United States Culture Quotes & Sayings

We need a leader who can lower taxes, protect small businesses, and increase job creation nationwide. I have no doubt that John McCain appreciates the important role Hispanics play not only in the economy, but in our nation's culture as well
he has a track record with Hispanics for more than 20 years as a senator from Arizona. The American people need a strong leader who has the experience and the judgment to be the next President of the United States, and that man is John McCain. — Katie Barberi

But that such an administration could be elected in the first place, headed by a man whose only qualifications to be President of the United States at a dangerous time in the history of the world were rhetoric, style and symbolism - and whose animus against the values and institutions of America had been demonstrated repeatedly over a period of decades beforehand - speaks volumes about the inadequacies of our educational system and the degeneration of our culture. — Thomas Sowell

You get more churches burned down in the United States in the last two years than in the last hundred, because of the lack of understanding of culture and diversity and the beauty of it. — Edward James Olmos

We've finally given liberals a war against fundamentalism, and they don't want to fight it. They would, except it would put them on the same side as the United States. — Ann Coulter

When L.A.'s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea. — Steve Erickson

China can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, but the United States can draw on a talent pool of 7 billion and recombine them in a diverse culture that enhances creativity in a way that ethnic Han nationalism cannot. — Lee Kuan Yew

In the United States, everything is permitted, even encouraged: "Go for it, try it, do it," we are urged, no matter what the "it" might be. But, while everything might be permitted, practically nothing is forgiven. By contrast, in the Church much is not permitted: "If you love me, keep my commandments," Jesus says (Jn. 15:10). But, while much is not permitted, everything can be forgiven. Our culture pulls us towards vengeance; our faith towards mercy. — Francis George

Warhol came from an ordinary family and he had a profound understanding about capitalism and material culture. He was probably one of the few Western artists - or artists from the United States - that could be considered a true product of his time and brought out that kind of spirit of the culture. — Ai Weiwei

I think one thing that has helped me to be an entrepreneur is being an immigrant and coming to the United States. I had to basically build a new life for myself, and adjust very quickly to a new environment, new culture, learn a new language. — Anousheh Ansari

Year after year, an ideological and economic barrier hardened between our two countries, meanwhile, the Cuban exile community in the United States made enormous contributions to our country, in politics, in business, culture and sports. — Barack Obama

Human reactions to robots varies by culture and changes over time. In the United States we are terrified by killer robots. In Japan people want to snuggle with killer robots. — Daniel H. Wilson

American political culture quickly and always outpaces any attempt to satirize it. — Glenn Greenwald

You have the United States, and you have Mexico, and then you have this Mexican-American thing which is this third culture, which I like to call Aztlan. — Linda Ronstadt

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. — Joel Salatin

Succinct, thorough, and masterfully researched-Thomas Medvetz has written a subtle and timely history of these fixtures of public debate in the United States. In the realms of culture studies, policy, and policy formation, there is no book quite like Think Tanks in America. Plus which, no one has understood, interpreted, then used Pierre Bourdieu's ideas better-so well that Bourdieu himself would have been pleased. — Charles Lemert

It is no longer a question of controlling a military-industrial complex, but rather, of keeping the United States from becoming a totally military culture. — Jerome Wiesner

America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal. And we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words, within our borders and around the world. We are shaped by every culture. Drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept, E pluribus unum: Out of many, one. — Barack Obama

The world became more aware that America-despite being the hope of many who have the personal drive and ambition to become part of the "American dream"-is beset by serious operational challenges: a massive and growing national debt, widening social inequality, a cornucopian culture that worships materialism, a financial system given to greedy speculation, and a polarized political system — Zbigniew Brzezinski

The expansion of this country was accomplished at the cost of decimation to the Native American population. The American Indian death toll due to the United States' march to the Pacific was massive. Much of the land we stole from the Native Americans is uninhabited to this day; basically, the Indians could have stayed where they were. Had America expanded its boundaries yet been true to its conscience, the American Indian nations could have remained intact. And were there a greater prevalence of Native American philosophy and culture in the United States today, the life of our nation would be immeasurably enriched. — Marianne Williamson

