Ian Buruma Quotes

#1. Who teaches young people to be so exquisitely sensitive to perceived slights, so ready to read affronts into routine events in everyday life? Their teachers no doubt.

George F. Will

#2. The best way to execute French cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken.

Julia Child

#3. 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.

Ian Buruma

#4. 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.

Ian Buruma

#5. 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.

Ian Buruma

#6. The greater the adversity the greater the rewards.

Matshona Dhliwayo

#7. 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.

Ian Buruma

#8. The primary declaration of Christianity is not "This do!" but "This happened!

Evelyn Underhill

#9. A soft hushing sound, like fingernails scratching down an endless sheet of paper.

James S.A. Corey

#10. Isherwood did not so much find himself in Berlin as reinvent himself; Isherwood became a fiction, a work of art.

Ian Buruma

#11. Strength can only get you so far; vulnerability takes you the rest of the way.

C. Nicole Mason

#12. 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.

Ian Buruma

#13. Prayer is the most important activity a born-again Christian can perform. It should head your list of priorities, for certainly the world around us desperately needs prayer. Prayer will open the door for God to do a glorious work in these last days. Prayer will stem the tide of evil.

Chuck Smith

#14. Recreational number theory [ ... ] is that part of number theory that is too difficult to study.

Hendrik Lenstra

#15. The word of God is an immense wealth.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#16. The whole purpose of climbing something like Everest is to effect some sort of spiritual and physical gain. But if you compromise the process you're an asshole when you start out and an asshole when you get back.

Yvon Chouinard

#17. April. Month of dust and lies.

Naguib Mahfouz