Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.
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.
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.
Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.
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.
Foreign culture is as necessary to the spirit of a nation as is foreign commerce to its industries.
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.
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
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.
Culture hides more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.
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.
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.
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
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.
or simply:
