Mbarak

“it is natural to believe in God when you’re alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death . . .” “But people never are alone now,” said Mustapha Mond. “We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them ever to have it.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former.”
― Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

“To be acceptable, it seems, a project must often be billed as a pure replica of a successful venture in an advanced country.”
― Albert O. Hirschman, Development Projects Observed

“people undertake some new task not because of a challenge, but because of the assumed absence of a challenge because the task looks easy…and then, once they are stuck with it, they have willy-nilly to overcome the unsuspected difficulties—and sometimes they even succeed.”
― Albert O. Hirschman, Development Projects Observed