Cultural Identity Quotes & Sayings

Last names ... they were like word parasites. They attached to people in strange ways, moved across cultural and political lines, traveled the world and reattached to others, certainly at whim and seemingly at random.
Why didn't anybody else see how creepy last names were? They labeled a person as coming from a particular class or geographical area or linked their identity to another person, as if someone's identity had no merit on its own unless it had latched on to another. — Thea Harrison

I think I started writing about identity, and I used to believe that identity is the story. But now I'm not so much subscribed to that. I mean, with 'Mr. Fox,' it has a feminist agenda as well. And so, as I sort of been away from writing about identity, I still feel that kind of tug of roots and, you know, cultural background. — Helen Oyeyemi

Christianity is facing something of an identity crisis. Who are we to be to the twenty-first-century world? How should the church position itself in the postmodern culture? Through what cultural languages will the gospel be best communicated in this turbulent time? — Brett McCracken

When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burqa rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it's not about liberating her, but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. It's not about the burqa. It's about the coercion. Coercing a woman out of a burqa is as bad as coercing her into one. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It is what allowed the US government to use western feminist groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy-cutters on them was not going to solve their problems. — Arundhati Roy

As for major obstacles keeping young Latinos from becoming filmmakers, I think our communities are still coming into their identities as storytellers. It's such an important identity to reclaim - it's how our ancestors kept our cultures alive. But a long history of silencing, invisibility, and marginalization has kept generations of Latinos from believing in themselves, from seeing themselves as agents of their own lives. I think there needs to be a focus on this aspect to help cultivate young Latinas to see themselves as cultural producers and defenders. — Aurora Guerrero

When the Bible is understood in its literary and historical context; errors, contradictions, and inconsistencies pose no threat to spirituality, whether that spirituality is theistic, non-theistic, or even explicitly Jesus-centered. The graver threat to what Christians call godliness may be fundamentalism - religion that flows from literalism and fear, religion based on anachronism and law. Fundamentalism teachers, in effect, that the tattered musings of our ancestors, those human words that so poorly represent the content of human thinking, somehow adequately describe God. Fundamentalism offers identity, security, and simplicity, but at a price: by binding believers to the moral imitations and cultural trappings of the Ancients, it precludes a deeper embrace of goodness, love, and truth - in other words, of Divinity. — Valerie Tarico

What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions. It is precisely this that defines my identity. Would I exist more authentically if I cut off a part of myself — Amin Maalouf

She scraped her spoon around the bottom of the honey jar. She was aware, she said, that this was also a cultural malaise, but it had invaded her inner world to the extent that she felt herself summed up, and was beginning to question the point of continuing to exist day in and day out when 'Anne's life' just about covered it. — Rachel Cusk

It is quite understandable that Puerto Ricans seek to preserve a cultural sense of identity without separating politically from U.S. national sovereignty. — Dick Thornburgh

It would be wrong to interpret the growth of British national consciousness in this period in terms of a new cultural and political uniformity being resolutely imposed on the peripheries of the island by its centre. For many poorer and less literate Britons, Scotland, Wales and England remained more potent rallying calls than Great Britain, except in times of danger from abroad. And even among the politically educated, it was common to think in terms of dual nationalities, not a single national identity. — Linda Colley

the symbolic dimensions of disaster and recovery cannot be separated from political history. Even as buildings and memorials become the touchstones of memory and identity, they are also implicated in larger social, cultural, and political processes. — Lawrence J. Vale

Why is it that, in creative writing courses today, the very first thing we teach students is write what you know? Perhaps that's not the right way to start at all. Imaginative literature is not necessarily about writing who we are or what we know or what our identity is about. We should teach young people and ourselves to expand our hearts and write what we can feel. We should get out of our cultural ghetto and go visit the next one and the next. — Elif Shafak

