“We now have cultural machines so powerful that one singer can reach everybody in the world, and make all the other singers feel inferior because they’re not like him.”

The dimension of cultural equity needs to be added to the humane continuum of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice.

I knew Bobby Dylan back in the days when he lived in the village.

He used to come and see me and sing songs for me, saying they ought to go into my next collected book on American folk music.

The modern computer with all its various gadgets and wonderful electronic facilities now makes it possible to preserve and reinvigorate all the cultural richness of mankind.

The essence of America lies not in the headlined heroes…but in the everyday folks who live and die unknown, yet leave their dreams as legacies

My life has been devoted to opposing that tendency.

That the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.

And the thing that I always tried to do with important singers when I met them was to sit down and record everything they knew, give them a first real run-through of their art.

People were saying that Southern folk song was dead.

Crushing the life out of all the other human possibilities.

Once that gets started, he gets backed by so much cash and so much power that he becomes a monstrous invader from outer space.

Folk Music is the map of singing.

But herein lies the rub: Christianity has been on a long-term trend of decline in every Western cultural context that we can identify.

I don’t care if this is a great cultural event or a national symbol. It has nothing to do with me. It deals with the city.

[Museums] all belongs to the cultural department, which is the biggest cultural department in the world.

Lawrence Hill, a cultural and spiritual descendant of West African griots, has used his vast storytelling talents to create an epic story that spans three continents.

To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.

We try to avoid the single-building syndrome. You have to look at the big picture. If you try to put social and cultural development ahead of economic development, it doesn’t work. You have to do it all together.

Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women’s choices concerning childbirth.