Hisham Matar Quotes

This whole tribal loyalty seems to have gone.

Before the rise of the nation-state, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and belief. They feared other tribes and often warred against them.

Tribal man is not an individual in the western sense. Psychologically and emotionally, he is the present living personification of a number of forces, among the most important of which are the ancestral dead.

Libya is divided into tribes and clans.

Israeli society is comprised of four principal tribes growing closer in size.

God made me an Indian.

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.

On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men.

We've organized ourselves as cultures, to a large degree, around what we agree we know. And when you have multiple ways of knowing, multiple ways of organizing, the society loses one of its deepest organizational principles.

Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.

It is a community of purpose that constitutes society.

A nation is the totality of people who speak the same language.

In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent community and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today we cannot count on any such inheritance.

The rites and festivals of each nation shall remain undisturbed and shall continue as before because they were given by the people of old times as useful and necessary for the good of men

Culture more than politics determines the success of the society, but politics can save the culture.

Ethnicity and tribe begin precisely where taxes and sovereignty end.

Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first a patron, the last a punisher.

Society is one word, but many things.

A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge.

The State is the nation socially organized.

Tribal affiliation is much more important than policy details.

The prosperity of a people depends upon such facts as the natural wealth of the country in which they live, their social discipline and industrial character, the result of generations, of centuries, it may be, of tradition.

… tribes with flags

A country is more than an economy. We're a civic society.

I came from a family that was pretty insularly Cherokee. We kept to ourselves - the white people were there, and we were here, and it was practically a segregated kind of thing.