Cultural Ignorance Quotes

If Jesus was a Jew, how come he has a Mexican first name?

The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable. This form of stupidity is confined to no community, to no nation; it is universal. The fat is the human race is not only slow about borrowing valuable ideas—but sometimes persists in not borrowing them at all.

I had maybe heard 'The Times Are A-Changing' on the radio, but I had no idea who Dylan was. No idea.

I remember hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and not really knowing anything about the geography or the culture of the music. But for some reason it did something to me - it resonated.

I am concerned if 25 percent of Americans think that President Obama is a Muslim. I mean, it's obviously a lack of knowledge. But also, it's for the Muslims as well, you know, because a small numbers of Muslims have really painted a very negative image of Islam.

For years, before coming here, I had read of the quiet dignity of the Arab. He is quiet, but is the lity, in my opinion, is pure dumbness. His aquiline face, which in the pure bred ones is quite impressive, is really the face of a dumb man.

Treat every Frenchman as if he was the devil himself.

I've never really wanted to go to Japan, simply because I don't like eating fish and I know that's very popular out there in Africa.

The medieval Islamic world, from Central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society, and system of belief, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history.

You get more churches burned down in the United States in the last two years than in the last hundred, because of the lack of understanding of culture and diversity and the beauty of it.

Growing up on the border there, we were always frustrated with people's pronunciations of towns in Michigan, and people mispronouncing Illinois. There are all these Native American words that no one really knows how to pronounce.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

Make-believe has so long held sway that truth arrives on the scene with all the aspect of an ogre. As a consequence, the real history of their country is a sealed book to the vast majority of the Irish. They neither ask for it nor is it given them.

They'll touch you and look at your skin to see if it's paint. I'm not playing. All Russia is not like that. You've got your big cities like Moscow, St. Petersburg. Some cities understand that there are black people. They do exist. But the smaller cities, the little villages, they've never seen it.

The scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is our America’s greatest danger …. Through ignorance it might even come to lay hands on us. Once it does know us, it will remove it’s hands out of respect.

Much of the prejudice against Islam in the West stems from a lack of understanding of the true nature of Islam as a religion professed by 1.4 billion people in the world. Westerners tend to view other peoples and other cultures only from the perspective of Western benchmarks and philosophy.

Phillip Roth uses his Black women characters to make anti intellectual remarks about Black history month, begun by a man who reached intellectual heights that Roth will never attain. Roth is a petty bigot and his ignorant remarks about black culture expose him as a buffoon to scholars the world over.

Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.

When I was a teenager, I never knew anything about art. I think in South Africa at that stage, no one was really exposed to it. There were no museums that had great artists in them.

If you're taught to hate and fear a people or a country, and it works, it's because of your ignorance of that country. You have no contact with it, nor do you know what you're hating and fearing.

Every age is blind to its own worst madness.

You can't help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies.

Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.

Seppuku is Japanese for ritual suicide. I thought, What a cute name for a coat.