8 Quotes by Ian Buruma

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.

LIBERATION IS PERHAPS not the right word to describe the end of the war in colonial societies. Most Asians were more than happy to be rid of the Japanese, whose “Asian liberation” had turned out to be worse than the Western imperialism it temporarily replaced. But liberation is not quite what the Dutch had in mind for the Dutch East Indies in 1945, or the French for Indochina, or the British for Malaya.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The solution to the Muslim problem is a Muslim Voltaire, a Muslim Nietzsche – that.

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