Cultural Misinterpretation Quotes

In South America, I heard the 8th Symphony of Beethoven. And the young conductor thought, Beethoven must be heroic. But this is piece which shouldn't be heroic. And this was such a misunderstanding, such a deep misunderstanding.

I'm not of the religion but I'm educated enough to understand there is a misconception about it globally.

The Americans only like things they can label, even if it kills them. Think of those poor Latin American writers. Some of them are very good. But the "magical realism" label has absolutely ruined them. The critics are like tourists who return from a trip saying they've "done" Machu Picchu: "Okay, we've done magical realism," so now we can throw it out.

Angel of Death' is like a history lesson, but as soon as we released it everybody was calling us Nazis. Our singer's a dark-skinned Chilean, there's no way we're fascists.

Trying to project our expectations and our desires onto the sci-fi being written in China now isn't terribly helpful.

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.

Hip-hoppers are not interpreting what hip-hop is, and when we do interpret it, we interpret it as something immature, unorganized, and outlaw.

I don't believe there is a clash between cultures. I believe there is a clash between perceptions of each other.

I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.

These natives are a very good people; for when they saw that I would not remain, they supposed that I was afraid of their bows; and, taking their arrows, the broke them in pieces and threw them into the fire.

I love the idea of a tiny window between the back stoop and the pantry, where the milkman would pass through the cheese. But of course, there is no milkman anymore. So somebody coming by the house and seeing the window would say, 'Oh, that must be original, because that's where the milkman passed the cheese through to the pantry.'

What happened? Did a house fall on your sister?" I asked. Maybe there was a benefit to our language barrier. She pursed her lips. "You can't stay here much longer," she said. My mouth dropped open. "You...you speak English?" She snorted. "Of course.

A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a brilliance that isn't there

As to the so-called Hindu idolatry - first go and learn the forms they are going through, and where it is that the worshippers are really worshipping, whether in the temple, in the image, or in the temple of their own bodies. First know for certain what they are doing - which more than ninety per cent of the revilers are thoroughly ignorant of - and then it will explain itself in the light of the Vedantic philosophy.

Misunderstanding a culture's symbols is a common root of predujice.

When I saw 'Pretty In Pink' at the cinema at the age of 11, I just thought it was a period piece from maybe 100 years previously. I had no idea that was what everybody was supposed to be wearing.

Los Angeles had no culture of its own, just a large collection of misreadings of the artistic histories of other, proper cities.

Which is the other reason hip-hop is controversial: People don't bother trying to get it. The problem isn't in the rap or the rapper or the culture. The problem is that so many people don't even know how to listen to the music.

As Americans, we tend to look at Mexican food as nachos, which is not Mexican food really - they don't eat them.

When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.

Sometimes it can be difficult when you're talking to a journo after the game, saying, 'Yeah mate, I was on the burst.' And then the translator is trying to translate that into Japanese, and apparently there is no actual translation.

The cover story of the magazine [TIME magazine] depicting a few individuals who are acting contrary to most Myanmar, is creating misconceptions of Buddhism.

Members of the media, Jim Acosta of CNN and Glenn Thrush, formerly Politico, now the New York Times, and all of them actually think the Statue of Liberty is the symbol of immigration. And they believe the Emma Lazarus poem that is on the pedestal is the equivalent of immigration policy in the United States. They're not the only ones.

I find it not just strange but almost ridiculous that people could take a song like the one I was doing and interpret it is corroding anything. Folks have the feeling that oftentimes if you don't talk about something it will go away.

Seventy-two virgins - does that make sense to anyone? And it's an ancient religion, maybe it was misinterpreted? Maybe it's not 72 virgins, maybe it's a 7-foot-2 Persian.