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"However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world."
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"Society has a herd psychology, so until we have more good shepherds we are lost."

"The world is "sick" with loneliness in spite of multitudes of people living in it."

"Take responsibility for the city."

"Measures must always in a progressive society be held superior to men, who are after all imperfect instruments, working for their fulfilment."

"When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : "What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read."
Explore more quotes by Kenzaburo Oe

"Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of support for the old one that lives on in reality in some quarters."

"By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors."

"Paradoxically, the people and state of Japan living on such moral props were not innocent but had been stained by their own past history of invading other Asian countries."

"From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan's prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at large."

"The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War."

"After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution."

"My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity."

"In the recent years there have been criticisms levelled against Japan suggesting that she should offer more military forces to the United Nations forces and thereby play a more active role in the keeping and restoration of peace in various parts of the world."

"As I grew up, I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life - in my family, in my relationship to Japanese society and in my way of living at large in the latter half of the twentieth century."

"The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia."
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