Quotes about west
page 5

“Christianity, with its strong emphasis on unity under one God (an emphasis that it shares with Islam), can seem an almost natural ally of empire—unless, of course, the prophetic-critical dimension of the biblical tradition, which the Jesus of the synoptics certainly represented, is allowed a hearing. But as the history of Christology in the West easily demonstrates, after the establishment of Christianity, the prophetic office of the Christ, based not only on Jesus’ teaching but (even more so) on his suffering at the hands of power, was definitely subdued in favor of his priestly and kingly offices. Triumphant peoples, successful peoples, possessing peoples—empires!—do not want crucified criminals as their chief cultic symbol, especially not when they themselves are the crucifiers … as they regularly are!”

Douglas John Hall (1928) Canadian theologian

"Where in the World Are We?" (2006)

God, People, History, Nature

“The institutional settlement of post-war West Germany has endured because it generated value. They retained pre-modern artisan organisations and turned them into the foundation of their contemporary economic success. They entangled and constrained capital in a myriad form of national, sectoral and localised arrangements and they emerge from the crash, virtually alone, with a productive economy and a functioning democracy, with greater equality than us and more meaningful work.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Blue Labour, An Ancient Polity For A New Economy? http://www.bluelabour.org/2012/06/19/an-ancient-polity-for-a-new-economy/

War, Democracy, Success

“Bills to create three new states have finally been passed by Parliament. Of these, only the formation of Jharkhand out of Bihar can be said to be the outcome of a long, long struggle. Chhattisgarh and Uttaranchal, for instance, do not find any mention in the report of the States Reorganisation Commission that was submitted 45 years ago. What is intriguing about Uttaranchal is that it has given three great chief ministers to Uttar Pradesh in the past 50 years - Govind Ballabh Pant, Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna and Narain Dutt Tiwari - and yet the region felt neglected. Similarly, Chhattisgarh produced many noted political leaders, three of whom - Ravi Shankar Shukla, Shyama Charan Shukla and Motilal Vora - became chief ministers of Madhya Pradesh. Two other chief ministers, D. P. Mishra and Arjun Singh, contested from Chhattisgarh. Yet this region too felt unwanted. New voices are being heard. Fresh demands for Bodoland out of Assam, Vidarbha out of Maharashtra, Gorkhaland out of West Bengal and Telengana out of Andhra Pradesh are being made. And since Uttaranchal does not solve the problem of Uttar Pradesh's simply ungovernable size, some cries for a further break-up of India's most populous state are also being raised.”

Jairam Ramesh (1954) Indian politician

[Jairam Ramesh, Kautilya Today: Jairam Ramesh on a Globalizing India, https://books.google.com/books?id=1kDQthPkFJkC&pg=PA212, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/formation-of-jharkhand-out-of-bihar-can-be-said-to-be-the-outcome-of-a-long-long-struggle/1/246915.html, 2002, India Research Press, 978-81-87943-37-2, 212]

Problem, Past

“West of the Amphitheatre, railroad sidings seemed to continue on for miles, accompanied by those same massive low sheds larger than armories, with pens for tens of thousands of frantic beasts, cattle, sheep, and pigs, animals in an orgy of gorging and dropping and waiting and smelling blood. In the slaughterhouses, during the day, a carnage worthy of the Disasters of War took place each morning and afternoon.”

Norman Mailer book Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Pt. 2, p. 86
Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968)

War, Waiting, Animals

“I began graduate work in the philosophy of sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in 1941 where I came under the influence of the “grand old man” of the department, the eminent philosopher E. A. Singer, Jr. Because of the informality of the department he created I began to collaborate with two younger members of the faculty, both of whom were former students of Singer, Thomas A. Cown and C. West Churchman.
Three aspects of Singer's philosophy had a particularly strong influence on me. First, that the practice of philosophy, its application, was necessary for the development of philosophy itself. Second, that effective work on “real” problems required an interdisciplinary approach. Third, that the social area needed more work than any of the other domains of science and that this was the most difficult.
We developed a concept of a research group that would enable us to practice philosophy in the social domain by dealing with real problems. The organization we designed was called “The Institute of Experimental Method.””

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

With the participation of a number of other graduate students in philosophy and a few other members of the faculty we started this institute on a completely informal basis. Preface, cited in Gharajedaghi, Jamshid. Systems thinking: Managing chaos and complexity: A platform for designing business architecture http://booksite.elsevier.com/samplechapters/9780123859150/Front_Matter.pdf. Elsevier, 2011. p. xii Towards a Systems Theory of Organization, 1985

Problem, Strong, Universe, Science

“The satellite revolt was not sparked from the West. It was sparked by Communism itself.”

Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961) Defected Communist spy

Source: Cold Friday (1964), p. 315

Communication

“In the Church which was founded at Corinth, St. Paul had special difficulties of the kind I have mentioned. In that flourishing commercial city, which through its shipping and situation, maintained a vital connexion between East and West, numerous crowds of people flocked together from all quarters, different in speech and in culture. As they mingled with the inhabitants, they produced, by contacts and contrasts, new and ever new differences. Even in the Church this differentiation endeavoured to make itself felt in sects and parties; and a kind of pagan wisdom made a special attempt to force itself forward as a teacher of truth. In his first letter to this church, from which the text I read is taken, St. Paul strongly combats this tendency.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, Sermon Preached at Trinitatis Kirke, 1844, P. 162

Wisdom, People, Truth, Teachers

“As my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) pointed out, many Jewish refugees fled from Russia in 1905 and from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. If the Bill had been law at that time, they could not have come here. There are also the victims of the Iran-Iraq war, the Fascist junta in Chile, and so on. The list is endless. The Minister should come clean about it. He should be honest enough to say that he is turning his back on all the asylum problems in the world. The racist connotations of not having anything to do with the problems of the Third world show that the Minister is working in concert with other European Governments to turn their backs on problems which in many cases were created by west European Governments in the first place…All that the Minister is trying to do is to appeal to the basic sense of xenophobia in the media, in the country and throughout Europe. They want to turn their backs on the problems of the rest of the world. I hope that there will be a greater sense of civilised values on this side of the House when we come to vote against the Bill than has ever been shown by the Tory party.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1987/mar/16/immigration-carriers-liability-bill in the House of Commons (16 March 1987). 1980s

War, World, Law, Hope

“East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State.”

O. Henry (1862–1910) American short story writer

"A Municipal Report"
Strictly Business (1910)

People

“Dharma is the repository of the nation’s soul. If Dharma is destroyed, the Nation perishes. Any one who abandons Dharma, betrays the nation…… Since Dharma is supreme, our ideal of the State has been Dharma Rajya…… What constitutes the good of the people, Dharma alone can decide. Therefore a democratic government Jana Rajya must also be rooted in Dharma i. e. a Dharma Rajya… Since in the West injustice and atrocities were perpetrated, bitter conflicts and battles were fought in the name of religion, all these were en bloc listed on the debit side of Dharma also. We feel that in the name of Dharma also battles were fought. However battles of religion and battles of Dharma are two different things. Religion means a creed or a sect, it does not mean Dharma. Dharma is very wide concept. It is concerned with all aspects of life. It sustains the society. Even further, it sustains the whole world. That which sustains is Dharma.”

Deendayal Upadhyaya (1916–1968) RSS thinker and co-founder of the political party Bharatiya Jana Sangh

Quoted from Talreja, K. M. (2000). Holy Vedas and holy Bible: A comparative study. New Delhi: Rashtriya Chetana Sangathan.

Life, People, World, Religion

“I think that the West is the most powerful reality in the history of this country. It's always had a power, a presence, an attraction that differentiated it from the rest of the United States. Whether the West was a place to be conquered, or the West as it is today, a place to be protected and nurtured. It is the regenerative force of America.”

