Never better than after the last four centuries of his history could a Western man understand that, while assuming the right to impose a radical sepa… - Claude Lévi-Strauss

Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize — because they set so little store by them — the immense riches accumulated by the human race on either side of the narrow furrow on which they keep their eyes fixed; by underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.

The wise man is not he who gives the right answers; he is the one who asks the right questions.

When the European looks down on this land, divided into minute lots and cultivated to the last acre, he experiences an initial feeling of familiarity. But the way the colours shade into each other, the irregular outlines of the fields and the rice-swamps which are constantly rearranged in different patterns, the blurred edges which look as if they had been roughly stitched together, all this is part of the same tapestry, but — compared to the clearly defined forms and colours of a European landscape — it is like a tapestry with the wrong side showing.