There are neighborhoods in France that are not French… Why would immigrants want to change France is they left their country to live in France? .. You have two kinds of people living in France: The French and the others…. To offer something to the world, France has to remain France.|
When I grew up, there was a monoculture. Everybody listened to the same music on the radio. I miss monoculture. I think it's good for people to have a shared experience.
It baffles me that everything is so homogenized, because the world isn't, and yet we continue to support things that are so incredibly milquetoast.
Assimilation, not success, is the American end game.
That's just globalization. It's got good sides as well. But scenes aren't allowed to develop on their own anymore. Everyone knows about everything.
I'm afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.
In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.
The worst crime of any type of state is just that it always tries to force the rich diversity of social life into definite forms and adjust it to one particular form
We now live in the era of fake consensus, or phoney populism, a condition in which galleries and homes are seen to succeed best where they manage feelings of non-difference.
In one way, traveling has narrowed my mind. What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight. This is of course an encouraging finding; it helps arm you against news programs back home that show seething or abject masses of either fanatical or torpid people. In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere.
[The 'corporate takeover of people's lives'] also accounts for a lot of homogenization of culture. There are fast food restaurants everywhere. Every place tastes the same.
Back then, everyone was Lana and Rock. No one had ethnic names.
I think all regions have had their peculiarities of speech rounded off by television, radio, and people travel so much more now.
…It’s like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything even simpler. And it goes on and on.
Places have their own characters. . . . But the people begin to look the same.
As the publisher of the 'Tory,' I strive to defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity.
The trouble with normal is it always gets worse, fashionable fascism dominates the scene.
There's a certain kind of cultural energy pursued by the gatekeepers of elite discourse, who want to argue that Americans fundamentally agree with each other, and that's the health of the nation.
Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.
Since the 1940s, we've been saying there are no differences, we [humans] are all identical. We're going to know at year end if that is true.
The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization.
Imitation is being rewarded. They're learning that if you fit right in the mold, you get rewarded. Music is no longer a form of expression - it's a means to a lifestyle.
What works in Chattanooga now works in the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris; it’s a little sad.
American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And - since women are a majority of the population - we'd all be married to Mel Gibson.
