Culture Identity Quotes

1. "Nationalism as a thesis confuses (almost always deliberately) certain legitimate desires with illegitimate ones. People like to run their own affairs, and most people value the culture they were raised in, are proud of its achievements and wish it well; a significant degree of their sense of personal and group identity derives from it. All this is unexceptionable. But nationalists try to persuade their fellows that the existence of other groups and cultures somehow represents a challenge, and sometimes a threat, to what the natives of the home culture value. (From: Toward the Light of Liberty)"
Author: A.C. Grayling

2. "Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation."
Author: A.S. Byatt

3. "Yet the Narrator's quest is not only for his own identity and vocation. He seeks an understanding of art, sexuality and worldly and political affairs: he is a snoop and a voyeur; he comments and classifies; his taxonomic impulse makes the novel appear to be a vast compendium, replete with burrowing wasps and bedsteads, military strategies, stereoscopes, asparagus and aeroplanes."
Author: Adam A. Watt

4. "Tradition is a fragile thing in a culture built entirely on the memories of the elders."
Author: Alice Albinia

5. "Dominator culture teaches all of us that the core of our identity is defined by the will to dominate and control others. We are taught that this will to dominate is more biologically hardwired in males than in females. In actuality, dominator culture teaches us that we are all natural-born killers but that males are more able to realize the predator role. In the dominator model the pursuit of external power, the ability to manipulate and control others, is what matters most. When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent but it will frame all relationships as power struggles."
Author: Bell Hooks

6. "Because I didn't have any queer, lesbian, female role models I hated my own femininity and had to look deep within myself to create an identity that worked for me. Pop culture just doesn't hand us enough variety to choose from."
Author: Beth Ditto

7. "The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite—on calories and portion size and what's going into the body versus what's being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel—keeps the larger, more fearsome questions of desire blurred and out of focus. American women spend approximately $1 million every hour on cosmetics. This may or may not say something about female vanity, but it certainly says something about female energy, where it is and is not focused. Easier to worry about the body than the soul, easier to fit the self into the narrow slots of identity our culture offers to women than to create one...that allows for the expression of all passions, the satisfaction of all appetites. The great preoccupation with things like food and shopping and appearance, in turn, is less of a genuine focus on hunger—indulging it, understanding it, making decisions about it—than it is a monumental distraction from hunger."
Author: Caroline Knapp

8. "To be "bad" is good not simply because it subverts the language of the dominant white culture but also because it imposes a unique kind of order for young black men on their own distinctive chaos and solicits an attention that makes others pull back with some trepidation. This young black male style is a form of self-identification and resistance in a hostile culture; it also is an instance of machismo identity ready for violent encounters."
Author: Cornel West

9. "A culture that values production over life values the wrong things, because it will produce things at the expense of living beings, human or otherwise."
Author: Derrick Jensen

10. "The worlds of folklore and religion were so mingled in early twentieth venture German culture that even families who didn't go to church were often deeply Christian."
Author: Eric Metaxas

11. "Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating."
Author: George Packer

12. "We are defined by what we believe in. Identity is shaped by what we believe is right. Culture is cultured, pun intended; by what we believe is right.'Kita diertikan dengan apa yang kita percaya sebagai benda betul. Dan budaya serta nilai itu sendiri, memang dibentuk dengan benda yang sama juga, apa yang kita percaya sebagai benda yang betul baik. Cuma yang membezakan antara manusia tu ialah apa yang difahami sebagai benda yang betul dan benda yang baik.Contoh, 'Westerners' percaya minum wain merah baik untuk kesihatan jantung. Tapi kalau untuk orang Islam, sah la benda tu haram.Contoh lain, 'Englishmen are all about tea, and Americans are all about coffee."
Author: Hlovate

13. "Our culture promotes individuality, while the Amish are deeply entrenched in community. To us, if someone stands out, it's no big deal because diversity is respected and expected. To the Amish, there's no room for deviation from the norm. It's important to fit in, because that similarity of identity is what defines the society. If you don't fit in, the consequences are psychological tragic, you stand alone when all you've ever known is being part of the group."
Author: Jodi Picoult

14. "When sociobiologists start shitting in their backyards with dinner guests in the vicinity, maybe their arguments about innateness over culture will start seeming more persuasive."
Author: Laura Kipnis

15. "My culture is my identity and personality. It gives me spiritual, intellectual and Emotional distinction from others, and I am proud of it."
Author: M.F. Moonzajer

16. "I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates. To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity."
Author: Maurice Blanchot

17. "The culture of New York is just impossible to replicate. It's such an incredible feeling to be walking on the streets of New York. You can literally find everything you need in a five block radius oftentimes."
Author: Max Schneider

18. "Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue."
Author: Naomi Wolf

19. "What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?"
Author: Naomi Wolf

20. "Our inner dialogue is frequently composed of old tape loops that we run again and again... The normal personality marshals sufficient defense mechanisms to exclude dangerous and unknown stimuli and just enough windows to let in an occasional wandering minstrel. Neurotic identity crises come when our defense mechanisms have been too successful and we're encapsulated in the fortress we have constructed with nothing to refresh us in our solitary confinement. So we play the old movies with their stale fears and their unrealistic hopes until we become bored enough to risk disarmament and engagement."
Author: Sam Keen

21. "If we don't value the people who inspire us (and money is one mark of that) then what kind of culture are we building?"
Author: Sara Sheridan

22. "Teenagers talk about the idea of having each other's 'full attention.' They grew up in a culture of distraction. They remember their parents were on cell phones when they were pushed on swings as toddlers. Now, their parents text at the dinner table and don't look up from their BlackBerry when they come for end-of-school day pickup."
Author: Sherry Turkle

23. "If readers, young and old, would take even a moment to reflect on our rapidly shifting culture and ideology, I would be happy. Many leaders of the older generation dismiss emerging culture. Those leaders are at risk of becoming a feeble voice-piece without followers. Most of the younger generation is going deaf to the truth."
Author: Ted Dekker

24. "Read, listen to and watch everything you can. Explore the corners of popular culture and the arts. And, of course, these days you have to stay maniacally plugged in to the cutting edge of whatever technology is taking your profession into the future - otherwise you're toast."
Author: Tom Freston

25. "Travel early and travel often. Live abroad, if you can. Understand cultures other than your own. As your understanding of other cultures increases, your understanding of yourself and your own culture will increase exponentially."
Author: Tom Freston

26. "Perhaps because our culture and politics have gone so off course, with values so contrary to those of Jesus, more and more people intuitively recognize that His vision of God's kingdom-a new world of compassion, justice, integrity and peace- is the Good News they've been searching and waiting for."
Author: Tony Campolo

27. "Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing."
Author: Willa Cather

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