Cultural Constraint Quotes

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged in by male energy.

The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior-like the deepest capacities for emotional respone which drive and guide it-is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact.

Fashion makes fools of some, sinners of others, and slaves of all.

Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You're caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn't go running with Curt today because you don't want to sweat out this straightness. You're always battling to make your hair do what it wasn't meant to do.

Because I am an Englishman I spent most of my life in a state of embarrassment.

Art, music, and philosophy are merely poignant examples of what we might have been had not the priests and traders gotten hold of us.

Today, I don't even think that people like [James Baldwin] are possible. He would not have that much room.

All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.

Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control.

This lie of political correctness is bringing this country down. You just want to break through it all.

I do believe deeply that all human beings, male and female, are sexual beings, most likely bisexual beings channeled this way and that by cultures terrified of boundary crossings without passports stamped gay or straight.

Predominantly in the West, if you can only have creative voices that are either black or white, I'm going to say whatever the f - k I want, because no one's going before you, and if no one's coming after you, I'm just going to be the freakiest of all freaks!

The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron.

I don't think people understand the model-minority stereotype is negative. You are boxed in. You have to untangle that to find your own path.

My films have often looked at the whole dilemma of identity as a straitjacket for people, for societies, for cultures, for historical moments.

'IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU TO DO IT,' WAS THE TERRIBLE VERDICT. 'IN THE FIRST PLACE YOU ARE A WOMAN AND WOULD NEED A PROTECTOR, AND EVEN IF IT WERE POSSIBLE FOR YOU TO TRAVEL ALONE YOU WOULD NEED TO CARRY SO MUCH BAGGAGE THAT IT WOULD DETAIN YOU IN MAKING RAPID CHANGES. BESIDES YOU SPEAK NOTHING BUT ENGLISH, SO THERE IS NO USE TALKING ABOUT IT; NO ONE BUT A MAN CAN DO THIS.'