J. S. Holliday (1924–2006) American historian

The West (1996)

History, Thinking, Reality, Country

“On balance, the Islamic media's taste for what the West terms sensationalizing and conspiracy mongering is less than meets the eye. Based on my research, it is apparent that the Islamic media's correspondents and editors work harder, dig deeper, and think more than most of their Western counterparts. This is not to say that the Islamic media do not suffer from sensationalized conspiracy theories, but they probably are no more prone to those faults than their Western colleagues.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

Through Our Enemies' Eyes (p. 280)
2000s

Thinking, Suffering

“Modern human beings since their beginnings have been moved by the faith that the mastery of nature would lead to the overcoming of hunger and labour, disease and war on so widespread a scale that at last we could build the world-wide society of free and equal people. One must never think about technological destiny without looking squarely at the justice in those hopes. Let none of us who live in the well-cushioned west speak with an aesthetic tiredness about our 'worldliness.”

George Grant (1918–1988) Canadian philosopher

Technology and Justice (Notre Dame: 1986), p. 15

Hunger, War, People, World

“…it depends indeed on whether the immigrants are different, and different in important respects from the existing population. Clearly, if they are identical, then no change for the good or bad can be brought about by the immigration. But if they are different, and to the extent that they are different, then numbers clearly are of the essence and this is not wholly – or mainly, necessarily – a matter of colour. For example, if the immigrants were Germans or Russians, their colour would be approximately the same as ours, but the problems which would be created and the change which could be brought about by a large introduction of a bloc of Germans or Russians into five areas in this country would be as serious – and in some respects more serious – than could follow from an introduction of a similar number of West Indians or Pakistanis.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Any Questions?, BBC Radio (29 November 1968), from Reflections of a Statesman. The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (London: Bellew, 1991), p. 395
1960s

Problem, Change, Dependency, Country

“Harriet Miers isn't qualified to play a Supreme Court justice on The West Wing, let alone to be a real one.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"This is what 'Advice and Consent' means" (5 October 2005) http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/printer_friendly.cgi?article=79. 2005

Justice

“We oppose the West's efforts to gain a monopoly in nuclear fuel, and in nuclear industry and science. I believe that the Iranian success is a great success for the Islamic world.”

Mohammad-Javad Larijani (1951) Iranian politician

We Are Interested in Nuclear Cooperation with Arab and Muslim Countries; the Americans Will Need Our Assistance to Withdraw from Iraq http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=1168 (May 2006)

World, Effort, Science, Success

“Southern slave owners constantly agitated in the 1850s for state centralization of economic activities that would promote slave agriculture: state-sponsored agricultural surveys, state-subsidized agricultural periodicals, and state investment in railroads (at more than twice the rate of Northern state assistance) which would unite the South and the West and encourage more intensive cotton cultivation. They were, as historian John Majewski remarks, the forerunners of the "southern Progressives of the early twentieth century."”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Bullwhip Feudalism (2018)

“The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free.”

Julian Assange (1971) Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist

Julian Assange answers your questions, The Guardian, December 3, 2010, 2010-12-14 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/dec/03/julian-assange-wikileaks,

Bird, Change

“Wherever you go in the world, it’s always nice to feel like you’re supposed to be there. Whether in a city or the woods, West or East, we all have someplace to be. You’ll know it when you arrive.”

John M. Rodgers (1928–2012) American politician

“ Two Homes, a World Apart http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/31/opinion/two-homes-a-world-apart.html.” The New York Times. 30 May 2012.

World, Feeling

“We're told that the Arabs loathe us. Really? For liberating the Iraqis? For subsidising the lifestyles of people in Egypt and Jordan, to name but two, for giving them vast amounts of aid? For providing them with science, medicine, technology and all the other benefits of the West? They [Arabs] should go down on their knees and thank God for the munificence of the United States. What do they think we feel about them? That we adore them for the way they murdered more than 3,000 civilians on September 11 and then danced in the hot, dusty streets to celebrate the murders? That we admire them for the cold-blooded killings in Mombasa, Yemen and elsewhere? That we admire them for being suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women repressors?”

Robert Kilroy-Silk (1942) British politician

Sunday Express, 4 January 2004 ( full text of the column http://www.caabu.org/campaigns/kilroy-article.html) This column resulted in Kilroy-Silk's dismissal from the BBC.

Women, God, People, Way

“I hope that in Egypt there can be a transition toward a more democratic system without a break from President Mubarak, who in the West, above all in the United States, is considered the wisest of men and a precise reference point.”

Silvio Berlusconi (1936) Italian politician

On Hosni Mubarak, in the relation to the 2011 Egyptian protests, as quoted in Berlusconi: Hosni Mubarak Is 'The Wisest Of Men http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/04/silvio-berlusconi-hosni-m_n_818651.html, in The Huffington Post (4 February 2011), and Berlusconi: Mubarak is a wise man at al Jazeera (February 2011) http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2011/02/201124194950335734.html 2011

Men, Hope

“These are strange times, when we are healthier than ever but more anxious about our health. According to all the standard benchmarks, we've never had it so healthy. Longevity in the West continues to rise -- a typical British woman can now expect to live to seventy-nine, eight years more than just half a century ago, and over double the life expectation when Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. Break the figures down a bit and you find other encouraging signs even in the recent past; in 1950, the UK experienced 26,000 infant deaths; within half a century that had fallen by 80 per cent. Deaths in the UK from infectious diseases nearly halved between 1970 and 1992; between 1971 and 1991 stroke deaths dropped by 40 per cent and coronary heart disease fatalities by 19 per cent -- and those are diseases widely perceived to be worsening.”

Roy Porter (1946–2002) British historian

Introduction, lead paragraph; as cited nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/p/porter-benefit.html 1998 The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (1997)

Life, Death, Health, Disease

“What the world did not deem possible the German people have achieved…. It is already war history how the German Armies defeated the legions of capitalism and plutocracy. After forty-five days this campaign in the West was equally and emphatically terminated.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

“Adolf Hitler’s Order of the Day Calling for Invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece,” Berlin, (April 6, 1941), New York Times, April 7, 1941
1940s

War, People, World, History

“All the vampires walkin' through the valley
Move west down Ventura Boulevard.
And all the bad boys are standing in the shadows
All the good girls are home with broken hearts.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Free Fallin, written with Jeff Lynne
Lyrics, Full Moon Fever (1989)

Home, Girl, Boy, Heart

“However, even those who expect deterrence to work might hesitate at introducing a new weapon system that increased the reliability of deterrence, but at the cost of increasing the possible casualties by a factor of 10, that is, there would then be one or two billion hostages at risk if their expectations fail. Neither the 180 million Americans nor even the half billion people in the NATO alliance should or would be willing to design and procure a security system in which a malfunction or failure would cause the death of one or two billion people. If the choice were made explicit, the United States or NATO would seriously consider "lower quality" systems; i. e., systems which were less deterring, but whose consequences were less catastrophic if deterrence failed. They would even consider such possibilities as a dangerous degree of partial or complete unilateral disarmament, if there were no other acceptable postures. The West might be willing to procure a military system which, if used in a totally irrational and unrealistic way, could cause such damage, but only if all of the normal or practically conceivable abnormal ways of operating the system would not do anything like the hypothesized damage. On the other hand, we would not let the Soviets cynically blackmail us into accommodation by a threat on their part to build a Doomsday Machine, even though we would not consciously build a strategic system which inevitably forced the Soviets to build a Doomsday Machine in self-defense.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

Death, People, Way, Failure

“Vickery points out that the Kissinger-Nixon policy during the last two years of the war was a “major mystery,” for which he suggests an explanation that appears to us quite plausible. Referring to the “Sonnenfeldt Doctrine,” which holds that “pluralistic and libertarian Communist regimes will breed leftist ferment in the West,” he suggests that “when it became clear [to U. S. leaders] that they could not win in Cambodia, they preferred to do everything possible to ensure that the post-war revolutionary government be extremely brutal, doctrinaire, and frightening to its neighbors, rather than a moderate socialism to which the Thai, for example, might look with envy.” In short, though it was understood that the United States had lost the war in Cambodia (even though it was, quite clearly, still trying to win it in Vietnam), the destruction of rural Cambodia, by imposing the harshest possible conditions on the eventual victors, would serve two classic ends: retarding social and economic progress, and maximizing the brutality of the eventual victors. Then the aggressors would at least be able to reap a propaganda victory from the misery they had sown.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, pp. 218-219

