“The only difference between the East and the West seems to be that you have ancestors and we are going to be ancestors.”

“If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it.”

“Because we imagine that we are what humanity was divinely destined to become, we assume that our prehistoric ancestors were trying to be us, but just lacked the tools and techniques to succeed. We invest our ancestors with our own predelictions in what seem to us primitive and unevolved forms. As an example of all this, we take it for granted that our religions represent humanity's ultimate and highest spiritual development and expect to find among our ancestors only crude, fumbling harbingers of these religions. We certainly don't expect to find robust, fully developed religions whose expressions are entirely different from ours.”

“The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.”

“We southerners worship our ancestors.”

“A very long time ago, some 2.5 million years B.C., the mother of human species as we know it, our ultimate ancestor, appeared in East Africa... She was four feet tall and probably black..”