Selective Adoption Quotes

Someone else is going to read for me or go at my place to the mosque, and/or to tell me you shouldn't take anything from the West because the West is the enemy and so on. It is to me to decide. I am intelligent enough to be critical towards the West and take what I need and reject what is bad for me.

And while you bring all countries with you, you come with a purpose of leaving all other countries behind you - bringing what is best of their spirit, but not looking over your shoulders and seeking to perpetuate what you intended to leave behind in them.

I think there are nice things about every era. I wish we could just take the nice things.

I'm not a Luddite at all. I love all this stuff. I look at all the gadgets that come out and I think, 'Oh, this fix works for me. But the rest don't.' I'm not genuflecting in front of the God of Newness.

The idea of taking what's useful and discarding the rest is something I say to myself almost on a daily basis.

Failure's inevitable. It happens all the time in a complex economy. And how did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us, computers and cell phones and so on? Well, the process was trial and error. There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered, and the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out.

Hardly any generation wants to take the whole of the last generation, it just wants to take its best bits.

Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.

I am intelligent enough to be critical towards the West and take what I need and reject what is bad for me.

With the 12-step program, if you don't subscribe to that way of life completely, it can be seen as failing, and I think a lot of people can take the parts of that kind of program that they need and not other parts.

I'm not an early adopter of technology unless I consider it absolutely indispensable.