Bhikhu Parekh Quotes

For traditional societies … the collective, the group, is more important than the individual, and empowering the individual is equated with dividing the society.

There is no such thing as society…There are individuals, men and women, and there are families.

What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact.

Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.

The British government in India constitutes a struggle between the Modern Civilization, which is the Kingdom of Satan, and the Ancient Civilization, which is the kingdom of God.

Western fundamentalism: By this term I mean the elevation of Western modernity above all other ways of knowing and being and it includes adherence to capitalism, individualism, patriarchy, scientific rationalism, ‘Christian’ morality, commodification of the environment, private property and a belief in progress.

Communitarianism sows the seeds of conflicts between communities, and I don’t want my country to face conflicts between communities, I recognize only individuals. It is individual who have rights…

We are under attack. Our culture, society, traditions, and way of life are at risk.

All people owe their lives to surrounding society.

I wish I could bring Stonehenge to Nyasaland to show there was a time when Britain had a savage culture.

… all experience tended to show that a man must die; and whether he died of a miserable old age in his own country, or prematurely of damp in the bottom of a foreign mine, was surely of little consequence, provided that by a change in his mode of life he benefited the British Empire.

I understand the world solely as a field for cultural competition among the peoples.

Don't fall into the trap of imagining that the West can remake societies

Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.

Loneliness is not a problem in traditional societies. People spend their lives in or near the place where they were born, and they remain surrounded by relatives and childhood companions.

Some countries elevate and value community. Some serve the state to the detriment of individual people, and some, like the United States, celebrate individuality to a fault.

We are living in the jet-age, but we are governed by an Edwardian establishment mentality.

So-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question.

It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?

For the vast majority of humans in history, people lived, traveled, worked and died within a few miles of their birthplace.

The thing that is being lost is heritage. In Africa, religion and advertisement and television and media hype have gotten Africans to where they are convinced psychologically that their own heritage is heathen, pagan, barbaric, savage, primitive.

Too many have rushed in to explain the Arab world to itself.

Modernity is a shifting entity, not easily defined. Exactly the same is true of empire.