#cult

I think the biggest difficulty is that when I'm here in America, there's a necessity of using English, so I really have a great sense of really wanting to learn, but unfortunately when I head back to Japan, the necessity vanishes and so does my enthusiasm about learning. ↗

— Chiaki Kuriyama

#america #back #biggest #difficulty #does

The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable. ↗

— Talal Asad

#eurabia #europe #european #islam #modernity-tags-civilization

It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato. ↗

— Lewis Grizzard

#difficult #eating #homegrown #pleasant #think

And touring is difficult when everybody's heads aren't in the same place. ↗

— Fred Durst

#everybody #heads #place #same #touring

The main cause of my difficulties stemmed from the tragedy of my daughter's unsound birth and my inability to face my feelings. ↗

— Gene Tierney

#cause #daughter #difficulties #face #feelings

Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture. ↗

— Johan Huizinga

#culture #history #human #human culture #novel

War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene. ↗

— Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

#disappearing #human #human nature #i #i see

I think all of us thought that by the '70s, at the latest the '80s, all the world's problems would be solved and everyone would be getting along fine. And instead we saw that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that year, Robert F. Kennedy died. We saw that it was going to be a lot more difficult than I think we had thought. ↗

— Janis Ian

#assassinated #died #difficult #everyone #fine

Lord save us all from a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms. ↗

— Mark Twain

#blossoms #faculty #lord #lost #out

Humanity has experienced many revolutionary changes over the course of history: revolutions in agriculture, in science, industrial production, as well as numerous political revolutions. But these have all been limited to the external aspects of our individual and collective lives. ↗

— Daisaku Ikeda

#aspects #been #changes #collective #course