Umberto Eco Quotes

The fact that Western Muslims are free means that they can have enormous impact. But it would be wrong to claim that we are imposing our ways on the West. New ideas are now coming from the West. To be traditional is not so much a question of protecting ourselves as to be traditionalist in principle.

I am not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture - rule of law, universal suffrage - is preferable to Arab culture. That's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic.

Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.

The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.

If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.

The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.

I make no claim that Jewish culture is superior to other cultures or that the Jewish song is better than the song of my neighbor.

Yeah, I think that's sort of the American way. And it's also the Polish way, it turns out.

There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

The present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.

In Malaysia, where Western culture was extremely influential, I'd grown up listening to Elvis and the Beatles and watching American movies. People wanted to be like Americans. In contrast, when I got here, I saw prosperous middle-class American college students wanting to somehow join the Third World.

I love stories that give me a perspective on how easy American life has become in the 21st century.

Let's be careful when we start comparing American to European tolerance because there isn't necessarily a lot of European tolerance.

The Turks were a great nation even before they adopted the Muslim religion…The religion founded by Muhammad was based on a policy of setting Arab nationalism above all other nationalisms.

Secularism is the experience of the Western culture and thought. Insisting on spreading it to places where the underlying intellectual background, and the political and social reasons for its appearance are lacking, is clearly a mistake, regardless of being desirable or not.

Fact is, given a choice to erase or embrace Western popular culture, most Muslims would gleefully embrace it.

The customs of the [Khmer] barbarians are so different from our own that even if we were to capture all their territory, it would not be certain that we could change them.

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.

Foreigners are not like the people I am used to here.

I find that the hardest work in the world... is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.

For the Americans, it is not attractive to hear what the similarities are between them and the Iranian people. It is attractive to hear how different the Iranians are.

Immigrants have to adopt our values, not the other way around.

We should wake up and tell ourselves: You're not a xenophobe, you're not a racist, you're not a crazy guy if you say, 'My culture is better than yours.'

I never felt particularly alienated as an English person in America. It doesn't feel culturally like a massive gap to me.

In the U.S., I've had the opportunity to grow up around a lot of Arab families, and the one thing that always stood out to me is the incredible hospitality; it's out of this world.