I feel that for years of teaching in the country and reading criticism in books, I feel like the things most needed in our culture are the understanding of the meanings of our music. We haven't done that good of job teaching our kids what our music m...
Psychopaths are actually, really, really, really rare in our culture, are people who don't... Or in society, in the world. They're people who don't feel guilt. They're people who don't feel fear. I think that most of us feel those things. There's a k...
It's so interesting that when I finished 'The X-Files' in 2002, the - call it the political and cultural climate in America - was one of fear, and trust of government. Because we put ourselves in the hands of the authority who was going to protect us...
A lot of men do have a fear of my ultra-femininity. Sometimes people say I look like a drag queen, that I look scary, but I think that's a fear of my confidence. Most women in contemporary culture pare down their femininity, so there's a slight andro...
Tabloid discussion of bad children always blames baby-boomer liberals, careerist mothers and fashion-crazed Nathan Barley types who think it's all enormously funny. But the centre-leftish psycho-thinker Oliver James says it's all down to the Thatcher...
When I was at the CIA I asked my civilian advisory board to tackle some tough questions. Among the toughest: In a political culture that every day demands more transparency and more public accountability from every aspect of national life, could Amer...
Everybody needs to show respect to each others' ways and the cultural life that you get on this planet. Don't get caught up on 'I'm brown, black, white, red, blue, whatever.' You gotta ask, what were you called before 1492? All these names we're usin...
I get tired of hearing people, well-meaning people, talking about African-American kids or Hispanic kids as if they're all the same. Which isn't true. There is a very diverse group of people in both groups in terms of income, objectives in life, aspi...
I'm extremely proud of being Latin; it's a big part of my life. It's not something I outwardly promote, just like I don't outwardly promote that I have green eyes and blonde hair. It's a part of who I am. I love the richness of the culture I grew up ...
If you're eight and you live in Los Angeles and everybody has toys and you go to a country that has a Marxist dictatorship and there are no toy stores and nobody speaks English and it's blazing hot every day and they only have fish, which you don't l...
I could name a few songs and say exactly what summer they came out and what boy I thought I was in love with when I was fourteen years old, but I think that music used to be really more a part of the culture when people went out dancing in a differen...
Bolivia's majority Indian population was always excluded, politically oppressed and culturally alienated. Our national wealth, our raw materials, was plundered. Indios were once treated like animals here. In the 1930s and 40s, they were sprayed with ...
Anarchists are mouthpieces of a declining stratum of society; when they work themselves into a state of righteous indignation demanding 'rights', 'justice', 'equal rights', they are just acting under the pressure of their own lack of culture, which h...
Ryan Murphy, he basically tries to find something that's a pulse, a pressure point in our culture, and he grabs it, and he squeezes it. I think 'Freak Show' has a lot to do with the entertainment industry and the way we entertain ourselves: the objec...
Orwell wrote easily and well about small humane pursuits, such as bird watching, gardening and cooking, and did not despise popular pleasures like pubs and vulgar seaside resorts. In many ways, his investigations into ordinary life and activity prefi...
You know, Darwin said through natural selection things go gradually, and he was talking about pigeon's evolution or horses evolving, getting faster. But in fact if you look at evolution on a bigger scale, cosmic evolution and you look at culture evol...
Anorexia is a response to cultural images of the female body - waiflike, angular - that both capitulates to the ideal and also mocks it, strips away all the ancillary signs of sexuality, strips away breasts and hips and butt and leaves in their place...
Jiu Jitsu forges friendships in a way I’ve never known. Being involved in an art as intimate as this, where bodily connection is a prerequisite, the common cultural boundaries of personal space are broken. You will never see more hugs, high fives, ...
The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. ...
Describing passive violence in this culture is kinda like someone who is drowning in the middle of the ocean giving you the low-down on water. The only way you can really understand passive violence is by going somewhere far, far away from phones, ne...
I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.
