Top 77 American Cultural Sayings
#1. From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
Diane Wakoski
#2. I have made sense of my life by developing an ability to analyze Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts.
George W. S. Trow
#3. [Sarah] Palin is solidifying her status as a bona fide American cultural heroine.
Camille Paglia
#4. I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet.
Jose Saramago
#5. I work hard to stay cynical enough! I keep my expectations of our culture and our leaders low, low, low, and I do it so I don't have to be let down. And yet again I am lowballed by the brokenness of the American cultural machine.
Vinnie Tesla
#6. Even the most jingoistic person would have to admit that even American cultural music comes from Europe. That's what classical music is, real European music.
Sonny Rollins
#8. In Canada you grow up - we're next to the United States. We're watching whatever you're watching. We're following your news. It's obvious that we are inundated with American cultural information and political information. Whereas the opposite is not true.
Rick Mercer
#9. Over the past several years, all of us as Canadians, and as members of the North American cultural and economic environment, have been to a greater or lesser extent party to a significant attitudinal change towards our culture.
Alex Campbell
#10. I think Africa will have a crisper impact on Europe, as it has traditionally, and then that will filter into the American cultural psyche, in the way that India has.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
#11. American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.
Ishmael Reed
#12. A pitfall of making a comedy with a studio-and it's also an American cultural thing-is that I get tired of being encouraged to go always for laughs.
Alexander Payne
#13. In most of the European countries - France stands out in its resistance to this particular form of American cultural imperialism - the national film industries were forced onto the defensive after the war by such binding agreements.
Fredric Jameson
#14. One of the problems that we have as American journalists is that we bring the American cultural baggage with us and we plop it down and it follows us around and that's just a fact of life.
John Pomfret
#15. I think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, first of all, has got to be put into the context of being an American cultural showcase. It's there to be a museum showcase of all that's great about American music.
Ian Anderson
#16. The twisty nature of psychic attack - are you being attacked, or did you bring this attack on yourself? - speaks to me of an American cultural paradox we all grapple with. There's the rampant litigiousness of our society, and the desire to blame others for our misfortunes.
Heidi Julavits
#17. The railroads once were a dominant power in American life, for good and for ill. There's something inevitably nostalgic about a train book today. Trains attract us, but part of that attraction is cultural memory.
Brian Floca
#18. The cultural capital American Christianity has amassed simply cannot be leveraged where it matters most.
James Davison Hunter
#19. What basketball expresses is what jazz expresses. Certain cultural predispositions to make art. All African-American art has a substratum, or baseline, of improvisation and spontaneity. You find that in both basketball and jazz.
John Edgar Wideman
#20. Middle-class Pakistani cultural life is what I've seen, what I know - they're not all screaming faceless mullahs. It's disturbing that in American films, the character on the other side is not even named.
Mira Nair
#21. If it were in our national security to deploy to South Africa under apartheid, would we have found it acceptable or customary to segregate African American soldiers from other American soldiers, and say, 'It's just a cultural thing'? I don't think so. I would hope not.
Martha McSally
#22. What interested me was the story of Bennet Omalu. You hear his narrative: Immigrant from Nigeria, landing in Pittsburgh, only to learn and tell the truth about this most American - and sacrosanct - cultural institution: the NFL.
Peter Landesman
#23. Indiana was such a devout disciple of Shakti that she had once considered taking her name until her father, Blake Jackson, managed to convince her that a Hindu goddess's name was not appropriate for a tall, voluptuous blond American with the looks of an inflatable doll.
Isabel Allende
#24. Nobody is denying we should investigate and do what we can to prevent gun crime in our cities and towns. But, we should not scapegoat the American gun owner for complicated, cultural problems we are just beginning to understand.
Bob Barr
#25. In America, to be ID'd - sorted, tagged, and permanently filed - is to lose a bit of one's soul. To die a little. This sounds like a subtle, poetic notion. It's not. In American legal and cultural tradition, one essential privilege of citizenship is not having to prove it on demand.