I don't know why but I love this kind of project, when it's a little difficult and when you have a history. The beginning of the story of viticulture was in the Middle East, and it was a different generation than the science and logistics of today. My passion is to go into the past to make wine. Wine is something cultural, not only something to drink. I always try to find the identity of the place. — Stephane Derenoncourt

Listening to music, reading literature, writing, and extended periods of personal introspection provide four prongs of the incitements available to form a conscious and subconscious designation of self. Other potential incentives that contribute to self-identity include religion and cultural events as well as painting, sculpture, dance, films, newspapers, television, Internet surfing, web sites, and online message boards. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Greenberg wanted to give his pilots an alternate identity. Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural legacy. They needed an opportunity to step outside those roles ... and language was the key to that transformation. — Malcolm Gladwell

Did I really want to call myself Swiss if it meant shutting the door on less "perfect" residents? — Clare O'Dea

That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped - as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself? — Judith Butler

Sadly, at a time when so much sophisticated cultural criticism by hip intellectuals from diverse locations extols a vision of cultural hybridity, border crossing, subjectivity constructed out of plurality, the vast majority of folks in this society still believe in a notion of identity that is rooted in a sense of essential traits and characteristics that are fixed and static. — Bell Hooks

Since the notion that we should all forsake attachment to race and/or cultural identity and be "just humans" within the framework of white supremacy has usually meant that subordinate groups must surrender their identities, beliefs, values, and assimilate by adopting the values and beliefs of privileged-class whites, rather than promoting racial harmony this thinking has created a fierce cultural protectionism. — Bell Hooks

Cultural objects have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon them. Their value is entirely a product of the interaction that we have with them. — Brian Eno

The world's religions are tribal and xenophobic by nature, serving to regulate moral rules within the community but not seeking to embrace humanity outside their circle. Religion, by definition, forms an identity of those like us, in sharp distinction from those not us, those heathens, those unbelievers. Most religions were pulled into the modern Enlightenment with their fingernails dug into the past. Change in religious beliefs and practices, when it happens at all, is slow and cumbersome, and it is almost always in response to the church or its leaders facing outside political or cultural forces. — Michael Shermer

[Concerning postmodernism:] The aim of this experimental history is to disturb the ontological security of modern identity and hence to provoke the possibility of otherness through exposition of the cultural difference concealed by, and within, the order of modern rationalism. — Nicholas Gane

Storytelling is an essential part of our cultural and human identity...when we become afraid of stories outside the mainstream, I believe we have lost a valuable part of our cultural inheritance and growth. — Louise Sommer

efforts and character of institutions like these can grow into a way of life when the people involved in them put them at the center of their cultural existence and identity and, as it were, fall into orbit around their rich moral core. — Yuval Levin

It is important to remember that the Pacific Ocean covers a quarter of the world's surface and that each Pacific country has its own cultural, historical and ethnic identity. — Jenny Shipley

We are each a product of our biological endowments, culture, and personal history. Culture ideology and cultural events along with transmitted cultural practices influences each of us. We are each the product of our collective interchanges. Our county's domestic and interlinked international conflicts fuse us together. We are each a molecule in the helix of human consciousness joined in a physical world. We form a coil of connective tissue soldered together by cultural links. — Kilroy J. Oldster

In thirty years or so, the majority will no longer be European Americans; the first generation of mostly babies of color has already been born. This new diversity will give us a better understanding of the world and enrich our cultural choices, yet there are people whose sense of identity depends on the old hierarchy. — Gloria Steinem

America had shifted from what the influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality — Susan Cain

The often dramatic differences among the personalities are more an arresting epiphenomenon than the core of the condition. Characterological factors, cultural influences, imagination, intelligence, and creativity make powerful contributions to the form taken by the personalities. Most DID patients are rather muted compared to those cases incorrectly assumed to epitomize the condition (Kluft, 1985b). The personalities enact adaptational patterns and strategies that developed in the service of defense and survival. Once this pattern, which disposes of upsetting material and pressures rapidly and efficiently, is established, it may be repeated again and again to cope with both further overwhelming experiences and more mundane developmental and adaptational issues. — Richard P. Kluft

