When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.

In western culture, we have ignored death. We're running the other way - everything is about life and youth. So, there's something resonant about walking around with our own death masks. Zombies are the visible embodiment of death staring at us with our own faces.

I went to an exhibition at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum about Shanghai, about how courtesans had been influential in bringing western culture to Shanghai. I bought a book and in it saw this striking group of women in a photograph called 'The Ten Beauties of Shanghai'.

There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

When you consider the concept of vampirism, it is inherently part of a Western culture.

The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.

The present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.

We're used to saying that women in other cultures are oppressed, but the question that I had when making the film was: Isn't the objectification of a woman's body that we often see in Western culture another kind of oppression?

There is no question that Korean footballers have the ability to play in Europe. The real challenge is whether they will be able to adapt to western culture.

I had this question when we started: Is this something that's only going to work in New York City? And then, is it just in North America? Is it just in Western culture?

When you think after 25 years of Mao, Chinese people had no idea about western music or even western culture. They had no idea about James Dean or the Beatles or Charlie Chaplin, modern music or modern cinema.

The whole drive of western culture, the part of it which is serious, is towards an extreme objectification. It's carried to the point where the human subject is treated almost as if it's dirt in the works of a watch.

If you ask me, I'd say what the world now considers K-Pop began with SM Entertainment. SM was the very first company to take musical influences from Western culture and incorporate Korean culture into that by rearranging and writing lyrics with our style.

As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism.

It would be impossible to be a woman in Western culture and not have your own issues about your image and what you look like.

According to this view, democracy is a product of western culture, and it cannot be applied to the Middle East which has a different cultural, religious, sociological and historical background.

In looking at difficulties in the black American community over the years, it has always astounded me how much white Americans take for granted the rich and utterly decisive heritage of Western culture.

Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.

In our Western culture, although death has come out of the closet, it is still not openly experienced or discussed. Allowing dying to be so intensely present enriches both the preciousness of each moment and our detachment from it.

Istanbul is a vast place. There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture.