“The real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own.”

The Silent Language (1959)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own." by Edward T. Hall?
Edward T. Hall photo
Edward T. Hall 3
American anthropologist 1914–2009

Related quotes

Yuval Noah Harari photo

“Our debt to the Bible and Classics is so great that this type of research will deepen our understanding of our culture and of ourselves.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VIII Further Observations on the Bible
Context: If archeology had yielded only the Epic of Kret, we would have enough to bridge the gap between the Iliad and Genesis. But... our new sources are so rich that we have only begun... The years ahead bid fair to be the most fruitful in the annals of Classical and Biblical scholarship. Our debt to the Bible and Classics is so great that this type of research will deepen our understanding of our culture and of ourselves.

Samuel Butler photo

“Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied that they can understand their own.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Organic and Inorganic
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VI - Mind and Matter
Context: Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied that they can understand their own. What we call inorganic matter cannot understand the animals’ and plants’ business, we have therefore denied that it can understand anything whatever.

Rudyard Kipling photo

“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist
Chinmayananda Saraswati photo

“To understand anything is to find in it something which is our own.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

G. K. Chesterton photo

“Half the trouble about the modern man is that he is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

Source: The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton http://books.google.com/books?id=9_m6AAAAIAAJ&q=%22Half+the+trouble+about+the+modern+man+is+that+he+is+educated+to+understand+foreign+languages+and+misunderstand+foreigners%22&pg=PA322#v=onepage (1936)

Natalie Wynn photo
Alex Salmond photo

“A Parliament's job is not just to legislate but to debate, to enquire and to understand.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Strategic objectives of new Government (May 23, 2007)

Adlai Stevenson photo

“Understanding human needs is half the job of meeting them.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Speech in Columbus, Ohio (3 October 1952); quoted in The International Thesaurus of Quotations (1970) edited by Rhoda Thomas Tripp, p. 429

Related topics