Appropriation Quotes

“The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures."

"That's an oversimplification of the issue."

"The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world don't you? I'm terrified of that world and I don't want to live in a that world, and as a mixed race person, I literally don't exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Korea Town Los Angeles and as any mixed race person will tell you-- to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society: all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.

It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“the only thing worse than a bigot is an “ally” who can’t stop congratulating themselves on their enlightenment.”
― julio alexi genao

“..Acts of appropriation are part of the process by which we make ourselves. Appropriating - taking something for one’s own use - need not be synonymous with exploitation. This is especially true of cultural appropriation. The “use” one makes of what is appropriated is the crucial factor.”
― bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics

“The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“Even you, the professional helper, often mistaken for the enlightened Guru or Staretz, can become lost in your thoughts that you must be competent without fault. You may become enthralled with your identity as a professional, even the pressures of the culture of mastery that expects you to heal your clients without fail. Never mind all of the variables over which you have no control, it is up to you, according to the canons of mastery, to control the health and well-being of those for whom you provide professional care. This potentiates a furthering alienation between you and your clients. You are at risk to become, if you have not already, the one who does to your clients; to be the one the active subject acting upon the passive and receptive objects, your clients; to be the one in possession of special knowledge, technique and mastery. All of this conspires to coax or coerce you into treating your client as reduced, a mere case. Unawareness to these influences gives you little chance to consider their influence on your practice in the clinical setting, much less give attentive efforts to resist or change them.”
― Scott E. Spradlin

“What you have now then is the marketing of racialized identities as tools for consumption. And certain racialized bodies and images are associated with hipness, coolness, edginess. So all kinds of youth all over the world are appropriating that style as a way of, sort of, countering authority, stating their rebelliousness, and wanting to be seen as significant.”
― Amalia Mesa-Bains, Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism

“In order to be who we are, we human beings remain committed to and within the being of language, and can never step out of it and look at it from somewhere else. Thus we always see the nature of language only to the extent to which language itself has us in view, has appropriated us to itself. That we cannot know the nature of language—know it according to the traditional concept of knowledge defined in terms of cognition as representation—is not a defect, however, but rather an advantage by which we are favored with a special realm, that realm where we, who are needed and used to speak language, dwell as mortals.”
― Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language

“You can only pretend to be something so long before you become it.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“The moving force in Showing of Saying is Owning. It is what brings all present and absent beings each into their own, from where they show themselves in what they are, and where they abide according to their kind. This owning which brings them there, and which moves Saying as Showing in its showing we call Appropriation. It yields the opening of the clearing in which present beings can persist and from which absent beings can depart while keeping their persistence in the withdrawal.”
― Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language

“Ultimately, the definition of both the wonder tale and the fairy tale, which derives from it, depends on the manner in which a narrator/author arranges known functions of a tale aesthetically and ideologically to induce wonder and then transmits the tale as a whole according to customary usage of a society in a given historical period. The first stage for the literary fairy tale involved a kind of class and perhaps even gender appropriation. The voices of the nonliterate tellers were submerged, and since women in most cases were not allowed to be scribes, the tales were scripted according to male dictates or fantasies, even though they may have been told by women. Put crudely, it could be said that the literary appropriation of the oral wonder tales served the hegemonic interests of males within the upper classes of particular communities and societies, and to a great extent this is true. However, such a statement must be qualified, for the writing down of the tales also preserved a great deal of the value system of those deprived of power. And the more the literary fairy tale was cultivated and developed, the more it became individualized and varied by intellectuals and artists, who often sympathized with those society marginalized or were marginalized themselves. The literary fairy tale allowed for new possibilities of subversion in the written word and in print, and therefore it was always looked upon with misgivings by the governing authorities in the civilization process.”
― Jack Zipes, Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture

“Дело в том, что на оккупированных немцами территориях Холокост был также и социальной революцией. Евреев сгоняли в гетто и впоследствии уничтожали. Немцы забирали все, что могли увезти с собой, но недвижимость доставалась местному населению. Это было значительно радикальнее, чем все, что позднее делали коммунисты. Коммунисты не были заинтересованы в том, чтобы отменить результаты этой социальной революции. Между ними и местным населением существовала своего рода договоренность: не упоминать об этом воровстве [161—62].”
― Timothy Snyder, Украинская история, российская политика, европейское будущее

“Cultures of permission valorized bad taste as liberation.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens

“Sorry,” Wakefield insists, “but what exactly is cultural imperialism?”
The boy turns his good eye to Wakefield. “That when Indian kids play with Mickey Mouse instead of kachinas. Kachinas mean something to their people. The Mouse means nothing.”
“He must mean something,” Wakefield says.
“Yeah, he means money. A Kachina tells the story of the earth, of the people, of dances, rituals, how to make rain… Talk to the fucking mouse and see what he tells you.”
― Andrei Codrescu, Wakefield

“Man obviously is a being. As such he belongs to the totality of Being—just like the stone, the tree, or the eagle. But man's distinctive feature lies in this, that he, as the being who thinks, is open to Being, face to face with Being; thus man remains referred to Being and so answers to it. Man is essentially this relationship of responding to Being, and he is only this.”
― Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference

