Cultural Observations Quotes

America is a great country. I've been in the south, in the center and in the north. I like it. Americans are very good people. There's just too much air-conditioning.

I really liked German food. And it's very clean.. It's a very clean country. They kind of get rid of the waste really well... the garbage.

I like Columbus, Ohio, because it's Pleasantville for real. They have the nicest white people I have ever met, and I mean that!

We would be driving down the street in a place like Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and started to see, my gosh, the only people that have shoes are men. Why does that woman have a baby in her belly and one on her back, and she's carrying a huge load of bananas? You start to ask these questions.

My first time in Germany. We started off in Heidelberg, which is this quaint, nice town. The Germans, they shoot just like the Americans, except for, if it's a 10-hour day, they're leaving at 5. You don't go to 5:30, 6, 7. No. And then we had a fest for everything.

I don't know anything offhand that mystifies Americans more than the cotton they put in pill bottles. Why do they do it? Are you supposed to put the cotton back in once you've taken a pill out?

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.

What I learned about them, I liked. But it also seemed that the liberal line was not entirely correct, for it was obvious that racial differences went far beyond skin color. It would be difficult to categorize all the distinctions I noticed. In fact, I made no effort to catalogue them at the time, but their differences ranged all the way from physical characteristics to more subtle differences such as extreme aversion for work in cold weather. On cold days, when I felt invigorated, my black co-workers seemed lethargic.

The first thing that struck me on landing in America was that if the Americans are not the most well-dressed people in the world, they are the most comfortably dressed.

It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in "It's a nice day," or "You're very tall," or "So this is it, we're going to die." His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up. After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this--"If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.