Tahar Ben Jelloun Quotes

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.

Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.

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.

We've reached a truly remarkable situation: a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligencia and the American electorate.

When I was 12 years old, living in Cairo, my parents enrolled me in the American school. Most of the Americans there appeared oddly stifled, determined to remain, if not physically then sentimentally, back in the United States.

Every generation challenges the one that goes before.

A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.

Civilizations are a matter of the mind.

National cultures and heritages must compete for man's attention with the mind-absorbing advances of universal science.

Africans in the diaspora were constantly being reminded of Africa by their European masters who tried to impress upon them that Africa was primitive. Repudiating this thinly veiled justification of slavery required diaspora intellectuals to focus on Africa and demonstrate that it had made major contributions to world civilization. Consciousness of Africa was also sustained by the continuous flow of people, ideas, values, visions, practices, and expressive culture from Africa to the Americas and vice-versa.

There has been, no doubt, a considerable and very rapid change, … as the result of the importation of Western ideas from without by Young Chinese who have been educated abroad and who have returned to their own country not only imbued with Western conceptions, but so greatly estranged from all the old Chinese conceptions that they almost as much lost contact with the Chinese point of view as if they themselves were foreigners by birth.

In the old days, immigrants entered France and blended in. They adopted the French language and traditions. Whereas now entire communities set themselves up within France, governed by their own codes and traditions.

Cultural goods … are the source of the Nation's identity, continuity and development.

People and their cultures perish in isolation, but they are born and reborn in contact with other men and women, with man and woman or another culture, another creed, another race.

The question really isn't whether I'm American, Russian, Iranian, Azerbaijani, or anything else. I've been shaped by all these people and cultures and I feel quite comfortable among all of them

As long as a society's best minds were occupied by theological questions, it was possible to speak of a given religion as the way of thinking of the whole social organism. All the matters which most actively concerned the people were referred to it and discussed in its terms. But that belongs to a dying era. We have come by easy stages to a lack of a common system of thought that could unite the peasant cutting his hay, the student poring over formal logic, and the mechanic working in an automobile factory. Out of this lack arises the painful sense of detachment or abstraction that oppresses the "creators of culture."

I have the greatest respect for Aborigine people, to whom I owe everything. The time I spent with members of the Pijantjatjara and Pintupi tribes in Australia was a transformative experience for me and one that has deeply and indelibly informed my entire life and art.

We see culture as a self-organising thing.

My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door.

Hollywood does not understand Middle America, and it certainly does not understand and, in fact, despises, the core values of the country.

The smaller a group, the easier it is for more people to argue and enter into discussions. The U.S. is vast. It's too large. The intellectuals hide out in enclaves, in big cities or universities, like a bunch of chickens hiding from a fox.

When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.

Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there.

One of the biggest things immigrant kids oftentimes feel is this big disparity between our parents and us. And our parents are staunch pragmatists, and I consider myself to be an optimist.

While I was born in Singapore, I didn't actually grow up here. So I don't remember all that much.