If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian. — Anders Behring Breivik

How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity...To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history; --Harvey Levenstein — Michael Pollan

Fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists' conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. — Slavoj Zizek

No other society in the history of the world has searched so long for a meaningful cultural identity and failed in its quest as has America, the land of You Are What You Do. — Lester D. Langley

The European Union arose on an economic foundation, and it turns out that even this is not a solid base. Cultural identity has been neglected. — Gunter Grass

People are not two-thirds one thing and the remainder something else. Temperament, personality, or outlook don't divide quite like that. The bits don't separate clearly. You end up a funny homogeneous mixture. This is something that will become more common in the latter part of the century - people with mixed cultural backgrounds, and mixed racial backgrounds. That's the way the world is going. — Kazuo Ishiguro

A great deal of the global stimuli that we view comes to us without major effort. Daily a person scans and screens a wide barrage of solicited and unsolicited material. What information a society pays attention to creates the standards and principles governing citizens' life. A nation's discourse translates its economic, social, and cultural values to impressionable children. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Kenya is rapidly developing its industry and manufacturing, and its cultural identity as a new country. We had a humongous history pre-British, and when we were colonized and violently reshuffled, we had to decide who we were again. We couldn't rest on the stories and the cultures of our great-grandparents. — Wangechi Mutu

I was sure we would never see the adoption of the Euro. Countries giving up their currencies for a common tender was, it seemed to me, completely out of tune with currency being a carrier of people's cultural identity, celebrating national heroes and events, as it had been for hundreds of years. — John Naisbitt

Van Uoc felt the stab of a sad truth: she and her mother would never be as close as her mother and grandmother had been.
Her mother got up, stretched her tidy, graceful frame and headed for the kitchen. Van Uoc wanted to be able to offer her some comfort, but what could she say? Her mother was right. The two of them represented an irreconcilable cultural split. Distance between them was inevitable. — Fiona Wood

The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent. — Northrop Frye

However, over the years, the martial arts were separated into two schools for training, one for actual combat and the other as ritual dances that served to reinforce Manipuri cultural identity and played an important role in the physical and spiritual growth of the students who studied it. — Christopher Fernandes

An important ethical function of identity politics, in this context, is to highlight that obstacles to the self-development of individuals, and to the formation and exercise of their agency, emerge in complex cultural and psychic forms, as well as through more familiar kinds of socio-economic inequality. — Michael Kenny

After two decades of reconstruction work, I want to work on projects that lay at the intersection of cultural diplomacy and national identity - ones that empower local communities to define progress, not have it sanctioned by others. — Cameron Sinclair

I understand," she says, and then she quotes Du Fu: "The country is broken, but the mountains and rivers remain." Her eyes flash; he catches sight of the fire in this modest woman. "We are the mountains and rivers," he says, impressed. "No matter what the country is called. — Shawna Yang Ryan

I don't think it is wrong, racist, immoral or anything, for a country to say 'we will decide what the cultural identity and the cultural destiny of this country will be and nobody else'. — John Howard

Italy advocates the adoption of a legal instrument on cultural diversity, guaranteeing every country the protection of its own historical identity and the uniqueness of its physical and intangible cultural heritage. — Carlo Azeglio Ciampi

You can be many things if you are British and still belong. — Robert Hillman

This country is transforming before our eyes. In thirty years or so, the majority will no longer be European Americans; the first generation of mostly babies of color has already been born. This new diversity will give us a better understanding of the world and enrich our cultural choices, yet there are people whose sense of identity depends on the old hierarchy. It may just be their fear and guilt talking: What if I am treated as I have treated others? — Gloria Steinem

