Michel de Montaigne Quotes

The U.S. is not the holder of truth.

The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.

If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed.

You—the outside world—will be told that it is our “culture” and “religion” to do X, Y, and Z to women. Understand that whoever deemed it as such was never a woman.

What is taught in schools generally in the West Indies is that if something is your thing, it's better than anybody else's because it's yours. It's extremely provincial and also damaging. You prevent people from learning things. The biggest absurdity would be, 'Don't read Shakespeare because he was white.'

Each person calls barbarism whatever is not his or her own practice.... We may call Cannibals barbarians, in respect to the rulesof reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.

Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.

Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in

All nations are more tolerant of their own mistakes and weaknesses than of the mistakes and weaknesses of others.

Or a White Englishman would rather smash a White Frenchman than a Jew! Crazy!

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.

It is urgently necessary that we recognize our own limitations as a moral and ideological force among the Asiatic peoples. Our political philosophy and our patterns for living have very little applicability to masses of people in Asia. They may be all right for us, with our highly developed political traditions running back into the centuries and with our peculiarly favorable geographic position; but they are simply not practical or helpful, today, for most of the people in Asia.

Every way of a man is right in his own eyes

There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation, or a distinct group by its least worthy members.

... a fixed obsession on Anglo-Saxon superiority.

White men, seem to have difficulty in realizing that people who live differently from themselves still might be traveling the upward and progressive road of life.

A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements.

I don't trust most journalists who belong to Anglo Saxon stock because we know what your inclinations are.

When people today say 'racism,' they mean it's a nationalism they don't like. Racialism used to be a good thing, a looking-out for what was best for one group... Israel comes out of that 19th-century idea of nationalism. Many Arab states also have preferences. It's fundamentally unfair to decide that one is racism and the others aren't.

People say they don't want to call a call-centre in India. Why not? They're doing the same job - you just don't like Indians.

Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.

There is no story that is not true, [...] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

Consider the wave of revulsion that floods the average person when he or she hears of the practice of human sacrifice by the Aztecs and other so-called primitive peoples. How savage and barbaric such practices seem. But when a Christian or Jew comes across human sacrifice in the Bible (see Jephthah's immolation of his daughter in Judges 11:30-40), is he or she repulsed?