“According to a Confucian view, there are four steps in social develpment, wrote Wilhem (Sr.). There are the individual, the family, the state, and mankind. The West had always emphasized the individual and the state. Individual development is extolled, and the single human being is regarded as central and as an atom of society. Over-emphasis on the function of the individual has led to deterioration of the family. Unlike Westerners, the Chinese have given greater weight to family and mankind. The consciousness of the individual is contained in the family, and since traditional China considered itself the world, Chinese considered themselves responsible for humankind rather than for the state.”
“It is no accident that, of the early Jesuit scholars who were pioneers in making China's culture known in Europe, those who concerned themselves with the Book of Changes were all later declared to be insane or heretic. Indeed, to the Chinese themselves the study of the I Ching is not to be taken lightly. By an unwritten law, only those advanced in years regard themselves as ready to learn from it. Confucius is said to have been seventy years old when he first took up the Book of Changes.”
“The rearing of children is considered too important to be left to the individual and should be the responsibility of the state.”
“It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value”
“Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against "society," that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship.”
“The state tends to make man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends, overlooking his individual purposes. And since man, in his essence, is a free searching self perfecting being, it follows that the state is a profoundly anti human institution. That is, its actions are incompatible with the full harmonious development of human potential in its richest diversity. Hence incompatible with the true end of man…!”
“Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.”