Cultural Guilt Quotes

It’s no coincidence that these land acknowledgments are proliferating at formal ceremonies, even as such patriotic rituals as the Pledge of Allegiance and the playing of the national anthem are under attack. They replace a concise affirmation of national pride with a dense confession of national original sin.

A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest.

Guilt is a Jewish invention improved upon by Christians for the last two thousand years.

Your people invented guilt, but my people perfected it.

We have learned the lines of good taste through history and our sense of guilt, be it post-colonial or post-Holocaust.

Frankly, Indian women inherit this collective cultural unconscious - this sense of guilt, shame, and dishonour. I think Indian girls need to become shameless and a little selfish, too.

Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.

I feel non-stop Brit shame!

We live in an age of apologies. Apologies, fake or true, are expected from the descendants of empire builders, slave owners and persecutors of heretics, and from men who -in our eyes- just got it all wrong. So, with the age of 85 coming up shortly, I want to make an apology. It appears I must apologize for being male, white, and European.

My identity has always been confused. Born in Edinburgh of a Scottish/Russian/Jewish mother and an English/Irish/Catholic father, there is no form of guilt to which I was not subjected in my childhood. Members of my immediate family live all over the world - a diaspora of cousins, aunts, uncles and more in a dizzying mix.

There is a group that argues that we cannot criticize others because our ancestors did bad things.

The whole guilt thing of not feeling Mexican enough was a big deal, too. On the one hand, you have your grandmother who is anointing you as a chosen one because you are light, but then you feel like you're less because you are lighter than your cousins, who are more down on the streets. You know? So that confusion was all I wrote about.