The state does not oppose the freedom of people to express their particular cultural attachments, but nor does it nurture such expression - rather [ ... ] it responds with 'benign neglect' [ ... ] The members of ethnic and national groups are protected against discrimination and prejudice, and they are free to maintain whatever part of their ethnic heritage or identity they wish, consistent with the rights of others. But their efforts are purely private, and it is not the place of public agencies to attach legal identities or disabilities to cultural membership or ethnic identity. This separation of state and ethnicity precludes any legal or governmental recognition of ethnic groups, or any use of ethnic criteria in the distribution of rights, resources, and duties. — Will Kymlicka

Who are theologians? What kind of self-identity could or should a theologian claim? Should a theologian be a defender or transmitter of Christian _tradition_? What if the _tradition_ itself carries a dark side, implicitly or explicitly, bounded by religious or cultural superiorism, ethnocentrism, homophobism, exclusive nationalism, sexism, racism, and so forth? What kind of _identity_ would then justify my rule as theologian? This question has been lingering in my mind throughout the time I have been working on cosmopolitan theology. it may sound simple, but for me the identity issue has been fundamental. — Namsoon Kang

He was talking about hire purchase. precredit cards. A different way of getting the poor into debt, but I think he was right. It was nice when ordinary people could take a holiday in Spain, of course, but easy credit is what started the cultural rot. Tourism depends on lots of people everywhere with loads of disposable wealth, which means all kinds of changes through a place a cultivates it. The real, messy, informative past disappears to be overlaid with bad fiction, with simplified folklore, easy answers. Memory needs to remain complex, debatable. Without those qualities it is mere nostalgic sentimentality. Commodified identity. Souls bough and sold. — Michael Moorcock

The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them (social models, cultural mores, personal factors). Within them it is itself the effect of successive encounters and occasions that constantly alter it and make it the other's blazon: in other words, it is like a peddler carrying something surprising, transverse or attractive compared with the usual choice. These diverse aspects provide the basis of a rhetoric. They can even be said to define it. — Michel De Certeau

The family, as the fundamental and essential educating community, is the privileged means for transmitting the religious and cultural values which help the person to acquire his or her own identity. Founded on love and open to the gift of life, the family contains in itself the very future of society; its most special task is to contribute effectively to a future of peace. — Pope John Paul II

This no-land was exactly the place in which my self was pushed and started to float without points of reference, and at the same time to resist the forced choice of only one identity and the erosion of my plural cultural belonging. More then ever before, certainly more than at any other time of my geographical and cultural dislocation due to the experience of migration, I was convinced of the necessity to reinforce my pertinence not to the single reality, but to a multiplicity of spaces. As never before, I kept remembering irrationally the shape of my country still entire and unbroken, without the scars of the new borders drawn on a mainly historically incorrect 'ethnic basis'. My imagined country was visible only from the window of a plane flying over the Balkans, as only from the air are the new states' borders and walls of ethnic separation invisible. In my stubborn conviction I was keeping all the scattered pieces together as a mental map of my non-existent homeland. — Melita Richter Malabotta

The indigenous peoples understand that they have to recover their cultural identity, or to live it if they have already recovered it. They also understand that this is not a favor or a concession, but simply their natural right to be recognized as belonging to a culture that is distinct from the Western culture, a culture in which they have to live their own faith. — Samuel Ruiz

And he [Louis Brandeis] talks to his young acolyte, Horace Kallen, who wrote this beautiful book called Cultural Pluralism, and he comes to believe that by being better Jews, or better members of our ethnic group, we can be better Americans, because America is like an orchestra in which identity is defined by the diversity of perspectives that we bring to the table. — Jeffrey Rosen

Well to me growing, up I've had my own psychological war with my parents dying at such a young age. My mother was killed by a drunk driver, then two months later my father drowned. He was out with his friends drinking and on medication for depression, and he didn't come out of the water alive. Growing up with sexual abuse and having to be in gangs and dealing with my own trauma; finding the cultural identity when I was 16, and learning those traditional ways saved me from hurting myself. — Adam Beach

