Talal Asad Quotes

#1. It's just a joy to be able to work with a lot of different musicians. When you play with great musicians, whether they're schooled or self-taught, they keep you on your toes.

Cass McCombs

#2. The difference is that they [Europeans] don't have that culture about hip-hop as a lifestyle, a way of life; for them it's more of the new trend, the new music that you have to like.

K-Maro

#3. When you do comedy, you get impervious to good and bad reviews.

Adam McKay

#4. Modern sovereignty, whether expressed through killing in battle or the torture of suspects, brings together the desire to build up and the desire to destroy, to let Aid Agencies offer charity (in its original meaning of "love") while the military offers death. The two are intrinsically connected.

Talal Asad

#5. Tradition is not something a man can learn; not a thread he picks up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors. Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.

Talal Asad

#6. All great wealth was inconsistent with common sense.
(from 'The Fish can Sing

Halldor Laxness

#7. The Christmas genre is a field that's been well-ploughed.

John Oates

#8. I'm not really interested in participating in mainstream culture. Participating in the mainstream music business is, to me, like getting involved in a racket. There's no way you can get involved in a racket and not someway be filthied by it.

Steve Albini

#9. Why is it that aggression in the name of God shocks secular liberal sensibilities, whereas the act of killing in the name of the secular nation, or of democracy, does not?

Talal Asad

#10. It seems to me perfectly possible to act humanely towards other beings, whether humans or animals or plants. One simply has to learn how to behave. To behave "humanely" it is perfectly possible to do without the notion of "humanity."

Talal Asad

#11. I think the approach to Islam as a tradition is helpful. Tradition helps us to focus on questions about authority and temporality, and about the language used in relation to the two.

Talal Asad

#12. The propensity to intellectualize is itself both essential and dangerous. I think in our modern world we are much more aware of its essential character than of its dangers, and that is why I think of it as being an expression of transcendence.

Talal Asad

#13. Language has multiple uses, and is embedded in different forms of life. It is not necessary to have this grand concept of "humanity" in order to behave decently.

Talal Asad

#14. Tradition is an aspiration to connect the Self with the Other. One "internalizes" the Other as one acquires a sense of what one's own tradition is, what one belongs to and what gives valid shape to one's life.

Talal Asad

#15. The Moon and Pleiades have set, / Midnight is nigh, / The time is passing, passing, yet / Alone I lie.

Sappho

#16. I do not criticize religion as such, but I criticize the concept and the definition of "religion" - as I said in Genealogies.

Talal Asad

#17. You should never employ your intellect but only that it is not essential to exercise it in order to live a humane life. Language permeates all of life, of course, and one's mind is essential to it, but that does not mean intellectuality should transcend all of life.

Talal Asad

#18. They have had such a crazy life living with me as their dad. Not crazy but different from their friends.

Sebastian Bach

#19. I think we need to think about Islamic tradition as a way of asking questions that cut across (and transgress) the assumptions of a purely secular world in which we already know how things stand for individual subjects as well as for societies.

Talal Asad

#20. Originally, governments had very limited functions. Their purpose was simply to "preserve and protect." Then someone added "provide." When governments began to be the people's provider as well as the people's protector, governments started creating society, rather than preserving it.

Neale Donald Walsch