Uncontrollable consumerism has become a watchword of our culture despite regular and compelling calls for its end. The United States has more malls than high schools; Americans spend more time shopping than reading ... Some of the most insightful writing about the American character over the nation's history has been about neither freedom nor democracy but about the crazed impulse to acquire things. — Anna Quindlen

The "new" Anglo-American feminist theory argues that too little mothering, and, in particular, the absence of mother-son connection, is what engenders both sexism and traditional masculinity in men. (...) This perspective positions mothering as central to feminist politics in its insistence that true and lasting gender equality will occur only when boys are raised as the sons of mothers. As the early feminist script of mother-son connection required the denial of the mother's power and the displacement of her identity as mother, the new perspective affirms the maternal and celebrates mother-son connection. In this, it rewrites the patriarchal and early feminist narrative to give (...) voice and presence to the mother and make mother-son connection central to the redesign of both traditional masculinity and the larger patriarchal culture. — Andrea O'Reilly

The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S. — Elon Musk

The more time I spent in Finland, the more I started to worry that the reforms sweeping across the United States had the equation backwards. We were trying to reverse engineer a high-performance teaching culture through dazzlingly complex performance evaluations and value-added data analysis. It made sense to reward, train, and dismiss more teachers based on their performance, but that approach assumed that the worst teachers would be replaced with much better ones, and that the mediocre teachers would improve enough to give students the kind of education they deserved. However, there was not much evidence that either scenario was happening in reality. — Amanda Ripley

While the United States is becoming the most culturally diverse nation in the world, less than 5.5% of Christian congregations are multiethnic. — James MacDonald

The United States is enriched by many cultures, and united by a single common language. — S.I. Hayakawa

The new culture war is about national identity rather than religion and 'transcendent authority.' It focuses on which groups the United States will formally admit to residence and citizenship. It asks the same question as the old culture war: 'Who are we?' But the earlier query was primarily about how we define ourselves morally. The new question is about how we define ourselves ethnically, racially and linguistically. It is, in truth, one of the oldest questions in our history, going back to our earliest immigration battles of the 1840s and 1850s. — E. J. Dionne

The United States is primarily a guilt-based culture. The dominant method of social control in this country involves teaching people to feel guilt about not living up to personal expectations. Contrast this with shame-based cultures like Japan. As researchers Ying Wong and Jeanne Tsai explain in their paper, Cultural Models of Shame and Guilt, shame is "associated with the fear of exposing one's defective self to others. Guilt, on the other hand, is associated with the fear of not living up to one's own standards." In this formulation, guilt is based on failing to achieve personal ideals; shame is based on social exposure ["The Anti-Vaccine Movement Should Be Ridiculed, Because Shame Works," Gizmodo, February 6, 2015]. — Matt Novak

A history of the working class in the United States should, first of all, give a sense of what is meant by "the working class in the United States." It means most of us who live in the United States of America-which, unfortunately, has not been the focus of a majority of history books that claim to tell the story of this country. This doesn't make sense because without the working class there would be no United States. (From a certain point of view, this history book deficiency does make sense, given the biases built into our business-dominated culture.) — Paul Le Blanc

It seems to me that America is constantly reinventing what "America" means. — Ronald Reagan

In the United States we think we have at our disposal virtually everything - and I emphasize the word "think." We have big houses and cars, good medical treatment, jets, trains and monorails; we have computers, good communications, many comforts and conveniences. But where have they gotten us? We have an abundance of material things, but a successful society produces happy people, and I think we produce more miserable people than almost anyplace on earth. I've traveled all over the world, and I've never seen people who are quite as unhappy as they are in the United States. We have plenty, but we have nothing, and we always want more. In the pursuit of material success as our culture measures it, we have given up everything. We have lost the capacity to produce people who are joyful. The pursuit of the material has become our reason for living, not enjoyment of living itself. — Marlon Brando

