Cultural Blindness Quotes

The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable. This form of stupidity is confined to no community, to no nation; it is universal. The fat is the human race is not only slow about borrowing valuable ideas—but sometimes persists in not borrowing them at all.

Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.

I talk about race a lot. It's been my work ever since I came out of acting school. But it's true that in a way talking about race is a taboo. Because so many of our debates about race have to do not with race but with what we are willing to see, what we will not see and what we don't want to see.

There are no countries in the world less known by the British than those selfsame British Islands.

Most of us readily take things for granted that at an earlier time remained to be discovered.

Despite the unquestionable greatness of the Anglo-Saxon genius, it is impossible not to see that the laws of revolutions are least understood precisely in the Anglo-Saxon countries.

It is very easy for whites to miss problems that aren’t our own; that’s a function not of being white but of being human.

We are so proud of our guarantees of freedom in thought and speech and worship, that, unconsciously, we are guilty of one of the greatest errors that ignorance can make - we assume our standard of values is shared by all other humans in the world.

We're a whole culture of people who have a really hard time seeing beyond themselves.

The United States has the near inability to see its power from the perspective of the powerless.

Racism is a sign of ignorance, in my opinion. It's people who haven't been anywhere, haven't seen the world.

I feel like Africans are too often portrayed as people on the National Geographic channel: the image is of an African man in a loincloth chasing a gazelle. It's not intentionally racist; I wouldn't call it racist at all. It's a lack of understanding another culture.

I've always been curious about how much of our cultural baggage we bring to what and how we read. I suspect we bring a lot, although we like to think we don't.

It seems we're not only uninformed about our present, we're ignorant of our past.

Scientists are very much entangled in their culture and this culture is not pristine, untouched by other cultures and practices.

Foreigners see in our society virtues that we have not seen and problems that we have not seen.

We are to call barbarism whatever differs from our own customs. Indeed, we seem to have no other standard of truth and reason than the opinions and customs of our own country. There at home is always the perfect religion, the perfect legal system--the perfect and most accomplished way of doing everything.

History, like beauty, depends largely on the beholder, so when you read that, for example, David Livingstone discovered the Victoria Falls, you might be forgiven for thinking that there was nobody around the Falls until Livingstone arrived on the scene

There is a common British delusion that we 'understand' America. We don't. Watching 'Friends' listening to Bruce Springsteen, eating at McDonald's and visiting Disneyland does not do it.

The West has the wrong perception about Turkey itself.

Our ascendancy of the past two centuries - first Europe and then the U.S. - has bred a western-centric mentality: the West is the fount of all wisdom. We think of ourselves as open-minded, but our sense of superiority has closed our minds. We never entertained the idea that China could surpass the U.S.

The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of; our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.

Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves--to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!

Executives in Hollywood are missing a lot because they don't want to watch other cultures.

I lived through the Fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening - the repression of homosexuality, for instance, the demonization of the Left, the giggly, soporific ordinariness of adolescence, the stone-deafness to the social injustice all around us - seemed not only unobjectionable but also nonexistent.