Foreign Culture Quotes

• Foreign culture is as necessary to the spirit of a nation as is foreign commerce to its industries.

  Ameen Rihani

  Culture, Spirit, Commerce

  Ameen Rihani (2016). “The Book of Khalid: A Critical Edition”, p.183, Syracuse University Press

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• Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Travel, Communication, Inspiration

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• Learning a foreign language, and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children.

  Michael Gove

  Sympathy, Children, Empathy

  "Michael Gove proposes teaching foreign languages from age five" by Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt, www.theguardian.com. September 30, 2011.

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• The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Country, Travel, Adventure

  "Does Travel Really Matter Anyway?" by Kim Mance, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 11, 2008.

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• Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Inspiration, Learning, People

  Rita Mae Brown (2011). “Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers' Manual”, p.47, Bantam

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• Travel enables us to enrich our lives with new experiences, to enjoy and to be educated, to learn respect for foreign cultures, to establish friendships, and above all to contribute to international cooperation and peace throughout the world.

  Jules Verne

  New Experiences, Culture, World

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• Culture hides more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.

  Edward T. Hall

  Jobs, Real, Years

  "The Silent Language". Book by Edward T. Hall, 1959.

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• A people who free themselves from foreign domination will be free culturally only if,
  without complexes and without underestimating the importance of positive accretions from
  oppressor and other cultures, they return to the upward paths of their own culture, which is
  nourished by the living reality of its environment, and which negates both harmful influences
  and any kind of subjection to foreign culture. Thus, it may be seen that if imperialist
  domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily
  an act of culture

  Amilcar Cabral

  Reality, Other Cultures, Practice

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• Traveling and being in foreign cultures has always been really stimulating for me, partly because, when I'm living abroad, everything is new and like a puzzle to work out, by virtue of it being a foreign culture.

  Joshua Marston

  Work Out, Culture, Virtue

  Source: collider.com

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• Translation rewrites a foreign text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers in the receiving culture. Doing so is akin to committing an act of ethnocentric violence by uprooting the text from the language and culture that gave it life. Translating into current, standard English at once conceals that violence and homogenizes foreign cultures.

  Lawrence Venuti

  Interesting, Receiving, Culture

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• I do not feel that the West has really become less condescending toward foreign cultures than the Greeks and Romans were: it has only become more tolerant. Mind you, not toward Islam—only toward certain other Eastern cultures, which offer some sort of spiritual attraction to the spirit-hungry West and are, at the same time, too distant from the Western world-view to constitute any real challenge to its values.

  Muhammad Asad

  Spiritual, Real, Views

  Muhammad Asad (1954). “The Road To Mecca”, p.10, The Book Foundation

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• I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It’s the least you can do, really, as a polite guest.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Jobs, Long Ago, Guests

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage”, p.22, A&C Black

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• Much of the violence that humanity suffers in our times is rooted inmisunderstanding as well as in the rejection of the values and identityof foreign cultures. Tourism improves relationships between individualsand peoples; when they are cordial, respectful, and based on solidarity theyconstitute, as it were, an open door to peace and harmonious coexistence

  Pope John Paul II

  Doors, Rejection, Humanity

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• At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Differences, Choices, Culture

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

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