Q. Which is my favorite country?
A. The United States of America. Not because I'm chauvinistic or xenophobic, but because I believe that we alone have it all, even if not to perfection. The U.S. has the widest possible diversity of spectacular scenery and depth of natural resources; relatively clean air and water; a fascinatingly heterogeneous population living in relative harmony; safe streets; few deadly communicable diseases; a functioning democracy; a superlative Constitution; equal opportunity in most spheres of life; an increasing tolerance of different races, religions, and sexual preferences; equal justice under the law; a free and vibrant press; a world-class culture in books,films, theater, museums, dance, and popular music; the cuisines of every nation; an increasing attention to health and good diet; an abiding entrepreneurial spirit; and peace at home. — Albert Podell

Lederhosen Maker Opens First U.S. Store in Cincinnati By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Wiesnkoenig (pronounced VEE-sehn-koh-neg), the official supplier of lederhosen for the Munich Oktoberfest, opened its first store in the United States on Wednesday, in a brewery in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. Oliver Pfund, a Wiesnkoenig consultant, said, "We want to show people here in the U.S. you can wear the lederhosen with Chuck Taylors, you don't have to wear the suspenders." Founded in 2007, Wiesnkoenig has five stores in Germany and sells in department stores there and in Switzerland and Austria. Mr. Pfund said a brewery was a perfect location. He said the company hoped visitors to the brewery would "have an interest in the German culture, as well. — Anonymous

Americans, by which I mean people who live in the United States, are incredibly juvenile about social change. Robin Morgan called it "ejaculatory politics": if it doesn't happen right away it doesn't happen. The Women's Movement in this country has all the same characteristics as the culture that we live in, short-term gratification, personal fulfilment, personal advancement, and yes, coming out as a lesbian can get in the way of that. Liberals and left-wing men have recolonised women around the fear of the right. This troubles me - it makes me feel like we're really suckers. — Andrea Dworkin

The abnormal, the sick, the vicious have become more and more interwoven into the violent culture of the United States. Into the way news is seen, into the way movies are seen. — Assata Shakur

Long term, I have a lot of confidence in the United States. We have an excellent record in terms of innovation. We have great universities that are involved in technological change and progress. We have an entrepreneurial culture, much more than almost any other country. — Ben Bernanke

We are not 'censored' in the traditional way in the United States: writers are not beaten or killed because of their words, and no Ministry of Truth enforces an official version of what can be printed and thought. But in this culture of images, we are censoring ourselves. That may be more insidious and long-lasting. What I mean is that we disparage long-term complexity, and extol superficiality. We ignore reading, and lavish time on images. To read, in my mind, is to consider and to think. To see an image is to react. What happens when we start believing the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and prejudices? What have you become when the most expected of you is simply to press a 'Like' button? What kind of gulag is it when its inhabitants are too stupid to understand they are its prisoners? — Sergio Troncoso

You only have to travel to Europe to see the difference that an entitlement culture makes. While the United States is a vibrant, creative, and exciting place, Europe today is largely stagnant. Workers there have little incentive to move ahead, because the rate of taxation is punishing and the governments guarantee a certain standard of living. — Bill O'Reilly

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

America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products. — Thomas L. Friedman

Whether the United States is a hegemon, an indispensable power, or an empire at sunset, and whether China or some other rival stands to take its place, may be a debate that consumes international relations. But its terms are not adapted to a world where power is decaying - where unprecedented forms of fracturing are under way within each of these countries and across systems of trade, investment, migration, and culture. Identifying who is up and who is down is less important than understanding what is going on inside those nations, political movements, corporations, and religions that are on the elevator. Who is up and who is down will matter ever less in a world in which those who get to the top don't stay there for long and are able to do less and less with the power they have while there. — Moises Naim

Mass culture is Peter Pan culture. It tells us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our lives will be harmonious and complete. This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, Hollywood, or Christian preachers, is a form of magical thinking. It turns worthless mortgages and debt into wealth. It turns the destruction of our manufacturing base into an opportunity for growth. It turns alienation and anxiety into a cheerful conformity. It turns a nation that wages illegal wars and administers off-shore penal colonies where it openly practices torture into the greatest democracy on earth. — Chris Hedges

