Cultural Differences Quotes

Let us dedicate this new era to mothers around the world, and also to the mother of all mothers -- Mother Earth. It is up to us to keep building bridges to bring the world closer together, and not destroy them to divide us further apart. We can pave new roads towards peace simply by understanding other cultures. This can be achieved through traveling, learning other languages, and interacting with others from outside our borders. Only then will one truly discover how we are more alike than different. Never allow language or cultural traditions to come between brothers and sisters. The same way one brother may not like his sister's choice of fashion or hairstyle, he will never hate her for her personal style or music preference. If you judge a man, judge only his heart. And if you should do so, make sure you use the truth in your conscience when weighing one's character. Do not measure anybody strictly based on the bad you see in them and ignore all the good.

~ Suzy Kassem

Fantasy like thought that no man could rainJust let her reignRun wild with her unafraidOf any rain stormsThey only wash the mud away and make wayFor double rainbows and sunny days

~ Maquita Donyel Irvin

...I fell asleep and had a dream that a king was liquidated by a group of kind faces....

~ Maquita Donyel Irvin

...I fell asleep and had a dream that a king was liquidated by a group of kind faces...

~ Maquita Donyel Irvin

We need no language to laugh

~ Janaki Sooriyarachchi

There is no religion better than love, no color better than the color of happiness and no language better than the language of compassion.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Harmony doesn’t come merely through tolerance. You don’t need to tolerate people from other cultural backgrounds. It is time you start loving them. Toleration may make you a decent person, but it is love that makes you a true human being.

~ Abhijit Naskar

In addition, when they talked as if city people lived by different values, they were not emphasizing abortion, or gay marriage, or the things that are typically pointed to as the cultural issues that divide lower-income whites from the Democratic Party. Instead, the values they talked about were intertwined with economic concerns.

~ Katherine J. Cramer

When our environment changes we change, and this combination of transformative deeds create a synergistic effect. Seemingly, insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes can eventfully lead to fundamental qualitative changes in the way a group of people function as a society.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

When the purpose of clearly exposing the differences between the Aryan and the Tamil culture, civilization, conduct and creed Thirukkural was written. I am of that firm view.

~ Periyar E.v. Ramasamy

Often we may even smile or laugh at adversity, but all people share the same passions. They are merely manifest differently according to one's culture and conditioning.

~ Yasuo Kuwahara

I am living in world full of lost hope and discrimination. I am living a life in which social equality does not exist and I am not sure that it ever can, or if once upon a time it ever did.

~ Ciore Taylor

American can mean anything you want it to mean. It can mean that you live in America. It can mean that you are privileged. Being American can also mean that you are diverse. In many ways, the title American is an oxymoron because one may look it on the outside but not feel it on the inside.

~ Ciore Taylor

My skin is beautiful but it also serves as a huge barrier for so many opportunities that I want to pursue in life.

~ Ciore Taylor

It’s unfortunate really—how everyone can live on the same soil yet not even know the first thing about their neighbors.

~ Ciore Taylor

Differences simply act as a yarn of curiosity unraveling until we get to the other side.

~ Ciore Taylor

In many ways, the title American is an oxymoron because one may look it on the outside but not feel it on the inside.

~ Ciore Taylor

Sometimes, the reason that people don’t get along is because they feel that their role is to be selfish or submissive—not understanding that American simply means understanding who we are so that we can help others do the same.

~ Ciore Taylor

Reality tries to disguise the fact that this society neglects to provide equal opportunity established by God and clarified in the Constitution. Whether equal opportunity is given to an individual or not, he/she still has the equal potential within him/herself to advance and obtain a greater level of success.

~ Ciore Taylor

Peace and gladness in every home is a peace for the society, nation and the world.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

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

Individual cultures and ideologies have their appropriate uses but none of them erase or replace the universal experiences, like love and weeping and laughter, common to all human beings.

~ Aberjhani

Appreciation for cultural diversity is essential for our co-existence.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We all have a book in us. The first step is recognising this. Writing it is a whole new journey.