War, Appearance, Victory, Envy

“A world without nuclear weapons may be a dream but you cannot base a sure defence on dreams. Without far greater trust and confidence between East and West than exists at present, a world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech at a Soviet Official banquet http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106776, St George's Halls, the Kremlin (30 March 1987) Second term as Prime Minister

World, Dreams, Confidence

“I have a definite feeling for the West, the vast horizontality of the land, for instance... I have always been very impressed with the plastic qualities of American Indian art. The Indians have the true painter's approach in their capacity to get hold of appropriate images, and in their understanding of what constitutes painterly subject-matter. Their colour is essentially Western, their vision has the basic universality of all real art. Some people find references to American Indian art and calligraphy in parts of my pictures. That wasn't intentional; probably [it] was the result of early memories and enthusiasm.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Quote of Pollock, from Twentieth-century American painting, Gail Levin, The Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. London, 1987, p. 267
1940's, Art and Architecture (1944)

People, Art, Feeling, Understanding

“Insulting the hijab is also hardly Islamophobic. Indeed many in the West see the hijab as a symbol of oppression against women, and in opposing it are simply standing up for classical liberal, Western values.”

Raheem Kassam (1986) British journalist and politician

BBC Says Opposing Shariah Law Is ‘Islamophobic’ http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/08/19/bbc-refusing-shariah-law-islamophobia/ (Aug 19, 2016)

Women

“Kautilya has elaborated in his Arthashastra the psychological principles which alienate some people from their own society, and lead them straight into the lap of those who are out to subvert that society. The first group of people who can be alienated are the maneevarga, that is, those who are conceited and complain that they have been denied what is their due on account of birth, brains or qualities of character. (…) the Church was instinctively employing the psychological principles propounded by Kautilya. …Christian missionaries could find quite a few and easy converts amongst these upper classes precisely because the Church had declared war on their society. … By the time the French, the British and the Dutch appeared on the Eastern scene, Christianity had been found out in the West for what it had always been in facto power-hungary politics masquerading as religion. The later-day European imperialists, therefore, had only a marginal use for the christian missionary. He could be used to beguile the natives. But he could not be allowed to dictate the parallel politics of imperialism. … The field for the Christian politics of conversion has become considerably smaller in Asia due to the resurgence of Islam, and the triumph of Communism… It is only in India, Ceylon and Japan that the missionary continues to practice his profession effectively.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Genesis and History of the Politics of Conversion, in Christianity, and Imperialist ideology. 1983.

War, People, Religion, Communication

“They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets. The West has given more significance to the myth of the genocide of candy man the Jews, even more significant than God, religion, and the prophets, (it) deals very severely with those who deny this myth but does not do anything to those who deny God, religion, and the prophet. If you have burned the Jews, why don't you give a piece of Europe, the United States, Canada or Alaska to Israel? Our question is, if you have committed this huge crime, why should the innocent nation of Palestine pay for this crime?”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Translation by CNN, Dec 2005
2005, The World without Zionism, 2005

God, Religion, Question

“Here, India will be a global player of considerable political and economic impact. As a result, the need to explicate what it means to be an Indian (and what the ‘Indianness’ of the Indian culture consists of) will soon become the task of the entire intelligentsia in India. In this process, they will confront the challenge of responding to what the West has so far thought and written about India. A response is required because the theoretical and textual study of the Indian culture has been undertaken mostly by the West in the last three hundred years. What is more, it will also be a challenge because the study of India has largely occurred within the cultural framework of America and Europe. In fulfilling this task, the Indian intelligentsia of tomorrow willhave to solve a puzzle: what were the earlier generations of Indian thinkers busy with, in the course of the last two to three thousand years? The standard textbook story, which has schooled multiple generations including mine, goes as follows: caste system dominates India, strange and grotesque deities are worshipped in strange andgrotesque ways, women are discriminated against, the practice of widow-burning exists and corruption is rampant. If these properties characterize India of today and yesterday, the puzzle about what the earlier generation of Indian thinkers were doing turns into a very painful realization: while the intellectuals of Europeanculture were busy challenging and changing the world, most thinkersin Indian culture were apparently busy sustaining and defendingundesirable and immoral practices. Of course there is our Buddha andour Gandhi but that is apparently all we have: exactly one Buddha and exactly one Gandhi. If this portrayal is true, the Indians have butone task, to modernize India, and the Indian culture but one goal: to become like the West as quickly as possible.”

S. N. Balagangadhara (1952) Indian philosopher

Foreword by S. N. Balagangadhara in "Invading the Sacred" (2007)
Source: Balagangadhara, S.N. (2007), "Foreword." In Ramaswamy, de Nicolas & Banerjee (Eds.), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America . Delhi: Rupa & Co., pp. vii–xi.

Women, Pain, World, School

“As so often in Indo-Pakistani and Hindu-Muslim comparisons, the argument is reminiscent of the inequality between the contenders in the Cold War: you could demonstrate for disarmament in the West, but to demonstrate for this in the East Bloc (except if it were for unilateral disarmament by the Western “war-mongers”) would have put you in trouble.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Who is a Hindu, (2001)

War

“And comparing what happened in England—after all, in England the Parliament in Westminster was making laws for the West Indies. The West Indians didn't have any representation in the Parliament. The laws were made for them, and they had to go along with it. There was no such power within the Federal government to interfere with slavery, except by limiting the expansion of slavery. And it was Lincoln’s belief—and I think the best economic analysis that we have of the American economy in the antebellum United States indicates—that if the expansion of slavery had been ended, and if it was no longer possible for surplus slaves to be sold from the old states to new territories, that the pressure within the states to adopt programs of emancipation would become great enough to do that.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

Law, Thinking

“It occurred to me how very tired I sometimes feel as an outspoken feminist. … Trolls are trying to silence women, and I've installed a fiery declaration within myself to never give in, but it's incredibly hard, and gets harder as my platform as a writer grows. What didn’t occur to me initially is that West has spent years in the trenches fighting this endless, thankless fight, and maybe she needs a goddamn break. I had this revelation again, much more profoundly and emotionally, about my own mother while watching Greta Gerwig’s new film, Lady Bird. … Often, my mother and I clashed when she denied me freedom, but only because she had been harmed by the dangers she knew lay ahead for her daughter. I did so many risky, awful things, and then lied to her about them, because I never felt I could be honest with her. I should have known she wasn’t judging me. I should have known that she had done it all before, that even though she wouldn’t have used the word "feminist" to describe herself at the time, mostly she just didn’t want me to have to be so very tired. … Walking home from Lady Bird on the kind of night that New York fall fantasies are made of, I resisted the urge to call my mother, because I thought I might cry until the universe ripped apart at the seams. But then I called her anyway. I sobbed as I told her I had no idea how impossibly hard she had been trying.”

Lauren Duca (1991) American journalist

Sexism, Remembered and Forgotten (November 17, 2017)

Women, Feeling, Home, Idea

“There's a leveling homogeneity in America today created by television. Each day it passes over the vast land mass, over the states nudging each other like the sovereignties of the Balkans, creating a unifying cloud of aesthetic properties and experience. East and West, North and South are wrapped in a sort of over-soul of images, facts, happenings, celebrities. This debris is as sacred to our current fiction as gossip about the new vicar was to Trollope. And there it is on the page, informing the domestically restless households, father off somewhere, mother chagrined. Sons and daughters writing the books.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

"Locations: An Introduction" (pp. xix-xx)
American Fictions (1999)

Books, Soul, Daughters

“I appreciate that. It wasn't just Kanye West who was talking like that during Katrina. I cite him as an example. I cited others as well.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2010s, 2010, Interview on Today (November 2010)

“There is another objection to the Suffern's or Pompton position, which is, the advantage it gives the enemy of dividing our attention, by taking post at King's Ferry. It will be impossible for us to deter mine which is their object, the camp or West Point; and it will be almost as dangerous to expose our camp as these garrisons, especially early in the spring, when we have all our baggage about us, and no possibility of moving it off. If we take a position near Morris, we can always tell, by the motions of the enemy, what is their object; and, having our camp in a secure situation, should they turn their force to wards this place, we can march to its relief in such force as to give certain support, and at the same time leave our camp in perfect security.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (November 1779)

Spring, Support, Time, Perfection

“The modern world inherits the Christian view in which salvation is played out in history. In Christian myth human events follow a design known only to God; the history of humankind is an ongoing story of redemption. This is an idea that informs virtually all of western thought – not least when it is intensely hostile to religion. From Christianity onwards, human salvation would be understood (at least in the west) as involving movement through time. All modern philosophies in which history is seen as a process of human emancipation – whether through revolutionary change or incremental improvement – are garbled versions of this Christian narrative, itself a garbled version of the original message of Jesus.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Faith of Puppets: The Revelation of Philip K. Dick (p. 60)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

God, Hostility, World, Religion

“It would be best not to impose a model too soon, because the model that exists in the west for these states is pathological, and the model that exists in the primitive cultures is mystical and religious.”

