Now more than ever the world has to come together to make changes. Just because certain cultures have had long-standing traditions does not mean that in today's world they are acceptable any longer. The world and the environment are evolving and that means we must change our ways as human beings as well.
We've had so many lifetimes of different cultures and different religions and different points of view and different wars and different loves and different children.
There weren't too many books featuring other cultures and countries when I was growing up as an immigrant kid here in the States.
Travel is said to be broadening because it makes us realize that our way of doing things is not the only one, that people in other cultures live differently and get by just fine. Insects do that, too, only better.
I always have a positive reaction to Times Square - you've got so many people passing through here, so many cultures, and so many people merging into the central community of New York City. This is the hub of America.
Massive numbers of people are going to come online from cultures we don't normally interact with.
It's time to respect the treaties our ancestors signed and care for our land, water, and cultures so that they remain healthy for our future generations.
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.
Few cultures have not produced the idea that in some past era the world ran better than it does now.
Living in different cultures helped me work out who I was going to be, separate from where I came from.
Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it - life begins in slime and ends in intelligence - whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins put the matter: We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else take it for granted that they are descended from gods.
An observer will see the bizarre developments of behavior only in alien cultures, not his own. Nevertheless this is obviously a local and temporary bias. There is no reason to suppose that any one culture has seized upon an eternal sanity and will stand in history as a solitary solution of the human problem. Even the next generation knows better. Our only scientific course is to consider our own culture, so far as we are able, as one example among innumerable others of the variant configurations of human culture.
Ours is certainly not an old culture. Yet in recent decades we've used more energy, destroyed more soil, created more pathogenicity (temporarily stopped some too, for sure), mutated more bacteria, and dumped more toxicity on the planet than all the cultures before us-combined. I love the United States, but I am not blind to the wrongs. I have no desire to live anywhere else, but that doesn't mean I think everything we're doing should be done or can be maintained.
The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been evident in all cultures.
Abolitionism did not find positive response in Africa as it did in Western societies and cultures.
I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.
I'm a little like Marco Polo, going around and mixing cultures.
The teacher of history's work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.
Adidas is a very personal inspiration to me. It has enriched my creative life. It's an exchange between different cultures, different ideas, and most of all, it is teamwork.
Multiculturalism is based on the lie that all cultures are morally equal.