It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

The mainstream is always under attack.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated – Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example.

Tokyo would probably be the foreign city if I had to eat one city’s food for the rest of my life, every day. It would have to be Tokyo, and I think the majority of chefs you ask that question would answer the same way.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I’ve done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier?

I’d always somehow felt slightly as if I’d been born in the wrong country.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

Football fans share a universal language that cuts across many cultures and many personality types. A serious football fan is never alone. We are legion, and football is often the only thing we have in common.

Many people in the western world are spoiled by the conveniences of our culture.

I have never thought it necessary to patronize the American people.

Everyone has their style and your style explains a lot about who you are – you feel me? I’ve had style since childhood, so I like to dress how I feel. But maybe I get carried away by some trends.

I’ve come to the conclusion that mythology is really a form of archaeological psychology. Mythology gives you a sense of what a people believes, what they fear.

I’m not afraid to look like a big, hairy, smelly, foreign devil in Tokyo, though I do my best not to, I really do.

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

When you put on a uniform, there are certain inhibitions that you accept.

There can never be any stop to learn about different cultures by travelling to different places. And whatever comes your way, continue the healthy eating habits.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it’s popular, it’s not culture.

Traditions are a common part of our lives. They can be good, and not all traditions are wrong, but sometimes they can take the joy out of life.

I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, ‚black feminist‘ does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it’s just… womanish.

America means far more than a continent bounded by two oceans. It is more than pride of military power, glory in war, or in victory. It means more than vast expanse of farms, of great factories or mines, magnificent cities, or millions of automobiles and radios.

Coffee is a language in itself.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven’t belonged to any company or any system. It isn’t easy to live like this in Japan.

People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice… they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.

I often look ridiculous in Japan. There’s really no way to eat in Japan, particularly kaiseki in a traditional ryokan, without offending the Japanese horribly. Every gesture, every movement is just so atrociously wrong, and the more I try, the more hilarious it is.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

To hard necessity ones will and fancy must conform.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.

I don’t think culture is something you can describe.

A lot of people are bored of all the political correctness.

The Mind that lies fallow but a single Day, sprouts up in Follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous Culture.

Unlike Europe, China can’t be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they’ve been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don’t see any need to.

I just usually go with my own taste. If I like something, and it happens to be against the law, well, then I might have a problem.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

Puerto Rico’s relationship with music is everything. It’s an island full of talent and if you grow up there, you grow up living and breathing music.

One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.

Britishness is just a way of putting things together and a certain don’t care attitude about clothes. You don’t care, you just do it and it looks great.

The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy – the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities – which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.

Mine is better than ours.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

One thing I want to make clear, as far as my own rebirth is concerned, the final authority is myself and no one else, and obviously not China’s Communists.

It’s amazing, the culture Coach Belichick has been able to create in our system.

In Puerto Rico we dance to everything.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Hong Kong is a wonderful, mixed-up town where you’ve got great food and adventure. First and foremost, it’s a great place to experience China in a relatively accessible way.

Understand: as children and young adults, we are taught to conform to certain codes of behavior and ways of doing things. We learn that being different comes with a social price.

I think Americans generally are not used to working very hard, in terms of working for the collective. I think in our country we have taken individualism to its farthest reaches, possibly.

I’m the proof – you can’t throw away tradition.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

Say ‚Toronto‘ or ‚Ontario,‘ and the immediate thought associations are with a somewhat blander version of North America: a United States with a welfare regime and a more polite street etiquette, and the additionally reassuring visage of Queen Elizabeth on the currency.

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

Honolulu is a melting pot.