Walter Kirn
#26. How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity...To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history; --Harvey Levenstein
Michael Pollan
#27. Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don't have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science.
Sam Harris
#28. It is a cultural tradition that makes New Orleans what it is. It also represents the roots of American music and an important part of the African-American community in New Orleans. It unites people in some of the poorer neighborhoods of the city. It is absolutely critical to continue.
Bill Taylor
#29. In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.
Tom Brokaw
#30. I'm a big fan of cultural music, and that's how I try to expand my playing, by listening to music that is not conventionally American.
Steve Vai
#31. We didn't create the culture of film. We certainly market it better than anyone in the world, but film could have happened anywhere. It's not distinctly American, as witnessed by the fact that there are film communities throughout the world that tell stories to their own cultural liking.
David Simon
#32. Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.
Pankaj Mishra
#33. From the American retelling of Romeo and Juliet in West Side Story to the Japanese adaptation of King Lear in Ran, Shakespeare's cultural influence is virtually limitless.
Gordon Smith
#34. American psychology effectively guaranteed its place as a cultural icon by helping to create the pathologies it simultaneously promised to treat. (p. 37)
Alvin Dueck
#35. Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that.
Fredric Jameson
#36. I wanted to redirect, reinvent the political, cultural, and artistic judgments saved for African American writers.
Toni Morrison
#37. What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact.
J. William Fulbright
#38. For a long time, the church in America has assumed that its cultural conservatism was American, that most people at least ideally wanted to live up to our conception of the good life. Those with eyes to see ought to recognize that if those days ever existed, they are no more.
Russell D. Moore
#39. My new play 'Chinglish,' which will go to Broadway, is about a white American businessman who goes to a provincial capital in China, hoping to make a deal there. It's bilingual. And it's about trying to communicate across language and cultural barriers.
David Henry Hwang
#40. The real reason French women don't get fat is not genetic, but cultural, and if the French subjected themselves to the American extremes of eating and dieting, the obesity problem in France would be much worse than what has struck America.
Mireille Guiliano
#41. West Indian cultural mentality and a North American life equals the perfect balance.
Melanie Fiona
#42. When I see the cultural diversity that exists today, I feel that we must defend it, and we need Europe, because otherwise we are going to live in a society with a single model, the Anglo-American model.
Jean-Pierre Raffarin
#43. It is the American air protection, which safeguards the freedom enjoyed by the Kurdish region. It guarantees the cultural, health and civilizational progress made in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Jalal Talabani
#44. African American music can't happen in Germany or in Italy or in Mumbai. If America disappeared off the face of the Earth today, the greatest single cultural loss would be blues, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, rock-and-roll.
David Simon
#45. I always found strange comfort that the American propensity for mixing alcohol and firearms cut across racial, socioeconomic, and cultural divides, from rural redneck to ghetto gangbanger to skeet-shooting blue blood.
Brad Parks
#46. No, no, my friend. You are kind, and you mean well, but you can never understand these things as I do. You've never been oppressed.
S. Alice Callahan
#47. As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.
Arthur Golden
#48. The fact that the American government has formally set aside an enormous yearly budget of nearly $75 million to increase cultural exchanges in order to bring about what it calls "regime change" has muddied the waters and complicated American Studies in Iran more than anything else.
Mohammad Marandi
#49. Elvis [Presley] had a stepstool, if you will, to success because he came from the dominant culture. They identified with him. Michael Jackson had to come further and go deeper into the pit of possibility of American democracy and of cultural expression.
Michael Eric Dyson
#50. And this fear that US models are replacing everything else now spills over from the sphere of culture into our two remaining categories: for this process is clearly, at one level, the result of economic domination - of local cultural industries closed down by American rivals.
Fredric Jameson
#51. This is the difference between the Spanish advent and the American; that the technical revolution provoked by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of this Filipinoness.
