Ian Buruma Quotes
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Without ideology, and with nothing but jobs for the boys at stake, party politics was losing its raison d’être, and trust in the old democratic order could no longer be taken for granted.
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I think that Ryu Chishu, or Tanaka Kinuyo, or to be more precise, the imaginary characters they portrayed, were more real to the film buffs than any existing human being. This is why cinephiles are spookier, on the whole, than music lovers or balletomanes. For they are creatures of the dark, getting off on the lives of others.
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Citizenship of a democratic state means living by the laws of the country. A liberal democracy cannot survive when part of the population believes that divine laws trump those made by man.
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In her prime, she bore a slight resemblance to Liberace, but in a more masculine way.
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The question, then, for Western companies, as much as for Western governments, is to decide whose side they are on: the Chinese officials who like to define their culture in a paternalistic, authoritarian way, or the large number of Chinese who have their own ideas about freedom.
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Islam may soon become the majority religion in countries whose churches have been turned more and more into tourist sites, apartment houses, theatres, and places of entertainment. The French scholar Olivier Roy is right: Islam is now a European religion.
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Anti-Americanism may indeed have grown fiercer than it was during the cold war. It is a common phenomenon that when the angels fail to deliver, the demons become more fearsome.
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To isolate the revolutionary ideologues and their killers we must gain the trust of the majority of Muslims. This can only happen if they are treated as equal citizens, not just in theory, and have access to decent education and jobs.
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Isherwood did not so much find himself in Berlin as reinvent himself; Isherwood became a fiction, a work of art.
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The fact that both killers arrived on bikes added a peculiarly Dutch flavor to their murders.
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The solution to the Muslim problem is a Muslim Voltaire, a Muslim Nietzsche
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I am skeptical about the idea that we can learn much from history, at least in the sense that knowledge of past follies will prevent us from making similar blunders in the future... And yet it is important to know what happened before, and to try and make sense of it. For if we don't, we cannot understand our own times.