Ram Dass book Be Here Now

(quoting Timothy Leary's description of the Psilocybin experience).
Be Here Now (1971)

“Our military behavior must be visibly consistent with our conduct in the political, economic, and international fields. Our strategic readjustments should not be mistaken for a new spurt in an armament race with the USSR. Any serious imbalance in military power between East and West is an encouragement to war- if it favors the Communist dictatorship. Actions to correct an imbalance of power and to replace the concept of Massive Retaliation by one of Flexible Response are measures conducive not to war but to world peace. Such are the notes to be sounded by confident leaders who know what they are doing and why. Then we can prepare ourselves calmly to the battle, knowing that if it is properly prepared, the odds are high for peace.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: The Uncertain Trumpet (1960), p. 179-180

War, World, Peace, Behavior

“I didn't start with rock or jazz musicians. It was just my great dear friend whom I miss very much who is no more, Yehudi Menuhin, Lord Yehudi Menuhin. We got very friendly from the year 1952. And when I came to Europe and started performing, we cut three albums in those days, known as "West Meets East." And then I did many other things later on, of course. My student George Harrison, who is like my son, and a great friend of mine, whom I taught sitar initially but later on he was so interested he composed a lot of songs being influenced by our Indian music and Indian spiritual and religious teachings, things like that. And I've done a lot of experimentations, which I don't like to call fusion or trying to mix Indian music or Western music like a cocktail to make it interesting. Genuinely what I wanted to do is have the base as pure as possible Indian music within the framework of raga and tala, and use non-Indian musicians, non-Indian instruments for a special sound, for the range, for the volume, for the colors and all that. And I think some of them came out nice. Of course I was very much criticized also for it…”

Ravi Shankar (1920–2012) Indian musician and sitar player

Ravi Shankar during his talk with Gross.

Music, Color, Thinking

“Everything has altered its dimensions, except the world we live in. The more we know of that, the smaller it seems. Time and distance have been abridged, remote countries have become accessible, and the antipodes are upon visiting terms. There is a reunion of the human race; and the family resemblance now that we begin to think alike, dress alike, and live alike, is very striking. The South Sea Islanders, and the inhabitants of China, import their fashions from Paris, and their fabrics from Manchester, while Rome and London supply missionaries to the ‘ends of the earth,’ to bring its inhabitants into ‘one fold, under one Shepherd.’ Who shall write a book of travels now? Livingstone has exhausted the subject. What field is there left for a future Munchausen? The far West and the far East have shaken hands and pirouetted together, and it is a matter of indifference whether you go to the moors in Scotland to shoot grouse, to South America to ride and alligator, or to Indian jungles to shoot tigers-there are the same facilities for reaching all, and steam will take you to either with the equal ease and rapidity. We have already talked with New York; and as soon as our speaking-trumpet is mended shall converse again. ‘To waft a sigh from Indus to the pole,’ is no longer a poetic phrase, but a plain matter of fact of daily occurrence. Men breakfast at home, and go fifty miles to their counting-houses, and when their work is done, return to dinner. They don’t go from London to the seaside, by way of change, once a year; but they live on the coast, and go to the city daily. The grand tour of our forefathers consisted in visiting the principle cities of Europe. It was a great effort, occupied a vast deal of time, cost a large sum of money, and was oftener attended with danger than advantage. It comprised what was then called, the world: whoever had performed it was said to have ‘seen the world,’ and all that it contained. The Grand Tour now means a voyage round the globe, and he who has not made it has seen nothing.”

Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865) Canadian-British politician, judge, and author

The Season-Ticket, An Evening at Cork 1860 p. 1-2.

Men, Money, Books, World

“History knew a midnight, which we may estimate at about the year 1000 A. D., when the human race lost the arts and sciences even to the memory. The last twilight of paganism was gone, and yet the new day had not begun. Whatever was left of culture in the world was found only in the Saracens, and a Pope eager to learn studied in disguise in their unversities, and so became the wonder of the West. At last Christendom, tired of praying to the dead bones of the martyrs, flocked to the tomb of the Saviour Himself, only to find for a second time that the grave was empty and that Christ was risen from the dead. Then mankind too rose from the dead. It returned to the activities and the business of life; there was a feverish revival in the arts and in the crafts. The cities flourished, a new citizenry was founded. Cimabue rediscovered the extinct art of painting; Dante, that of poetry. Then it was, also, that great courageous spirits like Abelard and Saint Thomas Aquinas dared to introduce into Catholicism the concepts of Aristotelian logic, and thus founded scholastic philosophy. But when the Church took the sciences under her wing, she demanded that the forms in which they moved be subjected to the same unconditioned faith in authority as were her own laws. And so it happened that scholasticism, far from freeing the human spirit, enchained it for many centuries to come, until the very possibility of free scientific research came to be doubted. At last, however, here too daylight broke, and mankind, reassured, determined to take advantage of its gifts and to create a knowledge of nature based on independent thought. The dawn of the day in history is know as the Renaissance or the Revival of Learning.”

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804–1851) German mathematician

"Über Descartes Leben und seine Methode die Vernunft Richtig zu Leiten und die Wahrheit in den Wissenschaften zu Suchen," "About Descartes' Life and Method of Reason.." (Jan 3, 1846) C. G. J. Jacobi's Gesammelte werke Vol. 7 https://books.google.com/books?id=_09tAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA309 p.309, as quoted by Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science (1930).

Life, World, Faith, Law

“The kingdom has oil - and lots of it. But that's only part of the story. Saudia Arabia is important to the West not despite of its brutality but because of it, for the Saudi dictatorship's seen as a buttress against "instability" in a strategic region. Riyadh's deeply conservative leaders did everything they could to derail the Arab spring, suppressing an upsurge of democratic sentiment that threatened the regimes with whom the West had always done business.”

Jeff Sparrow (1969) Australian writer

Why the West turns a blind eye to Saudi Arabia's brutality (September 29, 2015)

Spring, Business, Parting

“The creation of Modern France through expansion goes back to the establishment of a small kingdom in the area around Paris in the late tenth century and was not completed until the incorporation of Nice and Savoy in 1860. The existing "hexagon" was the result of a long series of wars and conquests involving the triumph of French language and culture over what once were autonomous and culturally distinctive communities. The assimilation of Gascons, Savoyards, Occitans, Basques, and others helped to sustain the myth that French overseas expansionism in the nineteenth century, especially to North and West Africa, was a continuation of the same assimilationist project.”

