Hermann Hesse Quotes

Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.

Civilisation has ever accompanied emigration and conquest - the conflict of opinion, of religion, or of race.

Islam and its tradition have until now encountered modernity as a cultural aggression (al-ghazw al-fikri), not as a historical phenomenon.

Acting is, to me now, artificial. Seeing people suffer is real. It couldn't be more real. Some people don't like to look at it in the face because it's painful. But if nobody does, then nothing gets done.

If we want to avoid a clash of cultures - and the jury is still out on whether we can - we'll have to make different cultures and religions compatible with the universal nature of human rights and tolerance. But I can promise you this: Anyone who calls me an infidel at the conference will be in for a fight.

Mankind's suffering belongs to all men.

Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.

The future is our responsibility, but change will not take place until the majority loose confidence in their dictator’s and elected officials’ ability to solve problems. It will likely take an economic catastrophe resulting in enormous human suffering to bring about true social change.

I don't think that you can rehash music that was born in the Fillmore East and came from a whole different set of social and emotional circumstances. The situation has changed. Let's get real about this.

In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.

Maybe we, the cultural workers , could apply ourselves. We're not going to resolve it in this moment or even in this generation, but perhaps as some kind of agenda we could invite our writers and cultural workers to address the problem a little more responsibly, because people are suffering tremendously from a want of data.

I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?

All my brothers, my brothers-in-law, they're always telling me what a good-hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you get to be a real professor of pain.

The people of Iran have been battling against consecutive conflicts between tradition and modernity for over 100 years... some have tried and are trying to see the world through the eyes of their predecessors and to deal with the problems and difficulties of the existing world by virtue of the values of the ancients... many others...seek to go forth in step with world developments and not lag behind the caravan of civilization, development and progress.

We can have the final word on hate, neglect, disease and all the other insidious characters that still script their way into our stories...for now, but not forever.

We may convert every house in the country into a charity asylum, we may fill the land with hospitals, but the misery of man will still continue to exist until man's character changes.

Every Age has its own peculiar faith. Any attempt to translate into facts the mission of one Age with the machinery of another, can only end in an indefinite series of abortive efforts. Defeated by the utter want of proportion between the means and the end, such attempts might produce martyrs, but never lead to victory.

If everyone who wants to see an end to poverty, hunger and suffering speaks out, then the noise will be deafening.

Pres. Lyndon Johnson was a middle-aged man of smalltown America, both a Westerner and a Southerner, and except where politics had demonstrably forced his growth-as on the question of civil rights-he functioned like most men, as a product of his background.

In a very real sense, the suffering of this world was created by man himself.

I do like the idea of the novel of repressed college students being a contemporary novel of courtship! I guess what I would say to that is, we tend to think of historical periods and historical mores as ending a lot more concretely than they do. Like, in an Austen novel, there are lots of reasons - cultural, moral, religious - why the characters don't have sex during courtship. Maybe, even though those reasons have kind of expired, historically, they're still around in some sense.

If people would just wake up to what's real, there would be no misery in the world. I guess chanting's a pretty good place to start.

[On Edna Ferber's Ice Palace] ... the book, which is going to be a movie, has the plot and characters of a book which is going to be a movie.

Andy [Hallett] was a real man - you can tell an adult by how they deal with pain or adversity. Andy's eyeballs gave him searing pain all day every day because of the contacts they used. He was every moment a gentlemen; laughing and joking, wiping the tears from his eyes.

The real enemy is the secular humanist mindset which seeks to destroy everything that is good in this society.