Quotes About Cosmopolitanism

#1. Cosmopolitanism emphasizes and is grounded in a _singular relationality between and among people

Namsoon Kang

#2. California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life ... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character.

J.B. Priestley

#3. Cosmopolitanism has offered me an ethical perspective and a conceptual framework with which to read the signs of our times as a theologian and intellectual who has a public responsibility for constantly offering a way to engage in this rapidly changing public world.

Namsoon Kang

#4. Cosmopolitanism, ... , _speaks_ about the urgent need for and the significance of relocating our discourse on, ... , the scope and application of rights and justice for every singular human being regardless of the person's birth and belonging.

Namsoon Kang

#5. _For what ends_ does one claim cosmopolitanism? _Whose interest_ does it serve?

Namsoon Kang

#6. When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism

Bill Bryson

#7. Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history.

Rabindranath Tagore

#8. Cosmopolitanism starts from the _singular_ individual rather than the _faceless_ collective

Namsoon Kang

#9. We know that art is connected with the land, with its salt, with its smell, that outside of national culture there is no art. Cosmopolitanism - a world in which things lose their color and form, and words lose their significance. We love in our past all that we consider native, wonderful and fair.

Ilya Ehrenburg

#10. The notions of hybridity, metissage, cosmopolitanism have been deployed and reworked in order to capture the polycentric and polysemic aspects of these new configurations.

Okwui Enwezor

#11. We need to return to the cosmopolitanism of Alexandria of yore, and marry that with the tolerance and democracy of Europe today

Ismail Serageldin

#12. We don't need this religious cosmopolitanism. It's no good.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky

#13. Somebody once told me, black people, in and of themselves, are cosmopolitan. There's cosmopolitanism within the black experience. There's an incredible amount.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#14. Cosmopolitan discourse ... provides one with a _public gaze_ with which one can relate oneself to others in a different way.

Namsoon Kang

#15. Cairo and Alexandria were cosmopolitan not so much because they contained foreigners, but because the Egyptian born in them is himself a stranger to his land.

Waguih Ghali

#16. I want to affirm that thinking and living, knowing and doing, theory and practice intersect.

Namsoon Kang

#17. Cosmopolitan theology that longs for the Kindom of God seeks to recover its revolutionary universalizing ethos in terms of hospitality, neighbor-love, and multiple solidarities that one can see in Jesus' teaching and ministry, without any imperialist, kyriarchcal, hierarchical implications

Namsoon Kang

#18. Cosmopolitan theology is a theology for _the impossible_.

Namsoon Kang

#19. I believe theology should be about one's way of life, a kind of gaze into onesself and others, and a mode of one's profound existence in the world.

Namsoon Kang

#20. Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.

Peter Ackroyd

#21. Theology should be a discourse that helps the sociopolitical approach to justice to maintain its human face and not to become impersonal.

Namsoon Kang

#22. Now the question we must ask is ... what kind of _practices_ [theology] motivates, what kind of _gaze_ onto others, the guest, the new arrivant, it offers us to carry with us; _not_ who my neighbors are _but_ to whom I am being a neighbor.

Namsoon Kang

#23. I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
[As quoted in Plutarch's Of Banishment]

Socrates

#24. How can one maintain a theological confidence in what one claims to be _true_ while acknowledging the existence of multiple religions that also claim to be _true_?

Namsoon Kang

#25. The overall theme of theology can be twofold: the search for meaning and the responsibility one has to the others.

Namsoon Kang

#26. Cosmopolitan theology affirms and radicalizes the belief that the Divine creates each and every human being as equal to every one else as a _citizen-of-the-cosmos and that no one is either superior or inferior to the other.

Namsoon Kang

#27. Cosmopolitan discourse is in a way a response to the issue of solidarity. Although the precondition for solidarity can be a _community_, solidarity requires more intentional commitment and performance than does community.

Namsoon Kang

#28. I believe that dreaming an impossible world, is itself the task of theologies and that the disparity between the world-as-it-is (reality) and the world-as-it-ought-to-be (ideality) is where a prophetic call comes in.

Namsoon Kang

#29. I believe _cosmopolitanism_ can be an effective discourse with which to advocate a politics of _transidentity_ of overlapping interests and heterogeneous or hybrid subjects in order to challenge conventional notions of exclusive belonging, identity and citizenship.

Namsoon Kang

#30. The question is not, therefore, _whether_ a theory is grand or small, or whether it is universal/global or particular/local, but _what function_ a theory plays and _whose interest_ it serves.

Namsoon Kang

#31. That man's the best cosmopolite Who loves his native country best.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

#32. And you can fool yourself if you're raised in New York. Think that somehow your birthplace alone makes you cosmopolitan. But it isn't true. We're rubes too.

Victor LaValle

#33. Religion is about hospitality, solidarity, and responsibility or it is nothing at all.

Namsoon Kang

#34. New York presented a paradox. While foreigners thought of New York has the symbol of America, many Americans viewed the city with some suspicion as the country's most foreign.

Charles Emmerson

#35. Theological discourse can be, in and of itself, a form of identity and solidarity.

Namsoon Kang

#36. The politics of trans-identity seeks to move from the _politics of singular identity_ to the _politics of multiple solidarities_ across various identities without abandoning one's personal attachments and commitments to the group that one finds significant.

Namsoon Kang

#37. The cosmopolitan gaze of planetary love and hospitality _is_ what constitutes being _religious_.

Namsoon Kang