What compels the Hindu right's volcanic reaction to Valentine's Day? Some of its members have protested that the holiday is the product of a 'rotten imported culture' from the West.

Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?

In the end, perhaps it will be the true romantics, not the nerds, who choose to flee from a world of impersonal, digitized relationships and into the arms of simulacrums with manners imported from simpler times.

Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.

I only like two kinds of men, domestic and imported.

Democracy, good governance and modernity cannot be imported or imposed from outside a country.

Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the Gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's Gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the Gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.

Why are we as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?

I only like two kinds of men domestic and imported.