Local Context Quotes

The world looks different and is understood differently at every spot on earth. Without accepting this simple truth it is hard for us to grasp the behavior of others, the motives and aims of those actions.

One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.

When I make chairs, they have legs; they can go anywhere in the world. Interiors are a different responsibility. A house is a representation of where you are, and it has to be right for the place.

Belief in liberal freedom and democracy is always belief in it in a particular place, in a national home with histories that only those who are born in a place or who adopt its citizenship can hope to understand.

Every country has her own way of development.

All calculations based on experience elsewhere, fail in New Mexico.

My political awakening, if I can be as grand as to call it that, was all about what was happening around me. It wasn't some romantic, patriotic vision of Scotland going back to what it had been 300 years previously.

The fact is inner-city black districts are not the same as suburban Republican districts. That's a fact. And people need to go and learn about the whole country.

The community … is the world in miniature. If we encourage children to observe directly the complex relations between the people and the land, between nature and society, they will grasp the reality of their homes, their school, the town, village or city, and will be able to understand the wider world.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

You cannot transpose the U.S. system on Turkey, and the Turkish system on France etc. You have to understand the people and their culture. That's leadership.

A bridge is born of necessity, but it must establish its own identity. It should harmonize with its surroundings, and the design must transcend the purely local and transform the setting.

I was thinking about the armor, personally. I think it would go great in my hometown. I don't know. I'm not sure. Hopefully.

So, I went to McGill University in Montreal to study soil chemistry and microbiology, which I did complete, but realized early that little of this could be applied in our country, because we were learning of a Green Revolution that would suit a farmer who had 3,500 acres and not our poor farmer.

There is only one reason for art in America, and that is that the people of America learn the means of expressing themselves in their own time, and their own land.

I have travelled in the country enough to know that the concerns of villages in Rajasthan will be very different from the issues in the villages of Tamil Nadu. Anybody who makes a general remark about India probably doesn't know India.

When ever Buddhism has taken root in a new land, there has been a certain variation in the style in which it is observed. The Buddha himself taught differently according to the place, the occasion and the situation of those who were listening to him.

Democracy, good governance and modernity cannot be imported or imposed from outside a country.

I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.

I think conditions on the ground determine what you need in a particular area.

I was born in Chicago in 1927, the only child of Morris and Mildred Markowitz, who owned a small grocery store. We lived in a nice apartment, always had enough to eat, and I had my own room. I never was aware of the Great Depression.

Australia is my lens. I cannot see the world any other way.

I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it's more or less all I know about!

If you are in Mountain View, you don't resonate with the needs of urban dwellers. Tumblr couldn't have emerged in Sunnyvale.

There's no point in us designing synthetic laboratories that could just as well be in Dusseldorf or Helsinki. San Francisco has its light, which must be used.