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Backwardness Quotes

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Backwardness Quotes

“Then he said the funny thing was the old man himself had left home when he was a kid, after a fight with his own father. The father lit into him for using the wheelbarrow. "It was this way. They always carried the feed to the horses, pail by pail. In the winter, when the horses were in the stalls. So my father took the notion to carry it to them in the wheelbarrow. Naturally it was a lot quicker. But he got beat. For laziness. That was the way they were, you know. Any change of any kind was a bad thing. Efficiency was just laziness, to them. That's the peasant thinking for you.”

PovertyConservatismParochialismBackwardness
Book:A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968-1994
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“katolicyzm w Polsce jest zaledwie w jakich 20% religią, a w 80% przemysłem, znakomicie zorganizowanym przedsięwzięciem finansowym. Aparat działa z drapieżną precyzją, ale zarazem z poczuciem, że wszystko to wspiera się na ciemnocie i na zastraszeniu i że wystarczyłoby trochę światła i powietrza, aby podciąć ten przemysł, uprawiany w mroku i zaduchu.”

Catholic ChurchPolandBackwardnessAnticlericalism
Book:Nasi okupanci
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“The rote nature of education in contemporary Muslim societies can be traced to attitudes inherited from traditional education, wherein knowledge is something to be acquired rather than discovered. and in which the attitude of mind is passive and receptive rather than creative and inquisitive. The social conditioning of an authoritarian traditional environment has. as an inescapable consequence. That all knowledge comes to be viewed as unchangeable and all books tend to be memorized or venerated to some degree. The concept of secular knowledge as a problem-solving tool which evolves over time is alien to traditional thought.”

BackwardnessMuslim Education
Book:Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality
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“The new Islamic science has been fathered by the global resurgence of orthodoxy in Muslim countries; it is not peculiar to Pakistan by any means. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia are also particularly active centres. However, it is not confined by national boundaries and is particularly to be found amongst immigrants settled in the West. It evidently provides a form of psychological defence against the continuous battering by modern science in its many manifestations. For this reason, one must not expect the phenomenon to disappear in the decades to come.”

BackwardnessMuslim Orthodoxy
Book:Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality
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“We Pfliegmans, however, are incapable of imagining anything. From the get-go, Pliegmans were outcasts in a country of outcasts. We were then, and probably always have been, whole ages behind the progress of the company we kept. When men were bashing rocks together to make tools, Pliegmans were slithering from the ocean, coated in a greenish much; when men were grunting, sneezing, and lighting fire, hirsute Pfliegmans lay recluse in a dark musty corner of a cave, hissing; when men began wearing pelts and eating meat and painting walls, Pliegmans were stealing pelts to make fun of the pelt-wearers and would return to a cold cave hungry again, goddamnit; when men began forming languages and speaking in recognizable tongues, Pliegmans snorted and threw their heads in the mud in protest; when men began eating with forks, Pliegmans licked their dirty nails; when men were building factories to work in and homes for themselves to live in, Pliegmans rolled in the gross, deliciously; when Edison illuminated the world, Pliegmans squealed and covered their eyes; when Ford made the world go faster, Pliegmas stood at the curb, fearing for their lives, gaping at the shiny wheels, which explains why my father, János Pliegman, who, one Christmas morning in 1984, after receiving a VCR as a Christmas present from my mother, spent four minutes examining the buttons and one minute examining the manual before bashing it in the face with an elbow -- But I digress.”

BackwardnessSad Humor
Book:The Convalescent
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“The transmogrification of Islam into Islamism is bad news not only for the West but also for the majority of Muslims who have no desire to live in totalitarian theocracies. “For the West it is but a physical threat in the form of terrorism,” said Pakistani journalist Ayaz Amir. “For the world of Islam . . . to be trapped in bin Ladenism is to travel back in time to the dark ages of Muslim obscurantism. It means to be stuck in the mire which has held the Islamic world back.”

IslamBackwardnessIslamistObscurantism
Book:The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis
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