George M. Fredrickson (1934–2008) American professor and historian

2000s, National Identity in France and the United States (2003)

War, Communication, Help

“We are not to call for tyranny and bans on freedom. It is obvious that we cannot stop publication of what we view as indecent in our sacred faith…failing to make use of Western freedom of press and other technologies to show the West the values of Islam is intellectual failure and a guilt that should not be linked to Islam.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2000s, Burning embassies is not the way (2008)

Faith, Failure, Freedom

“Well, they raised that horse to be a jumper
He was owned by a mid-west bible thumper.
His preacher was a Louisiana drummer.
Took all winter, to get through the summer.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Ankle Deep
Lyrics, Highway Companion (2006)

Winter, Horse, Summer

“Sri Aurobindo, for one, insisted on the radically different spirit in Sikhism as compared with Islam: 'Those ways of Indian cult which most resemble a popular form of Theism, are still something more; for they do not exclude, but admit the many aspects of God. (…) The later religious forms which most felt the impress of the Islamic idea, like Nanak's worship of the timeless One, Akla, and the reforming creeds of today, born under the influence of the West, yet draw away from the limitations of western or Semitic monotheism. Irresistibly they turn from these infantile conceptions towards the fathomless truth of Vedanta.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

Sri Aurobindo: Foundations of Indian Culture, p.135
2000s, Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple (2002)

God, Truth, Way, Idea

“Our experience shows that today the West is commendably eager to encourage the slightest sign of independence within the Soviet bloc. Let's take advantage of their eagerness… We must make cleverness our national trait… Stop showing a sullen, frowning face and clenched fist to the West. Start making it feel compassion for us, and you'll see how fast Western boycotts change into magnanimity. Let's present Romania as a Latin island in the Slavic sea… Our millenia-old traditions of independence are now up against Moscow's political centrism… A pawn between two superpowers.”

Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918–1989) General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party

Source: Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, p. 8 on 22 February 1972

Feeling, Change, Sea

“While the so-called religious issue is necessarily and properly the chief topic here tonight, I want to emphasize from the outset that we have far more critical issues to face in the 1960 election; the spread of Communist influence, until it now festers 90 miles off the coast of Florida — the humiliating treatment of our President and Vice President by those who no longer respect our power — the hungry children I saw in West Virginia, the old people who cannot pay their doctor bills, the families forced to give up their farms — an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space. These are the real issues which should decide this campaign. And they are not religious issues — for war and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barriers.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1960, Speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association

Hunger, War, Children, People

“Wild Wild West is a comedy dead zone. You stare in disbelief as scenes flop and die. The movie is all concept and no content; the elaborate special effects are like watching money burn on the screen. You know something has gone wrong when a story is about two heroes in the Old West, and the last shot is of a mechanical spider riding off into the sunset.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wild-wild-west-1999 of Wild Wild West (30 June 1999) Reviews, One-star reviews

Money, Dead

“I see that not everyone in the West has understood that the Soviet Union has disappeared from the political map of the world and that a new country has emerged with new humanist and ideological principles at the foundation of its existence.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

interview with TF-1 Television Channel (France) http://www.kremlin.ru/eng/text/speeches/2006/07/12/1829_type82916_108548.shtml, taken on July 12, 2006 2006- 2010

World, Country

“The average Russian of mature age today may some day have the moral satisfaction of seeing his government exercise a power unprecedented in history over the land masses of Asia and Europe. But it is not likely that he will ever know the comforts, in the line of housing, clothing, and other conveniences of civilized living, comparable to those that have existed in the advanced countries of the West. That renunciation of comfort is his involuntary contribution to something: either to the future comfort of his own children or to the increased military power of Russia. He hopes — and we hope with him — that it will not be only the latter.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

Memoirs 1925 - 1950 (1967), Russia — Seven Years Later (September 1944)

Children, Age, Hope, Exercises

“Upper middle-class upbringing has rooted out any element of what might appear to be self-assertion or egoism; good manners is to be like everyone else. So the male of the species becomes accustomed to suppress any stirring of impatience or originality. Shaw once said you can't learn to skate without making a fool of yourself; the British middle-class attitude seems to be that, in that case, you hadn't better skate at all. The result seems to be considerably more oppressive than being brought up in a Jewish ghetto or a west side slum.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Bicameral Critic (1985), p. 112, An integrity born of hope: Notes on Christopher Isherwood (1976)

Fools, Learning, Appearance

“We should … stop the political indoctrination of our children and begin proudly teaching them the real history of the West instead of multiculturalist lies designed to instill shame in our own heritage. We must also prepare the coming generation for the difficult times ahead.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Source: 2010s, Marked for Death (2012), Ch. 13, p. 213

Children, History, Time

“The Arabs had acquired Africans as slaves for centuries, but they were exploited in a feudal context. African slaves in Arab hands became domestics, soldiers, and agricultural serfs. Whatever surplus they produced was not for reinvestment and multiplication of capital, as in the West Indian or North American slave systems but for consumption by the feudal elite. Indeed, slaves were often maintained more for social prestige than for economic benefit.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 225.

“Tell you what, I've been through hundreds of battles. I've seen it all. Which country in the west have I not been to? Everywhere! You should know Mike Wallace, in the U. S. He's way above you all! He and I talked and laughed comfortably. Your media really need to raise your level of knowledge. Got it, or not? I'm anxious for you all, it's true.”

Jiang Zemin (1926) former General Secretary of the Communist Party of China

To Hong Konger reporters (2000), as quoted in "Rare Footage of Former China Leader Jiang Zemin Freak Out (With English Subs!)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GIj2BVJS2A (2013), China Uncensored. 2000s

Way, Knowledge, Country

“Tales of great heroism were being told… at my parents home in Wirt County, West Virginia, it was understaged by media all repeating the story of the "little girl Rambo" from rural West Virginia who went down fighting.
It was not true.”

Jessica Lynch (1983) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

Congressional testimony (2007)

Home, Girl, Parent, Fight

“I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails that form the subject of my own research.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Ever Since Darwin

"Why We Should Not Name Human Races—A Biological View", p. 231
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

Problem

“I think Stone Mountain is amusing, but then again I find most representations of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson outside of Virginia, and, in Jackson's case, West Virginia, to be amusing. Aside from a short period in 1861-62, when Lee was placed in charge of the coastal defense of South Carolina and Georgia, neither general stepped foot in Georgia during the war. Lee cut off furloughs to Georgia's soldiers later in the war because he was convinced that once home they'd never come back. He resisted the dispatch of James Longstreet's two divisions westward to defend northern Georgia, and he had no answer when Sherman operated in the state. It would be better to see Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood on the mountain, although it probably would have been difficult to get those two men to ride together. Maybe Braxton Bragg would have been a better pick, but no one calls him the hero of Chickamauga. Yet Bragg, Johnston, and Hood all attempted to defend Georgia, and they are ignored on Stone Mountain. So is Joe Wheeler, whose cavalry feasted off Georgians in 1864. So is John B. Gordon, wartime hero and postwar Klansman. Given Stone Mountain's history, Klansman Gordon would have been a good choice.”

Brooks D. Simpson (1957) American historian

2010s, The Future of Stone Mountain (July 2015)

Men, War, Home, History

“[A]s I regularly emphasize when discussing Islam, no one is suffering under its doctrine more than Muslims themselves: Muslim jihadists primarily kill other Muslims. And the laws against apostasy, blasphemy, idolatry, and other forms of peaceful expression diminish the freedoms of Muslims far more than those of non-Muslims living in the West. Liberals like [Glenn] Greenwald, who are so eager to swing the flail of Islamophobia, display a sickening insensitivity to the plight of women, homosexuals, and freethinkers throughout the Muslim world. At this moment, millions of women and girls have been abandoned to illiteracy, compulsory marriage, and lives of slavery and abuse under the guise of “multiculturalism” and “religious sensitivity.” And the most liberal Muslim minds are forced into hiding. The best way to address this problem is by no means obvious. But lying about its cause, and defaming those who speak honestly in defense of a global civil society, seems a very unlikely path to a solution.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, Reponse to controverys https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/response-to-controversy (June 21, 2014) 2010s

