“Modern Orientalism embodies a systematic discipline of accumulation. Far from this being exclusively an intellectual or theoretical feature, it made Orientalism tend fatally towards the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories. To reconstruct a dead or lost Oriental language meant ultimately to reconstruct a dead or neglected Orient; it also meant that reconstructive precision, science, even imagination could prepare the way for what armies, administrators, and bureaucracies would later do on the ground.”

“Instead of Orientals being the passive objects of the Western gaze, we must study the West. The way Orientals saw it must be a subject for deep investigation. Occidentalism is the other side of Orientalism”

“The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.”

“Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.”

“From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.”

“Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.”