Nick Joaquin
#52. Westerners who go native with Chinese ideas are called 'eggs' - outside white, inside yellow -, and are often systematically excluded from their expat community's activities, let alone the financial support system.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
#53. Hollywood and Disneyland are the legacy of Europe's cultural imperialism. We gave them nursery rhymes and they gave back film. Televised riots are as American as Barbie/ Big Macs. Tomorrow the riots will be forgotten but Mickey mouse will still be there. Welcome to Disneyland.
Richey Edwards
#54. Whoever rises to deliver the inaugural Address of 2013 will speak to a nation in which the American Dream is under profound economic and cultural pressure. This is perhaps best measured by the state of the middle class.
Jon Meacham
#55. The Bible Belt is collapsing. The world of nominal, cultural Christianity that took the American dream and added Jesus to it in order to say, 'you can have everything you ever wanted and Heaven too,' is soon to be gone. Good riddance.
Russell D. Moore
#56. What city has given the world more in terms of American culture than New Orleans? There is none. Not New York. Not L.A. Not Chicago. Not anywhere, in the sense that African American music has gone around the world twenty times over, and it's continuing to evolve. It is our greatest cultural export.
David Simon
#57. Those [American Jews] who favor the [Israeli] attack on Gaza are certainly guilty of such overwhelming emotional and cultural attachment to Israel and Israelis, that they long ago ceased viewing this conflict with any remnant of objectivity.
Glenn Greenwald
#58. Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.
Howard Mumford Jones
#59. Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.
Diane Wakoski
#60. The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation. The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded.
Pankaj Mishra
#61. When you ask your white friends what their cultural heritage is, they don't just say white. They give you a math equation. 'Well, I'm a third German and a fourth Irish and one-sixteenth Welsh and one-fortieth Native American for college applications.'
Hari Kondabolu
#62. North American cinema is the only true weapon of mass destruction. It has achieved to convince the audience not only that it's the best possible cinema, but that it is the only.
Arturo Ripstein
#63. The French Code for cheese is ALIVE. The American Code for cheese, on the other hand, is DEAD.
Clotaire Rapaille
#64. Not surprisingly, there is a cultural divide between American and British actors regarding the self-promotion associated with new media.
Gina Bellman
#65. Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.
Jess Row
#66. Dare I ask Mao and his Communist Party?
I fear my throat will be cut into two pieces.
In the name of revolution, for thought crimes,
Such questions can turn me to ashes.
Zoe S. Roy
#67. I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.
Saul Bellow
#68. American energy ... is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism
Susan Sontag
#69. Along with the fight to desegregate schools, we must desegregate the entire cultural statement of America, we must desegregate the minds of the American people or we will find that we have won the battle and lost the war.
John Oliver Killens
#70. These urban provinces, new to the American scene, possess greater economic, social, and cultural unity than most of the states. Yet, subdivided into separate municipalities...they face grave difficulties in meeting the essential needs of the aggregate population.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.
#71. The 'low' quality of many American films, and of much American popular culture, induces many art lovers to support cultural protectionism. Few people wish to see the cultural diversity of the world disappear under a wave of American market dominance.
Tyler Cowen
#72. To me it's very obvious there are huge cultural differences between Americans and Canadians. But a lot of what we are is American.
David Cronenberg
#73. It's unfortunate that [Louis] Brandeis was not able to translate or abstract his devotion to cultural pluralism and racial equality as he put it for Jews to enslave people and their descendants and to African Americans.
Jeffrey Rosen
#74. What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start.
Nancy Gibbs
#75. Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.
Aberjhani
#76. A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me? An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?
I make no suggestion that one side or other is right, but observation over many years leads me to believe it is true.
Terry Pratchett
#77. Also, as a result of the involvement of American foundations that have backing from the U.S. State Department in Iranian internal politics, cultural exchange and dialogue have become more and more problematic.
Mohammad Marandi
