cultural divergence Quotes

I was playing hip-hop when everybody else was playing the giant rave music.

We misjudge anybody who's different from us and the Jews diverge from our type, ethnically and religiously. That's their chief offense, but there are particular causes.

When English education was introduced in this country, the Mahomedans did not accept it… They did not accept English education and at the same time they were divorced from the culture which their fathers had advanced. The result was that whereas the Hindus got on in life, got into government employment, got many things which people value in life, the Mahomedans were left without it and gradually there came to be a sort of estrangement between the two nationalities

There's an idea that London is a planet on its own: that it's starting to diverge from the rest of the solar system. We need to combat that.

Shared Sino-American global security goals would not mean that one partner dictates to the other. U.S.-PRC differences will persist, and on the Asian regional level they can even be a source of mutual irritation. Nor should it mean that we ignore the basic differences between our political systems and values.

I don't think polarization is some kind of grand distraction. It's real. People have different commitments, believe in different things and principles, different visions of the good life ... but there is also a degree to which all the really big, successful reform movements in the country had extremely bizarre ideological coalitions.

In expressing so completely his own type, Mr. Yeats presents us with the case for integrity. If we can express eventually our own scholastic mentality in verse, I believe that our art will lead us not towards, but away from, English art.

Latin, as we all know, ultimately broke down into Spanish, Italian, French, and so on. One wonders whether there will be an imperial parallel with English breaking down into, shall we say, North American, European, Australian, and so on. On the other hand, there is this immense, inward-driving influence of radio and television that is bringing us all back together. One could say it's a fight between the two: a fight between regionalism and the standardization through communication.

Our culture is like a garment that does not fit us, or in any case no longer fits us. This culture is like a dead language that no longer has anything in common with the language of the street. It is increasingly alien to our lives.

I quite often feel that my greatest task as a father is to raise children who love what is good, true, and beautiful, and who are therefore aliens in this popular culture.

Between every record, we all split off in our own world and we all end up listening to usually pretty different music on our own. We come together not really knowing what the other people having been really listening to and what's been influencing them.

At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.

The Middle East and South Asia have a lot less in common with America than 18-year-old kids in Boston have with 18-year-old kids in Arkansas.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

A conflict of values is not a misunderstanding. Islamic orthodoxy and the German constitution are not compatible.

Why on earth do we want closer connection with England? We have little in common with English people except our language. We are fast becoming an entirely different people.

The British have never historically thought of themselves as being European. The average Britain has much more in common with an American than with a Frenchman.

European and American values do not fully coincide.

History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves

Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.

In every historical period, the religious groups that grow most rapidly are those that set believers at odds with the surrounding culture.

Oh, America is slipping away from the rest of the consciousness of the planet - slipping away.

I didn't grow up watching TV or going to McDonald's or listening to mainstream music. Like, the casting agents are looking elsewhere for the cheerleader role.

The different American experience of the 20th Century is crucial because the lesson of the century for Europe, which essentially is that the human condition is tragic, led it to have a build a welfare system and a set of laws and social arrangements that are more prophylactic than idealistic. It's not about building perfect futures; it's about preventing terrible pasts. I think that is something that Europeans in the second half of the 20th century knew in their bones and Americans never did, and it's one of the big differences between the two Western cultures.