Ian Buruma - Bilingual quotes that celebrate the beauty of language, showcasing meaningful expressions in two unique perspectives.

Real and face to face, often follow disappointment. According to Beauvoir, Sartre returned from the United States as a bit stunned. Of course he liked people and admired Roosevelt; But in the words of Beauvoir, there were many things that shocked him in the civilization of the Western hemisphere, except for the economic system, discrimination and racism - the conservatism of the Americans, the scale of values, the legends, the optimism, the avoidance of all kinds of tragic things.

Since Jewish revenge did not receive political support, it was never implemented. The Zionist leaders tried to create a different kind of normality based on the theme of the Israelites, which was far from the European countries, who were blood-blooded by war, and collided with their enemies as proud citizens-soldiers. They looked at the future with an introvert approach. Though the future would be full of massacre, ethnic and religious conflict, but there would be no German blood.

The Japanese have an expression for human relations that are sticky with the mutual obligations and dependencies of the collective life. They use the English word wet. Traditional Japanese family relations are wet. Yakuza gangs are wet. Behavior that is more detached, more individualistic, often associated with a Western way of life, is dry. Terayama Shuji was dry. Kara was most definitely wet.

In her prime, she bore a slight resemblance to Liberace, but in a more masculine way

I think that Ryu Chishu, or Tanaka Kinuyo, or to be more precise, the imaginary characters they portrayed, were more real to the film buffs than any existing human being. This is why cinephiles are spookier, on the whole, than music lovers or balletomanes. For they are creatures of the dark, getting off on the lives of others.

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.

Without ideology, and with nothing but jobs for the boys at stake, party politics was losing its raison d'être, and trust in the old democratic order could no longer be taken for granted.

after all that, after the concentration camps in Germany, after we stated definitely that our former home was changed into a mass grave, we can only grope and clasp with our finger tips the shadows of our dearest and painfully cry: I can never more see my home. The victorious nations that in the 20th century removed the black plague from Europe must understand once and for all the specific Jewish problem. No, we are not Polish when we are born in Poland; we are not Lithuanians even though we once passed through Lithuania; and we are neither Roumanians though we have seen the first time in our life the sunshine in Roumenia. We are Jews!!

On May 7 crowds had gathered on Dam Square in the center of Amsterdam in front of the Royal Palace, cheering, dancing, singing, waving the orange flag of the Dutch royal family, in anticipation of the triumphant British and Canadian troops whose arrival was imminent. Watching the happy throng from the windows of a gentlemen's club on the square, German naval officers decided in a last-minute fit of pique to fire into the crowd with a machine gun mounted on the roof. Twenty-two people died, and more than a hundred were badly injured. Even that was not the very last violent act of the war.

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

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.

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.

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.