What is unusual about the United States - and it's something that I have never gotten used to - is that Jews here, there are so many of them, and they are so important to the culture. — Michael Lynton

Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species. — Barbara Kingsolver

Celebration of the new over the old easily translates into a celebration of young over the old, of young people over old people. The cult of youth, the celebration of youth for youth's sake s more pervasive in the United States than any other culture I have visited . . . When the culture values youth over maturity, the authority of parents is undermined. — Leonard Sax

People ask if I miss it, but they don't understand that American culture is so ubiquitous that there's nothing to miss. I don't see myself moving back. It's not that I hate the United States. I just always thought it would be a shame not to live in a foreign country. — David Sedaris

There should be a public outcry about what happened to me and other women in the name of our government! But history has shown "the customs of society and laws of the State allowed it to crush my aspirations and barred me from the the pursuit of almost every object worthy of an intelligent, rational mind."45 What law has the right to entrust the interest of myself and my children into the hands of such an evil bunch of men? I did not occupy my rightful place in 1976.
45. (paraphrased from Gurko, Miriram, The Ladies of Seneca Falls; the Birth of the Women's Rights Movement, 1974. — Diane Chamberlain

I'm working hard to be president of the United States.I'm running to change things, and I'm not going to be part of the political class in Washington, D.C. I have the skills to disrupt the old order and bring about a new culture. — Jeb Bush

In the 1970s, what I, as a young foreign student studying in the United States, found most dynamic, exciting and impressive about this country is what much of the world continues to value most about the U.S. today: its open intellectual culture, its great universities, its capacity for discovery and innovation. — Ahmed Zewail

The privatisation of the symbolic sphere is a strictly relative affair, not least if one thinks of the various Victorian contentions over science and religion, the culture industry, the state regulation of sexuality and the like. Today, one of the most glaring refutations of the case that religion has vanished from public life is known as the United States. Late modernity (or postmodernity, if one prefers) takes some of these symbolic practices back into public ownership. — Terry Eagleton

I don't want to rescind American directors but I think that European directors in general, because of the size of the nations in Europe are exposed to all different cultures, they can easily travel from one distinct culture to another in a matter of hours - you can drive for two weeks across the United States and you're in the same basic culture - so there is a certain breadth of understanding and sophistication that they bring to it and frankly, in some cases they are less expensive than American directors. — Wes Craven

The return to the Organization of the United States of America, the bearers of a great and diversified democratic culture that has inspired many other peoples. — Carlo Azeglio Ciampi

I'm afraid that in the United States of America today the prevailing doctrine of justification is not justification by faith alone. It is not even justification by good works or by a combination of faith and works. The prevailing notion of justification in our culture today is justification by death. All one has to do to be received into the everlasting arms of God is to die. — R.C. Sproul

Son unas cualquieras, she mutters. Nobodies. No culture, no family life, illiterates, she means. The kind of people who make her cross to the other side of the street if she meets them in the dark on payday. They're her worst nightmare of what a Latin girl can become in the United States. Their big hoop earrings and plucked eyebrows, their dark lips painted like those stars in the old black-and-white movies, their tight T-shirts that show too much curve and invite boys' touches. — Meg Medina

That natural disasters are required to provide Americans with a glimpse of reality in their own country is an indication of the deep rot infecting the official political culture. — Tariq Ali

The United States finds itself with forces of reaction. Do I have to demonstrate this? The Taliban's annihilation of music and culture? The enslavement of women? — Christopher Hitchens

more than parents. For most of the history of the human race, children have learned culture from the adults. That's why childhood and adolescence have to last so long in our species. But in the United States today, kids no longer learn culture from the grown-ups. American kids today have their own culture, a culture of disrespect, which they learn from their peers and which they teach to their peers. — Leonard Sax

It's really sad for me that in the United States the Latino community is losing its culture and language, especially among kids born here - a lot of them can't even speak our language. — Romeo Santos

What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope. — Audre Lorde

Women are in many ways second-class citizens in the United States in 2016, because of the way that we're portrayed in popular culture. — Geena Davis

The Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture will be far more important in the cabinet of the President of the United States who holds office in the year 2035 than the Secretary of War. — Nikola Tesla

Believe it or not, entertainment is part of our American diplomacy, it is part of what makes us exceptional, part of what makes us such a world power. Hundreds of millions of people may never set foot in the United States, but thanks to you, they've experienced a small part of what makes our country special. They've learned something about our values. We have shaped a world culture through you ... in a way that has made the world better. — Barack Obama

Few white citizens are acquainted with blacks other than those projected by the media and the so
called educational system, whichis nothing more than a system of rewards and punishments based upon one's ability to pledge loyalty oaths to Anglo culture. The media and the "educational system" are the prime sources of racism in the United States. — Ishmael Reed

I must say that the United States, of all the countries of the West, is the least guilty and has done the most in order to prevent it. The United States has helped Europe to win the First and the Second World Wars. It twice raised Europe from postwar destruction - twice - for ten, twenty, thirty years it has stood as a shield protecting Europe while European countries counted their nickels to avoid paying for their armies (better yet, to have none at all), to avoid paying for armaments, thinking about how to leave NATO, knowing that in any case America would protect them. These counties started it all, despite their thousand year old civilization and culture, even though they are closer to the danger and should have seen it more clearly. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There is hardly any political question in the United States that sooner or later does not turn into a judicial question. From that, the obligation that the parties find in their daily polemics to borrow ideas and language from the judicial system. Since most public men are or have formerly been jurists, they make the habits and the turn of ideas that belong to jurists pass into the handling of public affairs. The jury ends up by familiarizing all classes with them. Thus, judicial language becomes, in a way, the common language; so the spirit of the jurist, born inside the schools and courtrooms, spreads little by little beyond their confines; it infiltrates all of society, so to speak; it descends to the lowest ranks, and the entire people finishes by acquiring a part of the habits and tastes of the magistrate. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Citizens across the United States are now uniting in a great cause to establish a Department of Peace, seeking nothing less than the transformation of our society, to make non-violence an organizing principle, to make war archaic through creating a paradigm shift in our culture for human development, for economic and political justice and for violence control. — Dennis Kucinich

Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persistent vein in American culture. His admirers ranged from John Harvard and Thomas Jefferson in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth. More recently, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale wrote movingly of how his study of Epictetus at Stanford University enabled him to survive the psychological pressure of prolonged torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. Stockdale's story formed the basis for a light-hearted treatment of the moral power of Stoicism in Tom Wolfe's novel A Man in Full (1998).52 — Epictetus

Being educated in the United States gave me a good understanding of American culture. I think I got a lot of influence from the entrepreneurial mind in the United States. — Masayoshi Son

Well, when you're an immigrant writer, or an immigrant, you're not always welcome to this country unless you're the right immigrant. If you have a Mexican accent, people look at you like, you know, where do you come from and why don't you go back to where you came from? So, even though I was born in the United States, I never felt at home in the United States. I never felt at home until I moved to the Southwest, where, you know, there's a mix of my culture with the U.S. culture, and that was why I lived in Texas for 25 years. — Sandra Cisneros

The musical culture in the United States has no doubt suffered severe setbacks, especially in funding, since the early 2000's. However, I've been amazed at the resiliency of those involved with contemporary music in this country. I think composers and those dedicated to contemporary music have reacted with tremendous creativity and resourcefulness. — Michael Hersch

He was so far from being able to carry out such threats that one might conclude that the author of this document was utterly mad. Indeed, the man in the cave had entered a separate reality, one that was deeply connected to the mythic chords of Muslim identity and in fact gestured to anyone whose culture was threatened by modernity and impurity and the loss of tradition. By declaring war on the United States from a cave in Afghanistan, bin Laden assumed the role of an uncorrupted, indomitable primitive standing against the awesome power of the secular, scientific, technological Goliath; he was fighting modernity itself. — Lawrence Wright

