“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.”

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

The Samoan puts the burden of amatory success upon the man and believes that women need more initiating, more time for maturing of sexual feeling. A man who fails to satisfy a woman is looked upon as a clumsy, inept blunderer.

Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.

The need to find meaning is as real as the need for trust and for love, for relations with other human beings.

In almost any society I think, the quality of the nonconformists is likely to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.

Injustice experienced in the flesh, in deeply wounded flesh, is the stuff out of which change explodes.

We must have a place where children can have a whole group of adults they can trust.

Contentment can be bought at a price that one can not possibly pay.

Throughout history, females have picked providers for males. Males pick anything.

Monogamous heterosexual love is probably one of the most difficult, complex and demanding of human relationships.

What the world needs is not romantic lovers who are sufficient unto themselves, but husbands and wives who live in communities, relate to other people, carry on useful work and willingly give time and attention to their children.

The assumption that men were created equal, with an equal ability to make an effort and win an earthly reward, although denied every day by experience, is maintained every day by our folklore and our daydreams.

No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.

A woman, even a brilliant woman, must have two qualities in order to fulfill her promise: more energy than mere mortals, and the ability to outwit her culture.

And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.

Laughter is man’s most distinctive emotional expression. Man shares the capacity for love and hate, anger and fear, loyalty and grief, with other living creatures. But humour, which has an intellectual as well as an emotional element belongs to man

Foreigners cannot bring freedom, cannot bring democracy, because this is related to the culture, to the different factors that affect or influence that society. You cannot bring it, you cannot import it.

For some reason I seem to absorb the landscape and cultures where I am planted. A State Divided Symphony was inspired by the 150th anniversary of Missouri’s entry into the Civil War.

The notion that in order to have a nation it is necessary for there to be a common language, a common territory and common culture has failed to stand the test of time or the scrutiny of scientific definition of objective reality…

If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture – not only national culture but global culture.

Our democracy should reflect our culture and our habits and our customs and our reality at the same time.

Apple has a culture of excellence that is, I think, so unique and so special. I’m not going to witness or permit the change of it.

I try to communicate in a way that allows people in on what’s going on. What’s better than references to popular culture?

But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.