People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against. — Samuel P. Huntington

Human being's possess the cognitive ability to survey and study the biological and cultural constraints that influence us in order to gain an enhanced understanding of who each of us are. Comprehension of what comprises a self allows human beings to monitor and regulate their thoughts and actions and therefore revise and modify their sense of self. How much conscious control we assert over our minds as well as what decisions through default we leave essentially unregulated and in the sole providence of the unconscious mind determines our self-identity. Self-identity in turns affects personal decision-making, which alters our external world. The combined impact of millions of people making conscious choices exerts a profound impact upon reality, the physical world that is constantly in flux. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Hindu is a geographical identity, or at the most a cultural one - not a religion. There is no set of beliefs that everyone has to adhere to. — Jaggi Vasudev

Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right ... Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential. — Kofi Annan

We are curious creatures, we Taiwanese. Orphans. Eventually, orphans must choose their own names and write their own stories. The beauty of orphanhood is the blank slate. — Shawna Yang Ryan

I am grown, with children of my own. But inside I am still a daughter. A daughter is a woman who remains internally dependent, who does not shape her identity and direction as a woman, but tends to accept the identity and direction projected onto her. She tends to become the image of woman that the cultural father idealizes. — Sue Monk Kidd

What this committee needs, what this media center needs, is a good dose of Jeeves."
"I'm sorry," said Mr. Peabody, a mathematics lecturer who sat hunched at the far end of the table taking the minutes. "How do you spell that?"
"Is it possible," said Arthur, raising both his shoulders and his voice, "that we are working in a university where lecturers are not aware of the identity of one Reginald Jeeves, the gentleman's personal gentleman and the personal gentleman's gentleman? What has happened to cultural literacy, my fellow members of the Advisory Committee for the Media Center? This sort of ignorance is exactly what needs addressing. What I mean, Mr. Peabody, when I say that we need a dose of Jeeves, is that we need quiet and reasoned wisdom that leads to prompt and directed action. — Charlie Lovett

I am a cultural Frankenstein — Lucy Chau Lai-Tuen

I am a cultural Frankinstein — Lucy Chau Lai-Tuen

Citizenship has not delivered Indigenous Australians the same quality of life other Australians expect. Basic human rights involve health, housing, education, employment, economic opportunity, and equality before the law, and respect for cultural identity and cultural diversity. These human rights must be capable of being enjoyed otherwise they are empty gestures. — Jackie Huggins

antithetical to the new Germanic cultural identity undermined — Anne-Marie O'Connor

Education brings sustainability to all the development goals, and literacy is the foundation of all learning. It provides individuals with the skills to understand the world and shape it, to participate in democratic processes and have a voice, and also to strengthen their cultural identity. — Irina Bokova

I used to have a monthly cookery column, and am a big cook, so that whole sense of connecting what one does with food to one's cultural identity has always been fascinating to me. — Simon Schama

Human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight. — Margaret Mead

The most frequently cited artists and curators travel extensively and there is a real difference in saying whether concepts and other contributions to the current contemporary arts agenda bear a recognizable cultural, or even national, identity. — Charlotte Bydler

These stories are important to me, not because they happen to be about South Asians, but because they're circling around a certain strain of loneliness that goes deeper than cultural dissonance, that has to do with the yearning to connect with someone else, or with some unreachable vision of home. — Tania James

The existence of homosexuality, not as a circumstantial matter of passing sexual whim, but as a shared condition and identity, raises the intriguing possibility of homosexual culture, or at least of a minority subculture with sexual identity as its base. At the very least, by sympathetic identification with cultural texts which appeared to be affirmative, homosexual people saw a way to shore up their self-respect in the face of constant moral attack, and they found materials with which to justify themselves not only to each other but also to those who found their very existence, let alone their behaviour, unjustifiable. — Gregory Woods