Women, Marriage, World, Peace

“I think there are three possible scenarios for the future of Chinese writing, in all of which the government plays a major role. In the first, and at present apparently the least likely scenario, the government abandons its hostility to an expanded role for Pinyin and instead fosters a climate of digraphia and biliteracy in which those who can do so become literate in both characters and Pinyin, and those who cannot are at least literate in Pinyin. This is essentially a reversion to the Latinization movement of the 1930s and 1940s, when Mao Zedong and other high Communist Party officials like Xu Teli, the commissioner of education in Yan'an, lent their prestigious support to the New Writing. Such a change within the governing bureaucracy would in all likelihood result in an explosion of activity that might end in Pinyin ascendancy in use over characters in less than a generation.
In the second scenario the government adopts a policy of benign indifference that involves abandoning its hostility toward Pinyin but without actively supporting it, leaving it up to the rival protagonists of the two systems to contest for supremacy among themselves. This is likely to result in a somewhat longer struggle.
In the third scenario the government continues its present policy of repression, resulting in a much more protracted struggle (though surely not as long as the fascinating parallel struggle between Latin and Italian in Italy, where it took 500 [! ] years after Dante’s start in 1292 for academics, the last holdouts, to finally abandon their long resistance and start using Italian in university lectures).47 In this long struggle, PCs and mobile phones and other innovations still to come will undoubtedly allow more and more advocates of writing reform to escape the stranglehold of officialdom, to the point where (in a century or so?) characters are finally relegated to the status of Latin in the West.
My own view is that this is actually the least likely scenario, the most probable one being that the Chinese pragmatism that has manifested itself so strongly in economics will extend further into writing, and that, perhaps sooner rather than later, given the success of the promotion of Mandarin, some influential Party bureaucrats will finally arrive at the conclusion that the "some day in the future" anticipated by Mao has arrived, and that wholehearted Party support should now be unleashed for his anticipated "basic reform."”

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) American linguist

In any case it is basically all a matter of time. And the decisive factor that will seal the ultimate fate of Chinese characters is the new reality, noted by a perceptive observer, that "the PC is mightier than the Pen." "The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006, p. 20-21) http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_reform.pdf "The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006)

Hostility, Fate, Education, Support

“All this was being done by [Nehru] in the name of Secularism, which concept he had picked up from the modern West and perverted to mean the opposite of what it meant there.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

“VII. Let me call your attention to the recent tragedy in New Orleans, whereof the facts are obtained entirely through Pro-Slavery channels. A considerable body of resolute, able-bodied men, held in Slavery by two Rebel sugar-planters in defiance of the Confiscation Act which you have approved, left plantations thirty miles distant and made their way to the great mart of the South-West, which they knew to be the indisputed possession of the Union forces. They made their way safely and quietly through thirty miles of Rebel territory, expecting to find freedom under the protection of our flag. Whether they had or had not heard of the passage of the Confiscation Act, they reasoned logically that we could not kill them for deserting the service of their lifelong oppressors, who had through treason become our implacable enemies. They came to us for liberty and protection, for which they were willing render their best service: they met with hostility, captivity, and murder. The barking of the base curs of Slavery in this quarter deceives no one--not even themselves. They say, indeed, that the negroes had no right to appear in New Orleans armed (with their implements of daily labor in the cane-field); but no one doubts that they would gladly have laid these down if assured that they should be free. They were set upon and maimed, captured and killed, because they sought the benefit of that act of Congress which they may not specifically have heard of, but which was none the less the law of the land which they had a clear right to the benefit of--which it was somebody's duty to publish far and wide, in order that so many as possible should be impelled to desist from serving Rebels and the Rebellion and come over to the side of the Union, They sought their liberty in strict accordance with the law of the land--they were butchered or re-enslaved for so doing by the help of Union soldiers enlisted to fight against slaveholding Treason. It was somebody's fault that they were so murdered--if others shall hereafter stuffer in like manner, in default of explicit and public directions to your generals that they are to recognize and obey the Confiscation Act, the world will lay the blame on you. Whether you will choose to hear it through future History and 'at the bar of God, I will not judge. I can only hope.”

Horace Greeley (1811–1872) American politician and publisher

1860s, The Prayer of the Twenty Millions (1862)

Men, God, Hostility, World

“The Fairie Queene makes cinema out of the west's primary principle: to see is to know; to know is to control. The Spenserian eye cuts, wounds, rapes.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 173

“The lesson from the Cold War is, if you give in to totalitarian impulses once, new demands follow… The West prevailed in the Cold War because we stood by our fundamental values and did not appease totalitarian tyrants.”

Flemming Rose (1958) journalist

"Editor at centre of Mohammed cartoons controversy in Denmark nominated for Nobel Prize", in The Daily Telegraph (4 February 2015) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/denmark/11389398/Editor-at-centre-of-Mohammed-cartoons-controversy-in-Denmark-nominated-for-Nobel-Prize.html

War

“…a few years back, in the 1980s, in our efforts to bring peace and democracy to the world we assisted the freedom fighters of Afghanistan, and in our infinite wisdom we gave money, technology and training to Bin Laden, and now, this very year, we have declared that Bin Laden was responsible for the bombing in Africa. So what is our response, because we allow our President to pursue war too easily? What was the President's response? Some even say that it might have been for other reasons than for national security reasons. So he goes off and bombs Afghanistan, and he goes off and bombs Sudan, and now the record shows that very likely the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan was precisely that, a pharmaceutical plant… As my colleagues know, at the end of this bill I think we get a hint as to why we do not go to Rwanda for humanitarian reasons… I think it has something to do with money, and I think it has something to do with oil… they are asking to set up and check into the funds that Saddam Hussein owes to the west. Who is owed? They do not owe me any money. But I will bet my colleagues there is a lot of banks in New York who are owed a lot of money, and this is one of the goals…
Dana Rohrabacher: This resolution is exactly the right formula… Support democracy. Oppose tyranny. Oppose aggression and repression… We should strengthen the victims so they can defend themselves. These things are totally consistent with America's philosophy, and it is a pragmatic approach as well… Our support for the Mujahedin collapsed the Soviet Union. Yes, there was a price to pay, because after the Soviet Union collapsed, we walked away, and we did not support those elements in the Mujahedin who were somewhat in favor of the freedom and western values. With those people who oppose this effort of pro democracy foreign policy, a pro freedom foreign policy rather than isolation foreign policy, they would have had us stay out of that war in Afghanistan. They would never have had us confronting Soviet aggression in different parts of the world… Mr. Speaker, the gentleman does not think it is proper for us to offer those people who are struggling for freedoms in Iraq against their dictatorship a helping hand?
Ron Paul: Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I think it would be absolutely proper to do that, as long as it came out of the gentleman's wallet and we did not extract it from somebody in this country, a taxpayer at the point of a gun and say, look, bin Laden is a great guy. I want more of your money. That is what we did in the 1980s. That is what the Congress did. They went to the taxpayers, they put a gun to their head, and said, you pay up, because we think bin Laden is a freedom fighter.
Dana Rohrabacher: Well, if the gentleman will further yield, it was just not handled correctly.
Ron Paul: Mr. Speaker, again reclaiming my time, the policy is flawed. The policy is flawed.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Debate on the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, October 5, 1998 http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec98/cr100598.htm 1990s

Wisdom, Money, War, People

“Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the 'official truth'. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as 'functionaires', functionaries, not journalists. Many journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. The problem with those words 'impartiality' and 'objectivity' is that they have lost their dictionary meaning. They've been taken over… [they] now mean the establishment point of view… Journalists don't sit down and think, 'I'm now going to speak for the establishment.' Of course not. But they internalise a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity.”

John Pilger (1939) Australian journalist

The Progressive, Interview with John Pilger http://www.progressive.org/nov02/intv1102.html, November 2002

Truth, World, Problem, Thinking

“I am one of what must be an increasing number who find the portentous moralisings of A. Solzhenitsyn a bore and an irritation. Scarcely any aspect of life in the countries where he passes his voluntary exile has failed to incur his pessimistic censure. Coming from Russia, where freedom of the press has been not so much unknown as uncomprehended since long before the Revolution, he is shocked to discover that a free press disseminated all kinds of false, partial and invented information and that journalists contradict themselves from one day to the next without shame and without apology. Only a Russian would find all that surprising, or fail to understand that freedom which is not misused is not freedom at all.

