Culture hides more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.

The best reason for exposing oneself to foreign ways is to generate a sense of vitality and awareness - an interest in life which can come only when one lives through the shock of contrast and difference.

The future for us is the foreseeable future. The South Asian, however, feels that it is perfectly realistic to think of a 'long time' in terms of thousands of years.

I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost.

We live fragmented, compartmentalized lives in which contradictions are carefully sealed off from each other. We have been taught to think linearly rather than comprehensively, and we do this not through conscious design or because we are not intelligent or capable, but because of the way in which deep cultural undercurrents structure life in subtle but highly consistent ways that are not consciously formulated.

The drive to learn is as strong as the sexual drive. It begins earlier and lasts longer

The reason man does not experience his true cultural self is that until he experiences another self as valid he has little basis for validating his own self.