I am not anti-English, and I never was.