cultural contradiction Quotes

The White man is a paradox. On the one hand, he professes almost fanatic commitment to high ideals; on the other, he disdains those same ideals in practice.

Why is playing football in Europe considered the pinnacle of our game, yet in other spheres of life, that same phrase - 'being in Europe' - is dismissed with suspicion?

I love our country. My dad served in the army. I always grew up with a song sense of belonging as an American. But I was also in the counterculture and I was coming from a place of fearing the police. So I was anti-establishment, but also loving your country. It's kind of an ironic sort of upbringing.

For a gun-toting nation, Americans are surprisingly passive.

How can people say they don't eat eggplant when God loves the color and the French love the name? I don't under'stand.

Giving jazz the Congressional seal of approval is a little like making Huck Finn an honorary Boy Scout.

There is something deeply disturbing about a popular culture that will not forgive the sins of the Confederacy seven generations past but celebrates the teachings and legacies of Che Guevara, Mao Zhe-Dong, and Jeremy Wright.

Sometimes I look at where we've come to, and how much technology and advancement there is, and I can't believe that we're not this perfectly balanced, beautiful, peaceful society. I'm shocked that we're so deeply polarized, that there are people who want progress and they feel guilty for wanting progress, because it somehow seems un-American, because being American means staying ignorant and going backward.

The interesting thing about Sherlock is that he is himself a reflection of that very English duality. As a drug addict, he is a criminal. But he is also a crime fighter. That makes him an extremely potent character to personify the hypocrisy of a culture that is both moralistic and corrupt.

One of the ideals [Margaret Thatcher] grew up with was self-denial and postponement of gratification, and yet she went about to create a greedy, short-term society. It is a paradox.

Although we love the idea of choice - our culture almost worships it - we seek refuge in the familiar and the comfortable.

That happiness is to be attained through limitless material acquisition is denied by every religion and philosophy known to mankind, but is preached incessantly by every American television set.

We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.

However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch – American flag place mats, patriotic “body crystals,” flag stickers you attach to your skin. Personally, I’m small-minded and literal enough that I see the two symbols as contradictory, especially in a time of war. But I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place mat, is the sort of sophisticated thinker who is open-minded enough that she is capable of hating blacks and Arabs at the same time.

Tom Friedman says China is so awesome they make kosher pigs.

The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.

People worship and revere Ganga as a mother, and then throw away flowers in a plastic bag into the same river.

The capacity to be intrinsic and vulgar is American.

America preaches integration and practices segregation.

After all the Puritans came to America to escape from persecution and then turned around and started persecuting other people. So I understand that conflict that we have related to play and pleasure and sexuality. And I think what has made my life worthwhile is trying to deal with some of those questions.

Indians today are governed by two different ideologies. Their political ideal set in the preamble of the Constitution affirms a life of liberty, equality and fraternity. Their social ideal embodied in their religion denies them.

In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference.

We exist in this weirdly schizo culture, where sex is everywhere in the media, and yet, at the same time, you don't sit down and have a conversation about what you did in bed last night with your friends. Despite the ubiquity of sex, it's still a taboo when it comes to day-to-day conversation.

Socialism’s cultural contradiction is that it is parasitic on capitalism, which must produce the wealth that socialism redistributes — until the engine of wealth creation, battered by socialism’s redistributive agenda, sputters.

It's true that Paris is made up of equal parts of social conservatism and anarchic experimentation, but foreigners never quite know where to place the moral accent mark.