Cultural Influences Quotes

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise.

Politics is downstream from culture.

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.

Man is a child of his environment.

Everybody looks back on what they studied and what they grew up with.

Southern lawyers don't read novels much.

Supposedly I've got traces of an English accent, though I can't hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who's English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.

So-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question.

Every person has their pantheon - the Bible, Hollywood, Shakespeare - their way of understanding the world.

In soft regions are born soft men.

My stepmother Angela is an Italian from New York City. I based Rhoda on her and a Jewish friend named Penny Ann Green. People often said that Rhoda seemed to be Italian. That was the Angela seeping through.

Why am I who I am? It's the way I was raised.

Ziggy Stardust, the Village People, and punk rock really shaped who I am as a person and as a gay man.

I don't think my background in Zambia has really affected my lens because my classical training has been Western-style. But it's fantastically fortuitous to have been born African because I don't feel I have a vested interest to the U.S. or China or wherever.

Pop culture is like our subconscious.

If you ask what people say what American cuisine is, they cannot really do it. I don't know what it is.

I am a typical Telugu boy dominated by all the qualities of a Hyderabadi because I was born and brought up here.

My mom is from Venezuela, and my dad is German and Japanese, and we lived in Brazil when I was a kid for a couple of years, and then I grew up on Long Island. I think all the traveling and all the nationalities put that stuff in my head. I was just around it a lot.

My older sister was at the cusp of new wave, and I had older brothers from my father's first marriage who were rock 'n' roll guys, so I was exposed to a lot of popular culture.

Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.

Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that carry them far apart.

I don't know if people are born with a worldview or if their thinking is a product of their environment.

Even a genius cannot completely resist his Zeitgeist, the spirit of his time.

I had the good fortune to be able to take a course with Margaret Mead. I had a fabulous art course, where it was explained to me that nothing exists in a vacuum, that everything is a result of the period in which it's done - the economics, the sociology, the politics, all sewn together. That was a very important lesson.

Law is downstream from culture. By the time you make a law about something, you're reacting, not acting. I'd rather shape the culture.