Cultural Education Quotes

When you introduce something new to a country, you want to do it right. Generally, that means you have to do it yourself.

I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn't matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I was expected to know, to explain.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

I believe in the democratization of the arts. What do I mean by that? I think museums, with some exceptions, have a responsibility to educate a much broader public.

Every government secretary of state or minister should jolly well go to the theatre, go to a concert, go to an art gallery, go to a museum, become somehow interested in these things. If they're not interested, they shouldn't be in government, full stop.

Education is the transmission of civilization.

I have always been intrigued by other cultures, and traveling to foreign lands has always been a part of my personal passion for learning about our world.

People don't realize how black people, minorities, women as well, all their lives, they have had to make the effort to understand everybody else. All my life, I've known American culture very well. I probably know American literature more than the average American.

A museum should not just be a place for fancy paintings but should be a place where we can communicate our lives through our everyday objects.

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

I'm in a museum. I'm a relic.

Antiques Roadshow' is a public service. It reflects the nation back to itself, as does 'Question Time.'

I think in our culture there's been a tendency for people to blame the audience. There is a tendency in our industry to say, 'The audience has left the building. People don't want culture anymore.'

I love museums, and I think they're fantastic, but they don't touch the people who I frequently think need to be touched with at least some reminder of legacy.

If you're going to get up to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath you've got to figure out how you put people in possession of their heritage. To do that you have to talk about how they're being taught, and the imagination of community the people who are running our government have.

All of our lives are enriched by our culture, from blockbuster films, best-selling video games, independent music, and internationally-renowned museums and art collections, to theatre, opera, ballet, literary festivals and performance poetry.

I hate the word educational! I mean, 'Downton Abbey' is educational in that you come away from it knowing so much more about that period than when the show started, but you don't come away thinking it was educational.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

I've been lucky enough in 20 years in the media to have a nice soap box that put me in a position to describe to an American viewership that Tuscany is different from Umbria, and it's different from Emilia-Romagna and, not that that was news, but it was never presented to them in a way that was, "Hey, look. This is a different plate from that different place." And although we all think of "spaghetti, lasagna, ciao," as what Italy is all about, there's all of this great stuff... I was merely an interpreter. I wasn't the developer of the content.

[Cultural departments] don't care about culture. Maybe they're the furthest from the people who understand culture.

I joined the Young Philanthropists Circle at the Musee Des Beaux Arts, we have little events every month where you learn about a different artist and you see the exhibit and you get an inside an inside look at the technique used.

The British Museum was our first real museum, the property of the public rather than the monarch or the church.

I am extremely eclectic in choosing my films as an audience, and as a direct result of that, I love exploring, I love cinema, and I love learning from different experiences.

We don't intend to always keep this necessarily African oriented. Originally I had hoped to have African American Indian of this area, and the Appalachian of this area, but at the same time, just as we have the Haitian room, we will always have room for another exhibit.