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Ten of My Favorite Ian Buruma Quotes
Ian Buruma, a writer whom I am guessing you love? Here are our 10 best Ian Buruma quotes for you to enjoy. At Australia Unwrapped we believe every book has at least one quotable line, and our mission is to find them all. Here you will find Ian Buruma’s top 10 popular and famous quotes. Like every good writer Ian Buruma made a number of memorable quotes, here are some of our favorites:
About Ian Buruma
Buruma studied in Holland and Japan. Over the years, he has spent many years in Asia, which he describes in God’s Dust, A Japanese Mirror, and Behind the Mask. As well as Playing the Game, The Wages of Guilt, and Anglomania, he has published other works. Currently, Buruma is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Institute for the Humanities in Washington, DC.
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More from the Author: https://amzn.to/3dxTY9n
Popular Quotes
“The solution to the Muslim problem is a Muslim Voltaire, a Muslim Nietzsche—that”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
“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.”
― Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945
“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.”
― Ian Buruma, Year Zero: The History of 1945
“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.”
― Ian Buruma, A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir
“I am skeptical about the idea that we can learn much from history, at least in the sense that knowledge of past follies will prevent us from making similar blunders in the future… And yet it is important to know what happened before, and to try and make sense of it. For if we don’t, we cannot understand our own times.”
― Ian Buruma
“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.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
“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.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
“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.”
― Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
“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.”
― Ian Buruma, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq
“In her prime, she bore a slight resemblance to Liberace, but in a more masculine way”
― Ian Buruma, A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir
10 Famous Quotes by Author Ian Buruma
Quotes for all, here you found our selection of 10 Ian Buruma quotes. Make sure you help by commenting your best Ian Buruma quote below and sharing our favorite authors so we can look them up, read some of their works and give you the best quotes we can find. We hope you enjoyed our top 10 quotes by Ian Buruma. However, feel free to comment below if you disagree or would like to include some other great and memorable Ian Buruma quotes in our list.
One Final Bonus – Ian Buruma Quote
“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!!”
― Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945
More from the Author: https://amzn.to/3dxTY9n
Also see: Ian C. Esslemont: Author Bio About and Best Quotes