~ Kathryn Joyce

The secrets of the kitchen were revealed to you in stages, on a need-to-know basis, just like the secrets of womanhood. You started wearing bras; you started handling the pressure cooker for lentils. You went from wearing skirts and half saris to wearing full saris, and at about the same time you got to make the rice-batter crepes called dosas for everyone’s tiffin. You did not get told the secret ratio of spices for the house-made sambar curry powder until you came of marriageable age. And to truly have a womanly figure, you had to eat, to be voluptuously full of food. This, of course, was in stark contrast to what was considered womanly or desirable in the West, especially when I started modeling. To look good in Western clothes you had to be extremely thin. Prior to this, I never thought about my weight except to think it wasn’t ever enough. Then, with modeling, I started depending on my looks to feed myself (though my profession didn’t allow me to actually eat very much). When I started hosting food shows, my career went from fashion to food, from not eating to really eating a lot, to put it mildly. Only this time the opposing demands of having to eat all this food and still look good by Western standards of beauty were off the charts. This tug-of-war was something I would struggle with for most of a decade.

~ Padma Lakshmi

On either side of a potentially violent conflict, an opportunity exists to exercise compassion and diminish fear based on recognition of each other's humanity. Without such recognition, fear fueled by uninformed assumptions, cultural prejudice, desperation to meet basic human needs, or the panicked uncertainty of the moment explodes into violence.

~ Aberjhani

The Japanese have two words: uchi meaning inside and soto meaning outside. Uchi refers to their close friends, the people in their inner circle. Soto refers to anyone who is outside that circle. And how they relate and communicate to the two are drastically different. To the soto, they are still polite and they might be outgoing, on the surface, but they will keep them far away, until they are considered considerate and trustworthy enough to slip their way into the uchi category. Once you are uchi, the Japanese version of friendship is entire universes beyond the average American friendship! Uchi friends are for life. Uchi friends represent a sacred duty. A Japanese friend, who has become an uchi friend, is the one who will come to your aid, in your time of need, when all your western friends have turned their back and walked away.

~ Alexei Maxim Russell

Time has become a melding of minutes and months and the feeling of seasons. […] Leon says it is the Bhutan Time Warp and I know what he means. Time does not hurl itself forward at breakneck speed here. Change happens very slowly. A grandmother and her granddaughter wear the same kind of clothes, they do the same work, they know the same songs. The granddaughter does not find her grandmother an embarrassing, boring relic.

~ Jamie Zeppa

I love the different shades of colours. Purely beautiful!

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Organisations often appoint leaders for their IQ. Then, years later, sack them for their lack of EQ (Emotional Intelligence). Common Purpose argues that in the future they will promote for CQ - Cultural Intelligence.

~ Julia Middleton

Try seeing, feeling, and tasting the water you swim in the way a land animal might perceive it. You may find the experience fascinating -- and mind-expanding.

~ Erin Meyer

By sabotaging logic, the common frame of reference, and the common language, we have removed a safety valve that allows cultural divides to be resolved.

~ Mike Klepper

Thank God for immigrants. They're the only ones who have any personality left. They still allow themselves emotions, judgments, and all those qualities that we are evolving past. I don't know what they're saying, but I can tell they're speaking honestly.

~ Colin Quinn

The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most “savage” or “barbarous” of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.

~ Claude Lévi-Strauss

For it is a fact that a man can be profoundly out of step with his times. A man may have been born in a city famous for its idiosyncratic culture and yet, the very habits, fashions, and ideas that exalt that city in the eyes of the world may make no sense to him at all. As he proceeds through life, he looks about in a state of confusion, understanding neither the inclinations nor the aspirations of his peers.

~ Amor Towles

These outlanders are peculiar, aren’t they?Longbow smiled faintly. They seem to think that we’re the peculiar ones. Their lives are very complicated, but we try our best to keep everything simple. I’m not sure exactly why, but that seems to offend them for some reason.

~ David Eddings

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

~ J.c. Villamere

Most of my important lessons about life have come from recognizing how others from a different culture view things.

~ Edgar H. Schein

Whereas, in the west, individuality and drive are considered positive qualities, they are not seen the same way, in Japan. In that country, if you are too much of a rugged individualist, it might actually indicate that you are a weak, unreliable character and that you are selfish, in a childish, willful kind of way.

~ Alexei Maxim Russell

Culture is the celebration of diversity. Let us therefore not deny our origin; but instead celebrate ours as a cultural mosaic not a tower of Babel , but a power of Babel

~ Ali A. Mazrui