It is always good to explore the stuff you don't agree with, to try and understand a different lifestyle or foreign worldview. I like to be challenged in that way, and always end up learning something I didn't know.
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.
To cement a new friendship, especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world, a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person, and cut across the accidents of place and time.
There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
I was in a peacetime army. It was like something out of a Le Carre novel: studying the habits of your enemy. It was very exciting. It's interesting living life as a civilian, then on Friday night you're parachuting into a foreign country.
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.
A logical analysis of reflexive usages in French shows, however, that this simplicity is an illusion and that, so far from helping the foreigner, it is more calculated to bother him.
As we watch TV or films, there are no organic transitions, only edits. The idea of A becoming B, rather than A jumping to B, has become foreign.
We are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known
Foreign-language books are sometimes more beautiful when you can't tell what's being said. It's like you ruin it by reading.
People are always asking me in interviews, 'What do you think of foreign affairs?' I just say, 'I've had a few.'
And let us be frank, the security threats that emanate from our ports come from foreign cargo.
In the Bill Clinton years, the foreign leader who visited the White House most often was Yasser Arafat - 13 times.
It just is nothing foreign to consciousness at all that could present itself to consciousness through the mediation of phenomena different from the liking itself; to like is intrinsically to be conscious.
When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.
The Federal Reserve needs to provide small businesses in America with the same low-interest loans it gave to foreign banks.
Our national security is at risk when we rely on foreign oil to keep our economy moving forward.
The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge.
Where in the Constitution does it say that because we don't like a foreign country's leader, we should go in and topple the dictator?
The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.
