Americans are good people. They have no aggressions against us and they like us as we like them. They must know I don't hate them. I love them.... I hear it is a complex society inside. Many Americans don't know about the outside world. The majority have no concern and no information about other people. They could not even find Africa on a map. I think Americans are good, but America will be taken over and destroyed from the inside by the Zionist lobby. The Americans do not see this. They are getting decadent. Zionists will use this to destroy them.
My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex.
I don't think culture is something you can describe.
The East is a montage. It is old and it is young, very green in summer, very white in winter, gregarious, withdrawn and at once both sophisticated and provincial.
When you look at me, you can't really tell what I am, but I'm black, white, Native, Spanish, and a little bit of Filipino.
When people break up, after sharing their entire souls with each other, I don't want to believe that you just switch off. There are remnants of melancholia, and there is so much that stays with you because you loved this person. Of course, it's that much more complicated when it's an interracial love or love from a person from another culture.
American history is a loud, raucous, exquisite collection of noises.
I don't think of people as out-and-out black or white.
It is a complex fate being an American.
I'm not saying this in a condescending kind of way, but it's quite simple: The making of America was a heroic thing. Australia has a much murkier, much more complex view of its history. It's just full of all these open wounds we don't really know what to do with.
It's astounding the degree to which these communities are intermarried. Iraq is a crazy quilt of ethnicities and religious sects.
One layer was certainly 17th century. The 18th century in him is obvious. There was the 19th century, and a large slice, of course, of the 20th century; and another, curious layer which may possibly have been the 21st.
Many-sidedness of culture makes our vision clearer and keener in particulars.
It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.
The outside world thinks that this country [Libya] consists of a man [Muammar Qaddafi] and a desert. We are more than that.
Generally speaking, I don't think people know a great deal about the Viking culture, apart from the label that is usually attached to them, either pillagers or deviants who came and brought back loot to Norway. It was an incredibly sophisticated, complex and layered culture. They had their own laws, many of which protected women.
You know, Italian-Hungarian - no matter how linear and cool I look on the outside, I have all that energy trying to find its way through life.
The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty.
Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.
Europe has grown to 27 member states, encompassing an amazing diversity and richness. Some argue this is part of the problem: Europe is simply too big and culturally disparate to be managed properly. But look to India for an example of how social unity can be forged within a culturally, linguistically, and ethnically complex nation.
You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.
To speak of the Muslim world is not to endorse a totalitarian project, nor to bolster an Islamist narrative, nor to suggest that variety, plurality, and diversity are lacking in what Muslims think, believe, speak, and do as Muslims.
Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.
The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication.
In writing of Indian culture, I am highly conscious of my own subjectivity; arguably, there is more than one Indian culture, and certainly more than one view of Indian culture.
