Intercultural Conflict Quotes

Culture clash is terrific drama.

It's just so funny that when I was growing up, I was very much of an Australian. I just thought it was funny that there was this war, like, 'No, she's ours, she's practically a Miss Australia.' But I am a Miss Philippines.

Hear what the Great Spirit has ordered me to tell you! You are to make sacrifices, in the manner that I shall direct; to put off entirely from yourselves the customs to which you have adopted since the white people came among us; you are to return to that former happy state, in which we lived in peace and plenty, before these strangers came to disturb us, and above all, you must abstain from drinking their deadly liquor, which they forced upon us for the sake of increasing their gains and diminishing our numbers.

The spread of communications technologies - social media, TV news channels - aggravates societal divisions and discord. All that online snarling is making us jittery.

There was a lot of prejudice towards Russians in Latvia. When I went to school, often Latvians didn't like me, and Russians and Latvians didn't like Americans, so that was a whole other prejudice.

It is well known that German intellectuals are reluctant to agree with French intellectuals and the French are reluctant to agree with the German.

Threats are more readily perceived from culturally dissimilar powers than culturally similar ones.

Perhaps inevitably, media stories focus on differences, which exacerbates tensions; yet Islamic radicalization is, in part, an acute expression of broader trends that affect us all.

Ironically, even as Westerners feel threatened by Islam, most in the Muslim world feel themselves besieged by the West.

As someone who grew up between two cultures, I have been fascinated with the question of why men and women with similar backgrounds to mine were drawn towards radical messages of hate and violence.

We are threatened by long-unresolved issues between the melting pot of cultures that make up our nation. People are isolated, every day less united, and every day falling deeper into a new level of cultural despair.

I don't flatter myself with much dependence upon the present disposition of the Eastern Indians, who are many ways liable to be drawn into a rupture with us by the artifices of the French, their own weakness and the influence which the French Missionary Priests have over them.

I grew up in Los Angeles when the racial tensions between blacks and Mexicans were very high. Gang violence was very prevalent.

I already knew, from church, that this place was raped and pillaged by Spaniards and the Pilgrims. "Don't sit here and try to tell me that they broke bread together, brother.

I was bred as an outcast, part Negro and part Seminole, in my early years raised as an Indian.

From the beginning [of the film The Darkest Hour], [aliens] it's a metaphor for the foreigners and from the beginning of the movie, American boys feel themselves like aliens here or they feel like Russians are aliens. There's misunderstanding or miscommunication. Then when the real aliens appear, together they have to fight to survive.

At the beginning of my career as a writer, I felt I knew nothing of Chinese culture. I was writing about emotional confusion with my mother related to our different beliefs. Hers was based in family history, which I didn't know anything about. I always felt hesitant in talking about Chinese culture and American culture.

Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed.

Like so many other young South Asians in America, I am the product of two cultures whose conflicting values pull at me with equal urgency. Never have I felt as torn between the two as I do about the question of marriage.

I think subsuming political and economic conflicts into some grand 'clash of civilisations' theory or 'the West versus the rest' binary is a particularly insidious form of ideological deception.

The collapse of the Tower of Babel is perhaps the central urban myth. It is certainly the most disquieting. In Babylon, the great city that fascinated and horrified the Biblical writers, people of different races and languages, drawn together in pursuit of wealth, tried for the first time to live together - and failed.

It's very difficult to marry into another civilization.

It's a funny thing that's happening online. The Middle Easterners want 'Aladdin' to be a Middle Eastern story, and the Indians want 'Aladdin' to be an Indian story. The truth is, it's really a folk tale from the 1800s, and Agrabah is a fictional place that's a culmination of India and Asia and the Middle East.

The underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us.

In my high school the Mexican cowboys, the chilangos and rancheros, didn't like the punk rockers.