“Black women have long been the backbone of our political progressive past: the strategists and protesters and organizers and volunteers, the women who've gotten out the vote and licked the envelopes, pioneered the thinking that led to the revolutions. Yet they've been only barely represented in leadership of the political parties they've bolstered, their policy priorities have often gone unaddressed and unrecognized; their participation has long been taken for granted. And when white women have caught up to where black women have been for a long time, the work of the black women has often been appropriated, ignored, and uncredited by those with greater economic, cultural, and racial advantage.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“Once upon a time man conceived the belief that this universe, with its many worlds swinging through space, was created for him. He fancied that the sun shone by day to warm and vivify him; that the stars of night were none other than lamps to his feet; that the other animals existed to afford him food and clothing—and sport; that the very flowers of the field blossomed and fruited and were beautiful for his gratification. In fact, man conceived the belief that instead of being the wise brother and helper of this creation amidst which he moves, he was the great central pivot upon which all revolves.
A sorry lesson, surely, for man to read into the broad, open page of Nature’s great book. Small wonder that to him in his meanness its message came as “the painful riddle of the earth.” But it was the best he could do: the best any of us can do until we have learned the great lesson of the ancient Wise One has written out for us—which she will teach us, in time, through death, if we will not let her teach it through life: the lesson that use is not appropriation; that appropriation sets use to groan and sweat under fardels of evil.”
― Adeline Knapp, This then is upland pastures: being some out-door essays dealing with the beautiful things that the spring and summer bring

“The postmodern notion of "appropriation" is not a good fit. In New Mexico, the "indigenous" is a syncretic fusion of Native American and Hispano American. Just as Pueblo people who are Catholics embrace their traditional religions, Nuevo Mexicanos who wear Metallica T-shirts also attend mass and clean the ditches. The fact that both good and bad aspects of the larger pop culture are welcomed with open arms in New Mexican villages and pueblos does not belie the passion with which local ethnic culture is embraced.”
― Lucy R. Lippard, Nuevo México Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland

“How we devour one another's culture, do so without shame--ideas like water, free flowing and able to take on other forms. Able to flood highways, level entire cities if summoned with enough force.”
― J. Andrew Schrecker, Insomniacs, We

“As a scholar of Iraqi origin, the West not only reduces me into a token or an informant to write about Iraq, but even more damaging than that, I have to write about Iraq on their terms, if I am to be acknowledged or given the ‘honor’ of getting a place in their ‘prestigious’ institutions and publications. I understood this game early in my intellectual life and chose to opt out (to delink) to save my mind and to preserve my value and self-respect. I did not see a point in reaching ‘prestigious’ institutions while losing self-respect, knowing that I am not really writing, thinking, and doing knowledge conscientiously on my own terms.”
― Louis Yako

“In certain cases, I learned that the biggest reason to read and engage with writers, activists, and artists is precisely because they are being dismissed, silenced, or ignored by the Western mainstream media. Likewise, very often, it is probably safe to refuse to pay too much attention to ideas, individuals, or groups promoted by the mainstream, because they are most likely (intentionally or unintentionally) serving a colonial or elitist agenda. In my experience, anyone promoted by mainstream media is almost always mediocre and their primary job is to promote mediocrity for public consumption.”
― Louis Yako

“Imitation is the highest form of flattery' all too often means 'Appropriation is the easiest form of thievery'.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“The artist, in making victims of his muses, remasters himself as a hero, saving them from their otherwise inconsequential lives.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“Europe sapped Antiquity under the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Egyptians. Our triumphant nations appropriated the universal with their monopoly on science and archaeology, dispossessing the colonize populations by means of this pillage of a past that, as a result, they readily experienced as alien: and so brainwashed Islamist wreckers drive tractors all the more easily through ancient cities since they combine their profoundly uncultivated stupidity with the more or less widespread feeling that this heritage is alien, retroactive emanation of foreign powers.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“…hundreds of composers throughout all of Europe, over all of Europe the wind of alterity blows, all these great men use what comes to them from the Other to modify the Self, to bastardize it, for genius wants bastardy, the use of external procedures to undermine the dictatorship of church chant and harmony…”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“As we approached Glory's stall, she grinned as she looked between Chase and me. "Delegation! I love it. You've got some good leadership skills there, Emme honey."
I said, "It wasn't so much delegation as appropriation."
Chase's eyes widened in surprise and then narrowed as he reassess me. "Hold up now. I was being a gentleman.”
― Heather Webber, In the Middle of Hickory Lane

“Buddhism was first introduced to China around the first century ce, yet it took many centuries before it was not only properly understood but also creatively appropriated. Even if the speed and ease of transferring information and engaging in intercultural exchange have been greatly enhanced by modern technology, an "appropriate appropriation" of a deep and vast tradition like Zen Buddhism takes at least several generations.”
― Bret W Davis, Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism

“I'm the body.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“The claimed legitimizing devices of political consent or personal labour served only to obscure the unjustifiable seizure of land from the common by the powerful. Other commoners at the time of those seizures had not consented to them, and even if they had done so, their consent could not bind later generations.”
― Peter Vallentyne, The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings

“The Night When Fear Strays by Stewart Stafford

Each Hallowtide, all monstrous shapes do quail,
No balm for wounded wretches feeling frail,
Spectators as charlatan mortals filch frights,
Appropriated skins on haunted nights.

With bonfire’s glow ablaze in dauntless eyes,
Children’s fun quelled by strangest sighs,
A hulking shape, once fierce, wails tainted,
Its fearful gaze in phantom mists attainted.

Small, tender hands caressed its sodden fur,
A trembling growl betrayed its lonesome blur,
“Peace, gentle shade, what sorrow stirs unfed?”
“November’s dawn shall call me home,” it said.

Their kindly-shared oat cakes eased its pangs,
A webbed claw from veiled night to munching fangs,
It feasted with a hunger born of striven years alone,
Stroked the child’s cheek for the kindness shown.

When parents called, it whispered, soft and torn,
“At midnight’s knell, this thicket heralds morn—
Go, kindred babes, I’ll linger in this glade.
Each Halloween, I’ll mourn my fear remade.”

© 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford