Seyyed Hossein Nasr Quotes

The Western world is having an identity crisis.

Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence

The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void.

It's not just modern-day society that is liberal.

Information is the religion of the modern world.

Sex has become one of the most discussed subjects of modern times. The Victorians pretended it did not exist; the moderns pretend nothing else exists.

Modern marriage has lost its meaning--consequently it is being abolished.

Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations-though the illusion that they are persists in the West.

To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves... The modern world in comparison, ignores it.

Modern civilization has taught us to convert night into day and golden silence into brazen din and noise.

One great feature of modern society is the institutionalized respect we give to processes designed to destroy the past.

Sociology was born of the modern ardor to improve society.

The modern mind always tends to reduce the greater to the lesser rather than seeing the lesser as reflecting the greater.

Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas.

Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity.

...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.

The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.

Dignity is an anachronism.

We are no longer inheriting the Earth from our parents, we are stealing it from our children.

Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century.

The modern choice is between non-violence or non-existence.

Chivalry is dead. Women killed it.

The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.

Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West, results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.

The West is anything but altruistic.