Jonathan Haidt Quotes

What is sacred among one people may be ridiculous in another; and what is despised or rejected by one cultural group, may in a different environment become the cornerstone for a great edifice of strange grandeur and beauty.

Infidel, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.

A Western woman is not her brother's or her father's property. She's just herself. She can choose her own lifestyle. But in a Muslim family, the honor of the man is between the legs of a woman.

I differ materially from Capt. Lewis, in my account of the numbers, manners, and morals of the Sioux.

A smile abroad is often a scowl at home.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

Savages we call them because their manners differ from ours.

The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization.

Different members of different cultures will think that some things are beautiful.

If you want to judge the performance of the Egyptian people by the standards of German or Chinese or American culture, then there is no room for judgment.

On my parents' scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.

In some ways England is more liberal than France, but I also find it more intrusive. But when you go abroad you have to accept the ways of where you live. I have to respect that.

The West will never understand Muslims so long as we ... judge them by the rules we are accustomed to apply to ourselves.

In modern Western culture, the new is considered better than the old, and thus change itself is considered good; in tradition bound Arab cultures, the old is considered better than the new, and thus the retention of the existing order is good.

Legislated law is not a material necessity. But rather a subjective thing that defines the way Europeans order their lives. They should not criticize us for our way of ordering our own. We have…our own Sharia… We are astounded when we hear foreigners complain about absence of justice in Egypt.

The idea that there is a difference between East and West is nonsense. You both hand over your card with two hands. If someone were to give me a million pounds, I couldn't care if they handed it to me within their toes.

I think in the United States we have a different standard for what equality means for women that isn't really that comparable to that in the Middle East.

There's a difference between being culturally insensitive - being insensitive towards a culture - and being insensitive.

Cultural differences can be delicate situations we have to work within the respectful boundaries of.

Elegance for one society is not elegance for another. It's in the eyes of the beholder.

In Japan, violence isn't as controversial as it is in the West.

We cannot just ape the west. What may be good in an alien country may be unpalatable in India.

There are those who argue that the concept of human rights is not applicable to all cultures. We in the National League for Democracy believe that human rights are of universal relevance. But even those who do not believe in human rights must certainly agree that the rule of law is most important. Without the rule of law there can be no peace.

There are not unfrequently substantial reasons underneath for customs that appear to us absurd; and if I were ever again to find myself amongst strangers, I should be solicitous to examine before I condemned.

I do think that when you're specifically working in a country like South Africa, you have to be able to be aware of the cultural truth of what people are raised in and believe in and how they function within their society.