Like all travellers he misunderstands what he observes. It simply is not true that ‘within the Western countries the press has become more powerful than the legislative power, the executive and the judiciary’. The British electorate regularly disprove this by electing governments in the teeth of the hostility and misrepresentation of virtually the whole of the press. Our modern Munchhausen has, however, found a more remarkable mare’s nest still: he has discovered the ‘false slogan, characteristic of a false era, that everyone is entitled to know everything’. Excited by this discovery he announces a novel and profound moral principle, a new addendum to the catalogue of human rights. ‘People,’ he says, ‘have a right not to know, and it is a more valuable one.’ Not merely morality but theology illuminates the theme: people have, say Solzhenitsyn, ‘the right not to have their divine souls’ burdened with ‘the excessive flow of information’.

Just so. Whatever may be the case in Russia, we in the degenerate West can switch off the radio or television, or not buy a newspaper, or not read such parts of it as we do not wish to. I can assure Solzhenitsyn that the method works admirably, ‘right’ or ‘no right’. I know, because I have applied it with complete success to his own speeches and writings.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Letter in answer to Solzhenitsyn's Harvard statement (21 June 1978), from Reflections of a Statesman. The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (London: Bellew, 1991), p. 577
1970s

Life, Hostility, People, Travel

“Now one of the interesting facts here with respect to intermarriage, and our time is just about up and we will conclude in a moment, is this; that historically, whenever you have had two peoples close together, and one in a position of power and the other in a position of either slavery or inferiority, it takes only a very short time for the two races to merge, no matter how great the hatred between them. Thus, when the Normans took England, there was nothing more hateful to the Anglo Saxon peoples of England than a Norman. And yet, because they were of comparable ability, in spite of that intense hatred, they did merge, ultimately. But when you find two peoples of very different intellectual and cultural levels close together, they can be together generation after generation, and the amount of merging is very slight. So that there is no disappearing of one as against the other. This is why the Negro did not disappear in the South. Had the slaves been, say of another racial group, it would not have taken more than a hundred years of slavery for the two groups to have merged. But you had a couple of hundred years of slavery in the south, and the Negro did not disappear. So this is the remarkable fact. As a result, when you hear stories told about how the Negro women were exploited and so on, these stories tend to be exaggerations. As a matter of fact, the truth was usually the other way, it was very difficult to raise children in the south, or to rear children in the south, because one way of promotion was to capture the interest of a white boy or a white man. Now this goes counter to the Marxist thesis, but when you study the history of the west you discover that one of the best things that ever happened incidentally to the morality of the upper classes was modern inventions which abolished the need for servants in the home. Because one of the major problems that existed was the seduction of the boys and the men in a household by servant girls.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, The Law of Divorce (n.d.)

Women, Men, Hate, Children

“We…would nevertheless make it clear that entirely independent political structures are impossible here [in the Baltic]…They cannot lead an isolated existence between the colossi of West and East. We hope that they will seek and find this support with us. The German occupation will have to continue for a long time, lest the anarchy we have just been combating should arise again. We shall have to safeguard the position of the Germans, a position consistent with their economic and cultural achievements…Herr Scheiddemann, said that we have made ourselves new enemies in the world through our push in the East…Had we continued the negotiations, we should still be sitting with Herr Trotski in Brest Litovsk. As it is, the advance has brought us peace in a few days and I think we should recognise this and not delude ourselves, particularly as regards the East, that if by resolutions made here in the Reichstag or through our Government's acceptance of the entirely welcome initiative of His Holiness the Pope, we had agreed to a peace without indemnities and annexations, we should have had peace in the East. In view of our situation as a whole, I should regard a fresh peace offer as an evil. My chief objection is against the detachment of the Belgian question from the whole complex of the question of peace. It is precisely if Belgium is not to be annexed that Belgium is the best dead pledge we hold, notably as regards England. The restoration of Belgium before we conclude peace with England seems to me an utter political and diplomatic impossibility…There is a great difference between the first set of terms at Brest-Litovsk and the ultimatum that we have now presented, and the blame for this change rests with those who refused to come to an agreement with Germany and who, consequently, must now feel her power. We are just as free to choose between understanding and the exploitation of victory in the case of the West, and I hope that these eight or fourteen days that have elapsed between the first set of peace terms in Brest-Litovsk and the second set, may also have an educational effect in that direction.”

Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Speech in the Reichstag (25 February 1918), quoted in W. M. Knight-Patterson, Germany. From Defeat to Conquest 1913-1933 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1945), pp. 159-160
1910s

World, Education, Peace, Hope

“I fall into the category of Weird West, but I think it may be more of a “Down West” as I’d like to call it, for its sense of macabre western humor.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

interview with Lorin Morgan-Richards by Laura LaVelle of Newswhistle (28 November 2017).

Thinking, Sense

“I have not suggested that we should launch an armed attack on Iran. I don't think that's necessary. I don't think we should do anything that would either offend or tickle Iranian national pride. We're doing both at the present time. We're offending them by saying you mustn't have nuclear weapons, and we're tickling them by allowing their leaders to present themselves as defying the mighty West, standing alone and successfully defying the United States. I think that's the wrong way to do it. There are other things that one can do to indicate displeasure and to help those there who want a big change.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis (2006)

Way, Thinking, Change, Time

“For the West, the enemy was not "socialism" but capitalism. How to tame and subdue the polar bear, how to take over the talent, the science, the technology, how to buy out the human capital, how to acquire the intellectual property rights?”

Michel Chossudovsky (1946) Canadian economist

Source: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003), Chapter 16, The "Thirdworldization" of the Russian Federation, p. 240

Science

“You have to ask yourself, 'What was the desire of the people who, after more than 40 years of Soviet oppression, became free?' They didn’t want to be pawns between a residual West that ended somewhere on the borders of the old West Germany and a resurgent Russia. They wanted to be part of the democratic West and, eventually, of the European Union. Those are perfectly legitimate aspirations. This is no threat to Russia –- except to those Russians who cannot conceive of Russia as anything else but a dominant empire that rules not only over the Russian people but over those adjoining Russian territory.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński (1928–2017) Polish-American political scientist

Interview in The Huffington Post - NATO Should Stop Putin From Restoring Czarist Empire, Zbigniew Brzezinski Says http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/03/zbigniew-brzezinski-nato-putin-ukraine_n_5760068.html (September 3, 2014). Commenting on criticisms of NATO expansion to Eastern Europe.

People, Parting

“Republic of the West,
Enlightened, free, sublime,
Unquestionably best
Production of our time.”

James Kenneth Stephen (1859–1892) English poet, tutor to Prince Albert Victor

England and America.

Time

“There is no way a military commander like el-Sisi who has no political background should be expected to believe in democracy as we see it in the West. El-Sisi, rightly or wrongly, is a reflection of the mood on the street, which has discovered that the cost of democracy is way too high.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

Negad Borai, Egyptian rights activist; as reported in Al Arabiya, 20 Dec 2013 http://english.alarabiya.net/en/perspective/features/2013/12/20/Egypt-Leaks-help-not-hurt-el-Sissi-s-image.html. About

Way, Democracy, Mood

“Extremists in your midst spread propaganda claiming that the West is engaged in a war against Islam. This propaganda is false, and its purpose is to confuse you and justify acts of terror. This propaganda is false, and its purpose is to confuse you and justify acts of terror. We respect Islam, but we will protect our people from those who pervert Islam to sow death and destruction. Our goal is to help you build a more tolerant and hopeful society that honors people of all faiths and promotes the peace.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2006, United Nations General Assembly speech (September 2006)

Death, War, People, Peace

“A major problem is the characterization of the government in Seoul as liberal, as if it were no less committed to constitutional values and opposed to totalitarianism than the West German social democrats were in the Cold War. This makes Westerners think, "North Korea can't take over the South without a war, but it knows it can’t win one, therefore it must now be arming only to protect itself."”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Interview with The Conversation (September 2017)

War, Problem, Thinking

“The really good music, whether of the East or of the West, cannot be analyzed.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Interview with Rabindranath Tagore (14 April 1930), published in The Religion of Man (1930) by Rabindranath Tagore, p. 222, and in The Tagore Reader (1971) edited by Amiya Chakravarty
1930s

Music

“When I was growing up here in the wild west, if a young man got a girl pregnant out of wedlock, they got married, and the whole darned neighborhood was involved in that wedding. I mean, you just didn't allow that sort of thing to happen, you know? I mean, they wanted that child to be brought up in a home with two parents, you know, that whole story. And so I happen to believe that can happen again.”