We therapists often make inaccurate assumptions about people living with DID and DDNOS. They often appear to be "just like us," so we often assume their experience of life reflects our own. But this is profoundly untrue. It results in a communication gap, and, as a consequence, treatment errors. Because the dominant culture is one of persons with a single sense of self, most with multiple "selves" have learned to hide their multiplicity and imitate those who are singletons (that is, have a single, non-fragmented personality). Therapists who do not understand this sometimes describe their clients' alters without acknowledging their dissociation, saying only that they have different "moods." In overlooking dissociation, this description fails to recognize the essential truth of such disorders, and of the alters. It was difficult for me to comprehend what life was like for my first few dissociative clients. — Alison Miller

As a young gay African, I have been conditioned from an early age to consider my sexuality a dangerous deviation from my true heritage as a Somali by close kin and friends. As a young gay African coming of age in London, there was another whiplash of cultural confusion that one had to recover from again and again: that accepting your sexual identity doesn't necessarily mean that the wider LGBT community, with its own preconceived notions of what constitutes a "valid" queer identity, will embrace you any more welcomingly than your own prejudiced kinsfolk do. — Diriye Osman

Our sense of self, formulated in large part by the untold number of cross-related connections that we make with our physical, social, and family environments, is reliant upon fitting into our social fabric. The educational environment, family relationships, peer groups, books, television, films, music, along with an assortment of other cultural events shape our emergent persona. Our successes and failures interacting in the world leave their collective imprint upon the wet clay of our forming brains. We are sentimental creatures who cling to past memories. We are inquisitive critters who venture forth from our protective dens to explore new territory. We are perceptive organisms equipped with five basic senses. We are sentient beings who can consciously organize our sense impressions into guiding ideas and useful principles. Our survival responses form a central cord of our emotions. We are receptive, compassionate beings that respond with both body and mind to global stimuli. — Kilroy J. Oldster

A culture is much more than politics. It is a national identity encompassing education, fine and popular arts and entertainment, science, physical and mental health, leisure activities, friend and family relationships, values, ambitions. . .everything that constitutes the basic shared core values of any country. In our case, the core value of individualism has been the common denominator linking all other aspects of our cultural distinctiveness; it is what makes The United States "America." Viable only where Liberty reigns, valuing the sovereignty of individuals is precisely what makes America exceptional; therefore, it is the culture that warrants attention because the actual, underlying disease invading the mental health of our country has arisen not from the government directly but from the injection of deleterious ideas into our entire individualistic social-economic system. Proposals — Alexandra York

For me fashion is an expression of art that is very closely related both to me and to my body. I see it as an expression of identity combined with desire, moods and a cultural setting. — Iris Van Herpen

We carve on our body what society teaches us and continue this task, not knowing the identity they force us to have. This identity is carved on our faces and our skins. Not knowing our bodies have become "the paper made of human meat," we stuff our bodies and make them a theater where cultural symbols or suppressed symbols play. — Kim Hyesoon

When are we left-wingers going to learn that we are losing the cultural and political battle with conservatives because we are fractured into narcissistic special-interest groups? Why should an antiwar protestor be so concerned about her dietary identity? The political opinions of vegetarians and meat-eaters are, after all, equally important. And what does it tell us about vegetarians that it would never occur to meat-eaters to carry a sign that reads "Pacifist Pork Chop Lover for Peace" or "Backyard Rib Barbecuer for International Nuclear Disarmament"? — Sherman Alexie

I knew from an early age that people didn't see the different sides of me. I formulated a kind of bi-cultural identity quite early, and I was always very comfortable with it, but I knew people didn't quite see that. — Gurinder Chadha

I think it's too easy to just say that there is a direct and necessary conflict between black identity and gay identity. I think it's more nuanced than that simply because I think black is a color and then people layer on top of it all kinds of socio-cultural elements. — John Amaechi