I read an anecdote once about a woman from another culture who came to the United States and began to introduce herself as "Busy." It was, after all, the first thing she heard when meeting any American. Hello, I'm Busy - she figured it was part of our traditional greeting, — Kevin DeYoung

United States today, there is a widespread, malignant thought form that other people are the problem. Conservatives tend to blame liberals for our problems, while liberals blame conservatives. The media blames almost everyone, and almost everyone blames immigrants. Some people are convinced homosexuals are the problem, while others think that single mothers are the problem. Still others think the Christian Right is the problem, and far, far too many people think that our parents were the problem. The entire culture has become a hysterical blame session. — Marianne Williamson

Other sovereign democratic states have central governments more corrupted other than our own, but most can fall back on unifying elements we lack: common ethnicity, a shared religion, or near-universal consensus on many fundamental political issues. The United States needs its central government to function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it's one of the few things binding us together. — Colin Woodard

Where race is involved, there is a pronounced and proven tendency in the United States for the majority culture to willfully misremember the history and turn it upside down. — Taylor Branch

Progressive music probably wouldn't even really exist if not for the people of the United States having picked up on it and nurtured it in the way they did. It really is an American form of music in the sense that it was nurtured here. So it belongs here. It has become part of the fabric of American musical culture. — Greg Lake

The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying 'we' when referring to the United States and, even the 'shock and awe' of the initial stages, it was just too jubilant and just a little uncomfortable. — Katie Couric

I, too, like yourself was a good party man: my party was that of the Church; I was ultramontane. Your party system is one of your thefts from our Church; your National Convention is our Ecunemic Council; you abdicate reason, as we do, before its decisions; and you yourself Mr. Ratcliffe, you are a Cardinal. — Henry Adams

The United States has an isolationist and insular culture, combined with a global and interventionist posture. This highly dangerous and febrile mixture, which greatly facilitates the task of the fear-mongers and chauvinists, needs a very exact and nuanced diagnosis. I don't think that analogies from the totalitarian model, however suggestive, are sufficient. — Christopher Hitchens

Remember preconceptions? Even though I'd landed hoping simply to somehow scrape the transatlantic fare home, I'd been an arrogant swine, imbued with that Old World toffee-nosed attitude: The United States of America's got no culture, not deep down. — Jonathan Gash

Sometimes when I observe contemporary U.S. culture, with its hard fronts and nasty culture wars, I have a strange sense that I've seen something like it before - in the Communist and semitotalitarian state in which I grew up. The issues and positions are very different, but the spirit is strangely familiar. In all public discussion, there was a party line that people had to toe; if you diverged, you were deemed disloyal and suspected of betraying the cause. I sense a similar spirit today among both progressives and conservatives in the United States when it comes to many hot-button issues, including Islam. — Miroslav Volf

The United States and Turkey are the only two countries that don't have some kind of subsidy for the Arts. The whole culture in society has made certain films more acceptable. I turned down so many films in the '60s and '70s. — Alex North

Nevertheless, after Sobell's confession of guilt, all other conspiracy theories about the Rosenberg case should come to an end. A pillar of the left-wing culture of grievance has been finally shattered. The Rosenbergs were actual and dangerous Soviet spies. It is time the ranks of the left acknowledge that the United States had (and has) real enemies and that finding and prosecuting them is not evidence of repression. — Ronald Radosh

Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse. — Norman G. Finkelstein

We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours. — Northrop Frye

But nobody lives in a universal thing called culture. They live only in specific cultures, each of which differ from one another. Plays written and produced in Germany are three times as likely to have tragic or unhappy endings than plays written and produced in the United States. Half of all people in India and Pakistan say they would marry without love, but only 2 percent of people in Japan would do so. Nearly a quarter of Americans say they are often afraid of saying the wrong things in social situations, whereas 65 percent of all Japanese say they are often afraid. In their book Drunken Comportment, Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton found that in some cultures drunken men get into fights, but in some cultures they almost never do. In some cultures drunken men grow more amorous, but in some cultures they do not. — David Brooks