William Napoli (1948) American politician

In a 2006 interview regarding his support of the 2006 South Dakota state ban on abortion. PBS NewsHour http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june06/abortion_3-03.html (3 March 2006)

Home, Girl, Parent, Wedding

“Sin must be called by its name. Communism is one of the most dangerous sins in the world today. Every gospel that does not denounce it is not the pure gospel. The Underground Church denounces it, risking liberty and life. The less have we to be silent in the West.”

Richard Wurmbrand (1909–2001) Romanian Christian minister of Jewish descent

Source: Tortured For Christ (1967), p. 75.

Life, World, Communication

“Let us not deceive ourselves: our talent profile is nowhere near that of, say, the Jews or the Japanese in America. The exceptional number of Nobel Prize winners who are Jews is no accident. It is also no accident that a high percentage, sometimes 50%, of faculty members in the top American universities on both the east and west coasts are Jews. And the number of high calibre Japanese academics, professionals, and business executives is out of all proportion to the percentage of Japanese in the total American population”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

The Search for Talent, 12 August 1982 http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/speeches/record-details/73eb9163-115d-11e3-83d5-0050568939ad 1980s

Business, Universe

“Especially the CPM government in West Bengal has been ruthlessly using the constitutional discrimination against Hindu schools for justifying take-overs. But have these organizations appealed to Hindu society to come to their rescue? Have they launched, or asked politicians to launch, a campaign to end this discrimination? Apparently they have absolutely no confidence in the willingness of Hindu politicians to take up even an impeccably justified Hindu cause.
So, I think Hindu politicians should make this their number one issue. Article 30 is far more unjust and harmful than Article 370 which gives a special status to Kashmir. You can better lose that piece of territory than to lose your next generations. It is also a good exercise in separating the genuine secularists from the Hindu-baiters. The demand for equality between all religions in education merely seeks the abrogation of an injustice against the Hindus, so it cannot be construed as directed against the minorities. It wants to stop a blatant case of discrimination on the basis of religion, so everyone who comes out in support of the present form of Article 30, will stand exposed as a supporter of communal discrimination. It is truly a watershed issue.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

Education, School, Religion, Exercises

“Oh, young Lochinvar is come out of the West,
Through all the wide Border his steed was the best.”

Walter Scott Marmion

Canto V, st. 12 (Lochinvar, st. 1).
Marmion (1808)

“For four or five centuries, Islam was the most brilliant civilization in the Old World. (…) At its higher level the golden age of Muslim civilization was both an immense scientific success and a exceptional revival of ancient philosophy. These was not its only triumphs; literature was another: but they eclipse the rest. First, science: it was there that the Saracens (…) made the most original contributions. These, in brief, were nothing less than trigonometry and algebra (with its significantly Arab name). (…) Equally distinguished were Islam's mathematical geographers, its astronomical observatories and instruments (…). The Muslims also deserve high marks for optics, for chemistry (…) and for pharmacy. More than half the remedies and healing aids used by the West came from Islam (…). Muslim medical skill was incontestable. (…) In the field of philosophy, what took place was rediscovery - a return, essentially of the peripatetic philosophy. The scope of this rediscovery, however, was not limited to copying and handling on, valuable as that undoubtely was. It also involved continuing, elucidating and creating.”

Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) French historian and a leader of the Annales School

A History of Civilizations , Penguin, 1995, p. 73-81

Age, World, Literature, Mathematics

“This world materialist, hedonist and exhibitionist it doesn't even thrill me; and, considering that he reads me, you/he/she should know him/it. But I would want to know the system that you have in mind, and don't have the courage or the ability to propose. A Franciscan world? Beautiful: but looked around you, and tell me if you see a saio. A revised and correct communism? It would make the end of the other, even if he/she won't succeed in repeating its disasters. Believe me G.: the only acceptable social and economic system today, in West, it is that based on the market: a checked capitalism and moderate, to intend us. It is desirable that it may also correct: and not this always happens, it is true. The trouble is that the capitalism is served as the capitalists - and those, must admit, they are often difficult to be digested. You don't try to confuse me the ideas, therefore. You won't succeed us. I probably have three times his/her years, and I have seen where they conduct these generic pulls against "the multinationals": sooner or later, someone will depose the bar and he/she will take the gun. I forgot: I sign my opinions, she throws the stone and it hides the hand. All brave ones so, you boys of Seattle?”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

Corriere della Sera, 9 June 2001.
2000s - 2010s

World, Beauty, Boy, Communication

“They tell me thou art rich, my country: gold
In glittering flood has poured into thy chest;
Thy flocks and herds increase, thy barns are pressed
With harvest, and thy stores can hardly hold
Their merchandise; unending trains are rolled
Along thy network rails of East and West;
Thy factories and forges never rest;
Thou art enriched in all things bought and sold!

But dost thou prosper? Better news I crave.
O dearest country, is it well with thee
Indeed, and is thy soul in health?
A nobler people, hearts more wisely brave,
And thoughts that lift men up and make them free,—
These are prosperity and vital wealth!”

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) American diplomat

America's Prosperity (October 1, 1916).

Men, People, Health, Art

“My dear Hardman,
It was pleasant… I am sorry that your Oriental venture has not been going as well as you expected. But, then, I think that the days when a man could expect to make his fortune in the East are dead and gone. Indeed, the time seems to have come for the reverse of the old process to apply, and for the East to dominate the West.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

Thinking, Time, Dead

“If we do not solve our civilizational crisis -- a disintegrating culture, dying populations, and invasions unresisted -- the children born in 2006 will witness in their lifetimes the death of the West. In our hearts we know what must be done. We must stop the invasion. But do our leaders have the vision and will to do it?”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, State of Emergency (2006)

Death, Children, Heart

“The following sailors assigned to a West Coast-based Naval Special Warfare unit were killed:”

Michael Savage (1942) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, and Author

:
Special Warfare Operator Petty Officer 1st Class (SEAL) Jesse D. Pittman, 27, of Ukiah, Calif., and
Special Warfare Operator Petty Officer 2nd Class (SEAL) Nicholas P. Spehar, 24, of Saint Paul, Minn.
The Savage Nation (1995- ), 2013

“Leading a life like that got me thinking about some big questions. It is sometimes said that Americans and Europeans differ a lot and that they are growing further apart. I disagree—we share the same fundamentals, and that binds us together. Western societies guarantee their citizens something that no other civilizations grant them: privacy. It's one of those things you tend to take for granted unless you lose it. The importance of privacy is unique to Western society with its notion of the sovereign individual. In stark contrast to Western norms, Islam robs people of their privacy and dignity. Islamic societies—including Islamic enclaves in the West—exert tight social control that is indicative of the totalitarian character of Islam.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Source: 2010s, Marked for Death (2012), Ch. 2, pp. 22–23

Life, People, Question, Thinking

“I do not pretend to be a man who knows no fear, but when I heard about van Gogh's murder I can honestly say I felt anger, not fear. I defiantly proclaimed to the journalists that I would not allow anyone to intimidate me into silence. I was angry at the assassin and his accomplices, I was angry at Islam—this doctrine that has people murdered for their opinions—and I was angry at the naive politicians, journalists, and so-called intellectuals in the West who refuse to admit how dangerous Islam is and how fundamentally incompatible it is with our Western values and ideals.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Source: 2010s, Marked for Death (2012), Ch. 2: "On Freedom", pp. 10–11

People, Fear, Silence, Anger

“The Times was rushing to assure its readers that "prominent Islamic scholars and theologians in the West say unequivocally that nothing in Islam countenances the Sept. 11 actions." (That's if you set aside Muhammad's many specific instructions to kill nonbelievers whenever possible).”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2004, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) (2004)

Time