One can see the professionals and intellectuals talking to their rural brethren with an amused and condescending smile. They forget that but for the toiling rural masses, all their professional training and erudition would collapse like a castle of cards.

The worst mistake you can make with children is to talk to them in a condescending, patronising way and think that you can teach them something. You have to understand that it is you who will be learning from them. You have to get into their world and see things from their perspective.

The whole world is a theatre for the display of the divine goodness, wisdom, justice, and power, but the Church is the orchestra, as it were-the most conspicuous part of it; and the nearer the approaches are that God makes to us, the more intimate and condescending the communication of his benefits, the more attentively are we called to consider them.

Those in the west who dismiss the repressiveness of laws against women in countries like Iran no matter how benign their intentions present a condescending view not just of the religion but also of women living in Muslim majority countries as if the desire for choice and happiness is the monopoly of women in the west.

I've never really understood that. It's a funny thing people sometimes accuse us of condescending to our characters somehow-that to me is kind of inexplicable.