“The real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own.”
The Silent Language (1959)
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Edward T. Hall 3
American anthropologist 1914–2009Related quotes
Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VIII Further Observations on the Bible
Context: If archeology had yielded only the Epic of Kret, we would have enough to bridge the gap between the Iliad and Genesis. But... our new sources are so rich that we have only begun... The years ahead bid fair to be the most fruitful in the annals of Classical and Biblical scholarship. Our debt to the Bible and Classics is so great that this type of research will deepen our understanding of our culture and of ourselves.

Organic and Inorganic
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VI - Mind and Matter
Context: Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied that they can understand their own. What we call inorganic matter cannot understand the animals’ and plants’ business, we have therefore denied that it can understand anything whatever.

“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”

“To understand anything is to find in it something which is our own.”
Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Source: The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton http://books.google.com/books?id=9_m6AAAAIAAJ&q=%22Half+the+trouble+about+the+modern+man+is+that+he+is+educated+to+understand+foreign+languages+and+misunderstand+foreigners%22&pg=PA322#v=onepage (1936)

“A Parliament's job is not just to legislate but to debate, to enquire and to understand.”
Strategic objectives of new Government (May 23, 2007)

“Understanding human needs is half the job of meeting them.”
Speech in Columbus, Ohio (3 October 1952); quoted in The International Thesaurus of Quotations (1970) edited by Rhoda Thomas Tripp, p. 429