“We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.”

“The measure of a man's culture is the measure of his appreciation. We are ourselves what we appreciate and no more.”

“It's not that your most important work is meaningless; it's that your most trivial movements are also significant.”

“Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.”

“Art is what we do and culture is what they do to us.”

“The claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture. In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium it is responsible for an important change in the native. Perhaps we haven't sufficiently demonstrated that colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today.”