The world citizen is a small leaf on the giant tree of life. They do not see a difference between the branch they were born on and the remaining branches on the tree, because they understand well that we are are all connected to the same roots. The world citizen sees each section of the world as part of their arm, leg, eyes, and heart. They do not class, contain or separate themselves or their identity by ethnicity or religion -- because they see their existence as a small part of a greater whole. When asked about their religion, the world citizen simply replies: 'My heart. — Suzy Kassem

We build this country ourselves every day and we have to be, in the most positive sense, totally unreal. — J.C. Villamere

Many people believe that gender identity ... is rooted in biology ... Many other people understand that gender is more like language than like biology; that is, while they understand us humans to have a biological capacity to use language, they point out we are not born with a hard-wired language "preinstalled" in our brains. Likewise, while we have a biological capacity to identify with and learn to "speak" from a particular location in a cultural gender system, we don't come into the world with a predetermined gender identity. — Susan Stryker

We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging. — Mark Kingwell

Unsurprisingly, given the eagerness of professors and students of identity studies to claim as many labels for themselves as possible, some individuals have sought to expand the definition of disability to include ... well, themselves. At the "Wrong/ed Bodies" session at the Cultural Studies conference, Angela Lea Nemecek complained that when she breastfed in her office at the University of Virginia, she was made to feel as if she had a disability. In short, her breastfeeding was "constructed in the workplace" as a disability. Therefore, she reasoned, breastfeeding is a disability and should be protected under the Americans with Disability Act. — Bruce Bawer

Some series teach us that ethnic features must be "fixed," by drastic means if necessary. Plastic surgeons with questionable ethics give insecure women of all ethnicities boob jobs, liposuction, and face-lifts on shows such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, and Dr. 90210, ignoring medical risks and reinforcing problematic ideas about women's worth. Yet they don't make white surgical candidates feel like their cultural identity should also be on the chopping blocking - or that they'd be so much more attractive and fulfilled if only they didn't look so... Caucasian.

In contrast, TV docs' scalpels reduce or remove racial markers on patients of colour. Black women's noses and lips are made smaller. In an increasingly common procedure targeting Asian women, creases are added to Asian women's eyelids. — Jennifer L. Pozner

[O]nce we give up on the idea that only heterosexuality is normal and that all human bodies are clearly either male or female, more and more kinds of bodies and desires will come into view. Perhaps also, one body may, in one lifetime, move through many identities and desires. The use of,queer' then, is a deliberate political move, which underscores the fluidity (potential and actual) of sexual identity and sexual desire. The term suggests that all kinds of sexual desire and identifications are possible, and all these have socio-cultural and historical co-ordinates. — Nivedita Menon

Islamism demanded no less of a root-and-branch overhaul of society. But because it was cloaked in religious garb, no one quite knew what to do with it, and people were desperate not to offend. There was confusion over whether to define our activism as a cultural identity, an ideology or a faith. To top it off, Islamism went through a decade of being embraced by both the left and right wings. The default left-leaning liberal position was to embrace the movement as part of multicultural sensitivity: to tell people to stop practising their faith was imperialism in nineties clothing, a colonial hangover bordering on racism. Instead, we were embraced as a new generation of anti-colonial politicised youth. Curiously, the default position on the right was to embrace us too, because it had been the Afghan Mujahideen, backed by the CIA, who fought the Soviet Union. Lest we forget, this was when Hollywood films such as Stallone's Rambo 3 portrayed the Afghan Mujahideen as heroes. — Maajid Nawaz

Culture has become one of the last elements of our identity. We have to act in favor of cultural diversity abroad as well as at home, we need strong cultural diplomacy but we have to create it. — Frederic Martel?

We should feel empowered by where we came from and who we are, not hide it. It is important to acknowledge that everything we do affects our ancestors as much as they have affected us. — Lorin Morgan-Richards

9/11 forced us to build another identity, to look deep and say who are we and what do we believe and is killing in the name of Islam part of that religion?

No. No. No. — Ruth Ahmed