This determined bias against religion, especially Christianity, is clearly evident when viewed against the religious heritage of American culture as revealed in the Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 452. 1892. — Mathew Staver

It is very easy to make wild generalizations about Islam. All you have to do is read almost any issue of The New Republic and you'll see there the radical evil that's associated with Islam, the Arabs as having a depraved culture, and so forth. These are impossible generalizations to make in the United States about any other religious or ethnic group. — Edward Said

Today as never before in their history, Americans are enthralled with military power. The global military supremacy that the United States presently enjoys - and is bent on perpetuating - has become central to our national identity. More than America's matchless material abundance or even the effusions of its pop culture, the nation's arsenal of high tech weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify who we are and what we stand for. — James McCartney

Still, it strikes me that, taken together, they do make an argument, and it is this: the rise of American democracy is bound up with the history of reading and writing, which is one of the reasons the study of American history is inseparable from the study of American literature. In the early United States, literacy rates rose and the price of books and magazines and newspapers fell during the same decades that suffrage was being extended. With everything from constitutions and ballots to almanacs and novels, American wrote and read their way into a political culture inked and stamped and pressed in print. — Jill Lepore

There's more emphasis on art and culture in Europe than there is in the United States and I think that a lot of American directors and writers are just trying to copy other American horror films, they don't pick up much in the way that European filmmakers do. — Wes Craven

The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture (though maybe not in the United States Bible Belt, nor in parts of the Islamic world). Most people are at ease with the idea that our present biosphere is the outcome of four billion years of Darwinian evolution. — Martin Rees

The fact the enemies of God must face is that modern civilization has conquered the world, but in doing so has lost its soul. And in losing its soul it will lose the very world it gained. Even our own so-called Liberal culture in these United States which has tried to avoid complete secularization by leaving little zones of individual freedom is in danger of forgetting that these zones were preserved only because religion was in their soul. And as religion fades so will freedom, for only where the spirit of God is, is there liberty. — Fulton J. Sheen

We are an impatient culture and an impatient electorate. — Dick Couch

I think the biggest impediment to fixing the food system in the United States is that we expect food to be cheap. We want to by other things with our money. We're so disconnected from agriculture - from the culture in agriculture. — Alice Waters

There's something unique about the United States, a sense of individual rights and freedoms, and a sense of social and civic responsibility that we contributed to so much of the world. We lost that mission in the 1980s and 1990s, when we entered a gilded age, and the culture of individualism became a culture of avarice. — George Hickenlooper

When I was 11, I moved to the United States with my two brothers and my mom. We moved to northern New York, up near the Canadian border, from Argentina, and there was nobody there that spoke Spanish, and because there was no internet at the time, not even cable TV yet, I lost the connection with my childhood friends and the culture I had been brought up with for my first decade completely. — Viggo Mortensen

The United States was founded on the idea that all people are endowed with inalienable rights, and that principle has allowed us to work to perfect our union at home while standing as a beacon of hope to the world. Today, that principle is embodied in agreements Americans helped forge - the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and treaties against torture and genocide - and it unites us with people from every country and culture. — Barack Obama

Dear Dan, I recently attended one of your lectures, and I was wondering why an Israeli guy telling Jewish jokes is wearing an Indian shirt?
D.A.: In general I am not someone who should be asked for fashion advice, but this particular case might be the one exception ... My solution? I figured that as long as I am wearing clothes from a different culture, no one is politically correct (and this includes almost everyone in the United States ) could complain that I'm underdressed. After all, any such critic could be offending a whole subcontinent. — Dan Ariely

So much of the United State's political relationship with Israel is based on culture. Israel is the only Westernized culture in the region and the Middle Eastern countries bordering Israel are Arab, which is a totally different society. Even though Israel doesn't exactly feel like the United States, by comparison to its neighbors it's very Western. — Jill Soloway

I think that every minority in the United States of America knows everything about the dominant culture. From the time you can think, you are bombarded with images from TV, film, magazines, newspapers. — Spike Lee