Asghar Farhadi Quotes

People tend to believe that to be modern you have to disengage from your heritage, but it's not true.

You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared o submit to correction by anybody who cares about a community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community's dying.

Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West.

There aren't any looks or customs I wish would come back. Today almost anything goes. Culture constantly devours the past so there's not much that's missing.

For members of a traditional society where many traditions have been discredited, an interest in modernity can result in a restless sophistication. Mehmet Ertegun seems not to have been a restless man.

Niaqornat particularly seemed to offer a heightened version of a story being played out across the world about traditional communities' struggle for survival and their attempts to renegotiate their identity in the face of modern life.

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.

Whether we like it or not, the modernity is something that comes from Western countries, and when the modernity comes to the Eastern countries, although they feel like they really need it, at the same time it shakes the very fundament of the culture - there is always this challenge between the two.

When I first decided to be a writer, that meant dealing with preoccupations and concerns that took little account of Indian traditions. I saw India's past as part of an antiquity rendered irrelevant by modernity, which with its science, nation states, free enterprises, and consumer societies was supposed to have solved all problems.

What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

As countries grapple with modernization, people who are left behind tend to hold firmer and firmer to their view of the evil of modernity.

I'm Cherokee, and there were times when social expansion was something that is needed by a cultural group or a national group.

We regard those other cultures, such as that of India, where many people live and believe and behave much as they did 1,000 or 2,000 years ago, as undeveloped.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.

In a kind of a way there's a bit of that happening now so we have to be careful to preserve our culture.

Even with, or perhaps, because of, this background, I have over the past few years sensed a very dramatic change in attitude on the part of Prince Edward Islanders towards the on-going rush for so-called modernization.

Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing.

While the association and its founders and its founders most sincerely appreciate the splendid elements and achievements of the old-time Indian culture and the methods by which early conditions were met, it realizes most keenly the inefficacy of these methods in meeting the conditions of modern times.

The culture of Saudi Arabia belongs to a past age. It is not appropriate for the age of globalization.

These fears, held by indigenous Fijians, must not be ridiculed but understood and addressed. In the final analysis it will be counterproductive to impose democracy on people who have yet to fully understand how it will sit against everything they believe in.

Although the world has undergone many changes, both good and bad, in the past century, change need not imply the loss of traditional values. Nor is progress another word for moral decay. It is not development and progress which jeopardize values and morality but rather the absence of a strong and secure moral foundation developed first and foremost in the family. Surely, it is possible for one to enjoy the conveniences of modern life-airplanes and automobiles, computers and cell phones, microwaves and VCRs-without losing one's sense of values. When we love God, love our families, we can enjoy life without betraying the practices of decency, without abandoning the traditions of our cultures.

Americans are constantly extolling "traditions"; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician's discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as "identities" that can be accepted as part of larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

Civilisations which get cut off from their traditions and values do not survive for long.