3,162 Quotes About Culture

Culture is the always-on operating system, guiding behavior even when there is no one to watch, reward, or punish that behavior.

Social change is a million individual acts of kindness; culture change is a million subversive acts of resistance.

So entrenched is our fictional image of Gypsies that we often brush aside real-world experiences as a mirage when they contradict the picture that we have absorbed and internalized.

I believe that it is not beneficial either to idealize Romani culture or treat it as exotic. Romani culture is not simply Indian or Asian, though some aspects of it clearly reflect its historical origins in India, language being one of the most obvious. Nor is it inherently a culture of poverty or a culture of resistance or defiance against mainstream norms.

Code-switching is dancing between vocal styles and rhythms. This dance is part celebration--of the richness, intricacies, and blurry borders of our cultures.

People of color know that not all of the safety and spoils of whiteness are available to us. Yet we can speak in the voice of whitness if we so choose. Some of us know no other voice. It was born in us. It is the voice colonization left us. Some of us adopt it later--in childhood or early adulthood -- and lose our other voices. Some of us never allow whiteness into our throats. Some of us code-switch. I am a code-switcher.

Juliette breathed in and found her lungs to be horribly tight. Could she never be both? Was she doomed to choose one country or the other? Be an American or nothing?

Paul jumped, unable to hide his surprise. Then he grinned and said, "Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. For a Chinese woman, your English is extraordinary. There is not a trace of an accent to be found.""I have an American accent," she replied dully.Paul waved her off. "You know what I mean."Do I? she wanted to say. Would I be less if I sounded like my mother, my father, and all those in this city who were forced to learn more than one language, unlike you?

Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character.