My dad played guitar, and he taught me enough to play some Beatles' songs. But primarily, I was a bookworm. I loved reading and still do. My whole family does. It was part of the family culture. Accomplished literacy was a value.
I went to an exhibition at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum about Shanghai, about how courtesans had been influential in bringing western culture to Shanghai. I bought a book and in it saw this striking group of women in a photograph called 'The Ten Beauties of Shanghai'.
Always, some great culture is dying to enrich the soil of new harvests, some civlization is crumbling to rubbish to be the hill of a more beautiful city, some race is spending itself that a lower and more barbarous world may inherit its stored treasure house.
It meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books. It was this beautiful place that I felt pop culture should look like.
No officer should be allowed to behave as if they are above the law just because they are responsible for upholding the law. Permitting and protecting even the smallest acts of abuse by a tiny fraction of our officers leads to a culture where extreme acts of abuse are more likely, just like what happened to Laquan McDonald.
A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.
To me, I learned along the way, you know, culture is behavior. That's all it is; culture is people's behaviors.
To reform the Secret Service, the agency needs a director from outside the agency who will be immune from that culture and not beholden to entrenched bureaucrats within the agency.
My whole shtick is that I want to contribute to New York's culture via restaurants, nightlife, whatever... but to be more conscious, more aware, more sustainable. It's more than just 'being responsible as a culture.' It's having an ethical chain of production.
You need to make sure you hire people who are capable of being strong team players. Team members should fit the company's culture, be committed to the team, and be capable of being genuinely vulnerable and selfless.
I love consumerism, TV culture, shopping malls. There's nothing I'd ever buy, but I like being there. It's wacky.
Being unique is never easy, and often, by the time culture catches up with you, there are only a few people who notice.
I think pop culture underestimates people. The message is, 'Being yourself is the worst thing you could possibly be.' But people are still attracted to it.
As someone who escaped religious persecution in Lebanon and whose parents were kidnapped in Beirut, I fully support the protection of all individuals from institutional discrimination. That said, I am weary of the ethos of victimhood that has parasitized our culture.
I come from a specific area in Beirut where it's multicultural, and it's a culture that blends with multiple cultures - it's unbelievable lifestyle.
I want to live in Kolkata; I don't want to live in Europe - I can't write there. I write in Bengali, and I need to be surrounded by the Bengali language and culture.
Well, right now, I'm very fascinated with 1920s Berlin. I mean, probably the more interesting thing would be to go to the beginning of civilization or precivilization - like polytheistic times. It would be interesting to see what came before modern religion and culture - what circumstances created the environment or the need for it.
I remember hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and not really knowing anything about the geography or the culture of the music. But for some reason it did something to me - it resonated.
It is interesting the way you create something and send it out into the culture, and then the culture kind of goes berserk.
Despite the best intentions, companies often become culturally dysfunctional. This occurs when leadership has a perception about the culture that conflicts with reality, or leadership behaves differently than what might be written down.
