The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Amin Maalouf

You can’t say history teaches us this or that; it gives us more questions than answers, and many answers to every question.

Questions, Answers, You

I have the profoundest respect for people who behave in a generous way because of religion. But I come from a country where the misuse of religion has had catastrophic consequences. One must judge people not by what faith they proclaim but by what they do.

Faith, Religion, People

I no more believe in simplistic solutions than I do in simplistic identieties. The world is a complex machine that can’t be dismantled with a srewdriver. But that shouldn’t prevent us from observing, from trying to understand, from discussing, and sometimes suggesting a subject for reflection.

Taking the line of least resistance, we lump the most different people together under the same heading. Taking the line of least resistance, we ascribe to them collective crimes, collective acts and opinions. “The Serbs have massacred…”, “The English have devastated…”, “The Jews have confiscated…”, “The Blacks have torched”, “The Arabs refuse…”. We blithely express sweeping judgments on whole peoples, calling them “hardworking” and “ingenious”, or “lazy”, “touchy”, “sly”, “proud”, or “obstinate”. And sometimes this ends in bloodshed.” – Amin Maalouf “On Identity

discrimination, identity, racism, stereotype

Every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances, and sometimes these loyalties conflict with one another and confront the person who harbors them with difficult choices

Can we reconcile indefinitely these two imperatives: the desire to preserve every individual’s special identity and the need for Europeans to be able to communicate with one another all the time and as freely as possible? We cannot leave it to time to solve the dilemma and prevent people from engaging, a few years hence, in bitter and fruitless linguistic conflicts. We know all too well what time will do.The only possible answer is a voluntary policy aimed at strengthening linguistic diversity and based on a simple idea: nowadays everybody obviously needs three languages. The first is his language of identity; the third is English. Between the two we have to promote a third language, freely chosen, which will often but not always be another European language. This will be for everyone the main foreign language taught at school, but it will also be much more than that–the language of the heart, the adopted language, the language you have married, the language you love.

identity, language

…it’s better to wake up amid the pangs of desire than amid those of remorse.

desire, love, remorse

By living exclusively for the present, we let ourselves be hemmed in by an ocean of death. Conversely, by reviving the past, we enlarge our living space.

death, life, past, present

Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.

People sometimes imagine that just because they have access to so many newspapers, radio and TV channels, they will get an infinity of different opinions. Then they discover that things are just the opposite: the power of these loudspeakers only amplifies the opinion prevalent at a certain time, to the point where it covers any other opinion.

clarence, journalism, mass-media, press

… we die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing.

birth, death, life

The twentieth century will have taught us that no doctrine in itself is necessarily a liberating force: all of them may be perverted or take a wrong turning; all have blood on their hands – communism, liberalism, nationalism, each of the great religions, and even secularism. Nobody has a monopoly on humane values.

communism, doctrine, liberalism, nationalism, religion, secularism