Cultural Imitation Quotes

Everywhere the fatal spirit of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates and threatens to blight whatever of original growth might adorn the soil.

I'm not a religious person. I don't have any desire. To me it's imitative of a conventional culture. I'm all for it for anybody. I totally have a free and open feeling about how other humans want to live their lives. It's just not something that has any real significance for me.

The mistake British comedians often make is trying to beat the Americans at their own game - getting visiting American singers on their shows, talking about 'sidewalk' instead of 'pavement,' sitting on high stools in a white dinner jacket doing ballads. That way, you simply end up with a mid-Atlantic mishmash.

The present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.

The greatest difficulty we have faced is the neocolonial way of thinking that exists in this country. We were colonized by a country, France, that left us with certain habits. For us, being successful in life, being happy, meant trying to live as they do in France, like the richest of the French.

When I lived in Beijing in 1996, it was a horizontal city. If you wanted to go out for a burger, if you wanted to really treat yourself, you went to this place called the Jianguo Hotel. The architect had proudly described it as a perfect replica of a Holiday Inn that he had seen in Palo Alto, California.

The Bostonians are really, as a race, far inferior in point of anything beyond mere intellect to any other set upon the continent of North America. They are decidedly the most servile imitators of the English it is possible to conceive.

I think Hollywood acts like followers of culture and is constantly seeking to follow trends.

Normally, Indian companies follow the trend set by companies abroad. There is usually a long lag period.

The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.

O Muslims! When a Muslim blindly imitates the West, he turns into a loyal supporter of their beliefs and customs; he is like one who tries to reform something but spoils it while he is unaware. He is just like a defeated follower, like a baby who bites and severs his mother's breast while it is in his mouth. Such a person does not know that blind copying of the West involves hidden hazards and that our rights, honor and dignity are violated by such imitation and imbecilic pride.

Identity politics includes the assertion of difference from ‘the West’, and the defenses against cultural invasions and ‘pollution’ by Western styles. The insistent emphasis on this theme is accompanied by its flagrant but largely unacknowledged subversion in everyday activity and styles, from dress, to food to music and entertainment, to media consumptions, to public spaces and general consumption patterns. While McDonald’s is boycotted because it is American, native fast food chains emerge which are direct imitations; the boycott of Coca Cola spawns Mecca Cola.

In China, we had some buildings that looked like the White House or wine bottles. All they seemed to represent was bad taste.

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.

The best-dressed man is an Italian who is trying to look English, or an Englishman who is trying to look Italian.

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

No single character is ever so great that a nation can afford to form itself upon it. Imitation belittles. This appears in the instance of the Chinese. The Chinese are so many Confucii; in miniature. And so with the Jews. Moses, the lawgiver, is poorly represented by Moses, the old clothesman ; or even by Dives, the hanker.

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.

You know, every country needs another country to mock, and Australians seem to be pretty good at impersonating American people. Maybe it's because all the movies and music and TV you see there is from America, so we just have the knack for it.

We're in a long line of English people pretending to be Americans and not being as good as Americans.

Every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation.

Report of fashions in proud Italy Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation Limps after in base imitation

I worked the drive-through at McDonald's and tried out different accents - Italian, Russian, Irish.

The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation.