Quotes about western
page 3

“…The result of burning embassies and treading on flags is the self-same objective these drawings wanted to highlight. It was their intention to say that Muslims are terrorists and their religion is a peril to Western civilization.”

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

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

Religion, Drawing

“Ki is a very complex word… and even more difficult to translate to westerners.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

Aikido: The Co-Ordination of Mind and Body for Self-Defence (1966), as quoted in "What is Ki?" at Brisbane Aikido Republic http://www.aikidorepublic.com/aikiphysics/what-is-ki

“The concepts of purposive behavior and teleology have long been associated with a mysterious, self-perfecting or goal-seeking capacity or final cause, usually of superhuman or super-natural origin. To move forward to the study of events, scientific thinking had to reject these beliefs in purpose and these concepts of teleological operations for a strictly mechanistic and deterministic view of nature. This mechanistic conception became firmly established with the demonstration that the universe was based on the operation of anonymous particles moving at random, in a disorderly fashion, giving rise, by their multiplicity, to order and regularity of a statistical nature, as in classical physics and gas laws. The unchallenged success of these concepts and methods in physics and astronomy, and later in chemistry, gave biology and physiology their major orientation. This approach to problems of organisms was reinforced by the analytical preoccupation of the Western European culture and languages. The basic assumptions of our traditions and the persistent implications of the language we use almost compel us to approach everything we study as composed of separate, discrete parts or factors which we must try to isolate and identify as potential causes. Hence, we derive our preoccupation with the study of the relation of two variables. We are witnessing today a search for new approaches, for new and more comprehensive concepts and for methods capable of dealing with the large wholes of organisms and personalities.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

L.K. Frank (1948) "Foreword". In L. K. Frank, G. E. Hutchinson, W. K. Livingston, W. S. McCulloch, & N. Wiener, Teleological mechanisms. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sc., 1948, 50, 189-96; As cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) "General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications". p. 16-17

Law, Behavior, Search, Fashion

“One widely articulated paradigm was based on the assumption that the end of the Cold War meant the end of significant conflict in global politics and the emergence of one relatively harmonious world. The most widely discussed formulation of this model was "the "end of history" thesis advanced by Francis Fukuyama. "We may be witnessing, Fukuyama argued, "… the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." … The future will be devoted not to great exhilarating struggles over ideas but rather to resolving mundane economic and technical problems. And, he concluded rather sadly, it will all be rather boring.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 1: The New Era in World Politics, § 3 : Other Worlds?, p. 31

War, World, Democracy, History

“How full and rich a world
Theirs to inhabit is—
Sweet scent of grass and bloom,
Playmates’ glad symphony,
Cool touch of western wind,
Sunshine’s divine caress.

How should they know or feel
They are in darkness?

But, oh, the miracle!
If a Redeemer came,
Laid finger on their eyes—
One touch and what a world,
New-born in loveliness!”

Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) British writer

Poem: Blind Children

World, Feeling, Grass

“It confirms my idea that you also need more liberal gun laws. Guns lead to a polite society, as we like to say in the United States. And I think that all of western Canada would agree with me.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"U of O Speech Cancelled" in The Ottawa Citizen (24 March 2010) http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/speech+cancelled/2718883/story.html. 2010

Law, Idea, Thinking

“In what people irritatingly call "iconic" terms, Bin Laden certainly had no rival. The strange, scrofulous quasi-nobility and bogus spirituality of his appearance was appallingly telegenic, and it will be highly interesting to see whether this charisma survives the alternative definition of revolution that has lately transfigured the Muslim world. The most tenaciously lasting impression of all, however, is that of his sheer irrationality. What had the man thought he was doing? Ten years ago, did he expect, let alone desire, to be in a walled compound in dear little Abbottabad?…Ten years ago, I remind you, he had a gigantic influence in one rogue and failed state—Afghanistan—and was exerting an increasing force over its Pakistani neighbor. Taliban and al-Qaida sympathizers were in senior positions in the Pakistani army and nuclear program and had not yet been detected as such. Huge financial subventions flowed his way, often through official channels, from Saudi Arabia and other gulf states…. Then, not only did he run away from Afghanistan, leaving his deluded followers to be killed in very large numbers, but he chose to remain a furtive and shady figure, on whom the odds of a successful covert "hit," or bought-and-paid-for betrayal, were bound to lengthen every day…It seems thinkable that he truly believed his own mad propaganda, often adumbrated on tapes and videos, especially after the American scuttle from Somalia. The West, he maintained, was rotten with corruption and run by cabals of Jews and homosexuals. It had no will to resist. It had become feminized and cowardly. One devastating psychological blow and the rest of the edifice would gradually follow the Twin Towers in a shower of dust. Well, he and his fellow psychopaths did succeed in killing thousands in North America and Western Europe, but in the past few years, their main military triumphs have been against such targets as Afghan schoolgirls, Shiite Muslim civilians, and defenseless synagogues in Tunisia and Turkey. Has there ever been a more contemptible leader from behind, or a commander who authorized more blanket death sentences on bystanders?”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2011-05-02
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/05/death_of_a_madman.html
Death of a Madman
Slate
1091-2339
2010s, 2011

Death, People, World, Way

“Hitherto, crowded countries…like the United Kingdom and Western Europe, have had this outstanding vulnerability to carry. But the hydrogen bomb, with its vast range of destruction and the even wider area of contamination, would be effective also against nations whose population hitherto has been so widely dispersed over large land areas as to make them feel that they were not in any danger at all. They, too, become highly vulnerable … Here again we see the value of deterrents, immune against surprise and well understood by all persons on both sides—I repeat "on both sides"—who have the power to control events. That is why I have hoped for a long time for a top level conference where these matters could be put plainly and bluntly from one friendly visitor to the conference to another. Then it may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1955-03-01/debates/ae81a20b-68e7-42d0-8cbb-d9589f53fc0d/Defence#1899 in the House of Commons (1 March 1955) Post-war years (1945–1955)

Hope, Feeling, Time, Personality

“But I venture to submit, my lord, that the consideration which the people of the Western countries receive in consequence of their voting power should be available to us, in matters of finance at any rate, through an “intelligent anticipation” – to use a phrase of Your Lordship’s- of our reasonable wishes on the part of the government.”

Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915) social and political leader during the Indian Independence Movement

He commented criticizing the heavy taxation that was creating surpluses and the need to have a say in the matter by the representatives of the people. Pages=696-97
Sources of Indian Tradition

People, Intelligence, Parting, Country

“Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.
Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents — preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away.
Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless.
That is because they are intrinsically systems problems-undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.”

Donella Meadows (1941–2001) American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer

Pages 3-4.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

Wisdom, Hunger, War, People

“12 principles for a 21st century conservatism.
1. The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid.
2. Peaceful social being is preferable to isolation and to war. In consequence, it justly and rightly demands some sacrifice of individual impulse and idiosyncrasy.
3. Hierarchies of competence are desirable and should be promoted.
4. Borders are reasonable. Likewise, limits on immigration are reasonable. Furthermore, it should not be assumed that citizens of societies that have not evolved functional individual-rights predicated polities will hold values in keeping with such polities.
5. People should be paid so that they are able and willing to perform socially useful and desirable duties.
6. Citizens have the inalienable right to benefit from the result of their own honest labor.
7. It is more noble to teach young people about responsibilities than about rights.
8. It is better to do what everyone has always done, unless you have some extraordinarily valid reason to do otherwise.
9. Radical change should be viewed with suspicion, particularly in a time of radical change.
10. The government, local and distant, should leave people to their own devices as much as possible.
11. Intact heterosexual two-parent families constitute the necessary bedrock for a stable polity.
12. We should judge our political system in comparison to other actual political systems and not to hypothetical utopias.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Speech of Jordan Peterson at Carleton Place for the Conservative Party of Ontario <nowiki>[12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyw4rTywyY0</nowiki>] Concepts

War, People, Family, Peace

“Wisdom: The first error is that of the southern people, and it consists in holding that these eastern and western places are real places. … give no quarter to that thought, whether it threatens you with fear, or tempts you with hopes. For this is Superstition and all who believe it will come in the end to the swamps to the south and the jungles to the far south. Part of the same error is to think that the Landlord is a real man:”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 117
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

Wisdom, Thinking, People, Error

“If Western firms pay developing countries' suppliers' starvation wages in order to feed the West's ever increasing consumer demand, can we call that ‘partnership’?”

Begum Aga Khan (1963) German philanthropist

International Business and Leadership Symposium address

Partnership, Country

“…Western Civilization began to expand in 976. …The economic expansion was achieved chiefly by specialization and exchange… commercialization.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“While the new physics was developing in the 20th century, the mechanistic Cartesian world view and the principles of Newtonian physics maintained their strong influence on Western scientific thinking, and even today many scientists still hold to the mechanistic paradigm, although physicists themselves have gone beyond it.
However, the new conception of the universe that has emerged from modern physics does not mean that Newtonian physics is wrong, or that quantum theory, or relativity theory, is right. Modern science has come to realize that all scientific theories are approximations to the true nature of reality; and that each theory is valid for a certain range of phenomena.”

Fritjof Capra book The Turning Point

Source: The Turning Point (1982), p. 93.

World, Nature, Thinking, Reality

“Because we believe that somewhere in the nest of paradigms contained in the phrase “missional church” lies nothing less that the future viability of Western Christianity.”

Alan Hirsch (1959) South African missionary

Source: The Faith of Leap (2011), p. 155

Future

“Take Kentucky. Kentucky's legislature voted not to secede, and early in the war, Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston ventured through the western part of the state and found 'no enthusiasm as we imagined and hoped but hostility … in Kentucky.' Eventually, 90,000 Kentuckians would fight for the United States, while 35,000 fought for the Confederate States. Nevertheless, according to historian Thomas Clark, the state now has 72 Confederate monuments and only two Union ones.”

James W. Loewen (1942) American historian

2015, Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? Because our textbooks and monuments are wrong (2015)

Hostility, War, Hope, Imagination

“Western media only intensified the climate of fear and insecurity”

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

Paragraph 25
2006, Letter to George W. Bush, 2006

Fear

“Darwinian evolution may be the most truthful and powerful idea ever generated by Western Science, but if we continue to illustrate our conviction with an indefensible, unsupported, entirely speculative, and basically rather silly story, then we are clothing a thing of beauty in rags - and we should be ashamed, "for the apparel oft proclaims the man."”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"The Tallest Tale", p. 318
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Truth, Beauty, Idea, Science

“Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range... come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River...”

Ken Kesey book Sometimes a Great Notion

Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) First lines

“Many forms of new knowledge are potentially dangerous, the energy of the atom being a preeminent example. But instead of curtailing inquiry Western societies have in general assumed that the better policy is to continue exploration in confidence that the rewards can be reaped and the risks managed. It is hard to see why exploration of the human genome and its racial variations should be made an exception to this principle, even though researchers and their audience must first develop the words and concepts to discuss a dangerous subject objectively.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014)

Confidence, Knowledge

“"The language spoken by these early Macedonians has become a controversial issue in modern times. It seems not to have been so in antiquity. As we have seen, Hesiod made Magnes and Macedon first cousins of the Hellenes, and he therefore regarded them as speakers of a dialect (or dialects) of the Greek language. That he was correct in the case of the Magnetes has been proved by the discovery of early inscriptions in an Aeolic dialect in their area of eastern Thessaly. Then, late in the fifth century a Greek historian, Hellanicus, who visited the court of Macedonia, made the father of Macedon not Zeus but Aeolus, a thing which he could not have done unless he knew that the Macedonians were speaking an Aeolic dialect of Greek. A remarkable confirmation of their Greek speech comes from the Persians, who occupied Macedonia as part of their conquests in Europe c.510-480. […] Disagreements over this issue have developed for various reasons. In the second half of the fifth century Thucydides regarded the semi-nomadic, armed northerners of Epirus and western Macedonia as "barbarians", and he called them such in his history of events in 429 and 423. The word was understood by some scholars to mean "non-Greek-speakers" rather than "savages." They were shown to be mistaken in 1956, when inscriptions of 370-68, containing lists of Greek personal names and recording in the Greek language some acts of the Molossians, were found at Dodona in Epirus. This discovery proved beyond dispute that one of Thucydides "barbarian" tribes" of Epirus, the Molossians, was speaking Greek at the time of which he was writing. Demosthenes too called the Macedonians "barbarians" in the 340s. That this was merely a term of abuse has been proved recently by the discovery at Aegae (Vergina) of seventy-four Greek names and one Thracian name on funerary headstones inscribed in Greek letters.”

N. G. L. Hammond (1907–2001) British classical scholar

"The Miracle That Was Macedonia", Palgrave Macmillan (September 1991)

History, Time, Parting, Personality

“I bent over a chair and was given three of the best with my trousers on. I did not think he lightened his strokes. I have never understood why Western educationists are so much against corporal punishment. It did my fellow students and me no harm.”

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

The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, 1998
1990s

Thinking

“Slavery existed all over the world. The Egyptians had slaves. The Chinese had slaves. The Africans did. American Indians had slaves long before Columbus. And tragically, slavery continues today in many countries. What's uniquely Western is the abolition of slavery. And what's uniquely American is the fighting of a great war to end it.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Documentary films, America: Imagine the World Without Her (2014)

War, World, Fight, Country

“When I am in India I gravitate to the poor and forgotten; in the fields I love photographing the workers who eek out a living and a little bit of food from the earth. All of this has everything to do with this area, as Western New York has many people working in the fields as migrant families.”

Manuel Rivera-Ortiz (1968) American photographer

Buffalo Rising interview (2007)

Love, People, Family, Food

“You know why I go to museums on my day off? It restores my sense of Western Civilization, of History—it gives me a reason to go on… But at the same time I think, "Is this gonna be here 50 years from now, with the Muslims taking over the world? What will they do if they become a majority in America? What, burn the museums, throw the paintings into a bonfire?"”

Michael Savage book The Savage Nation

I mean, I really ask myself how this can go on.
The Savage Nation
The Savage Nation (1995- ), 2015-01-23
Radio
2015

World, History, Thinking, Sense

“Going through the history of economic, cultural and human exchanges in the most cultivated, tumultuous, lively, and cosmopolitan part of the world-Western Europe being its centre-we discover a wide unted universe”

Nico Perrone (1935) Italian historian and writer

Source: European and American patterns in a conflictive development, p. 19

World, History, Universe, Parting

“The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with the culture - free markets and individual rights - that has produced the greatest alleviation of suffering; the greatest liberation from want, ignorance, and superstition; and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all human life. This pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of Communism without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition, or a reevaluation of self, soul, and mind.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

As quoted in "Notable & Quotable: The Victims of Socialism" https://web.archive.org/web/20160217064704/http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-the-victims-of-socialism-1455667462 (17 February 2016), The Wall Street Journal, A13 2000s, Can There Be an "After Socialism"? (2003)

Life, Soul, History, Communication

“The carnage will eventually come to an end, but the Western powers will carry the historical guilt for not promptly providing the most intensive preventative measures against Germany's incessant attack-politics. Possibilities existed, but no actions were taken.”

Friedrich Kellner (1885–1970) German Justice inspector

May 29, 1940; Vol. 1, p. 73.
Diary (1939 - 1945)

“I mean it; the Bible-god of western monotheism is just like that horrible kid. Who would want to be trapped in a house with an indomitable telepathic despot and have to guard your thoughts –or be voluntarily mindless- and endure that existence forever and ever? Religion doesn’t want to talk about life either. They hate practically everything that goes on in life. They want to talk about death and pretend that THAT is life. And those of us who know life, live life, and love life, they accuse of being dead already. Every aspect of their world-view is upside-down or backwards -as DogmaDebate brilliantly illustrated. What these religionists preach actually diminishes the very meaning of life. Humans tend to value most that which is rare and fleeting. Such is life. The more you have of anything, the less valuable it is. They’re claiming immortality for eternity, rendering the value of life infinitely worthless. They sell their imaginary after-life as if it is sooo much better than this period of discomfort we have to endure before we achieve paradise. Having to toil in this fallen, sin-corrupted, dead-and-damned world. They hate existence itself so much that they actually long for the end-of-days, and only seem to get happy when they think Armageddon is upon us.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Fukkenuckabee http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2012/12/21/fukkenuckabee/ (December 21, 2012)

Love, Life, Death, God

“There were other gurus and other lessons, but not until I met Iyengar did I take up the study regularly. My first meeting with him was like the casting of a spell. We made each other's acquaintance in Mumbai. He appeared in my rooms one morning and straightaway made it clear that the "audition" to follow was mine as much as his. For all my celebrity, to him I was just another Western body knotted through and through.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Source: Yehudi's Yoga http://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=3779,hinduismtoday.com

Study, Appearance

“Beatles' "aryan" music removed any trace of black music from rock and roll: it replaced syncopated african rhythm with linear western melody, and lusty negro attitudes with cute white-kid smiles.”

Piero Scaruffi (1955) Italian writer

Beatles The History of Rock Music http://www.scaruffi.com/vol1/beatles.html

Smile, Music

“The centrally planned economies, dissatisfied with the outcome of their own efforts to achieve good economic growth performance, have changed strategy and decided to import high technology from the West. as well as necessary grains to supplement their domestic agicultural supplies. This new approach has opened their economies to Western inflation because imports have been reflecting rising world price. Gold and oil sales at correspondingly rising prices have been used by the Soviet Union to finance part of their import needs. but they are fully enmeshed in world inflation accounting in balancing rising export prices.”

Lawrence Klein (1920–2013) American economist

"Some Economic Scenarios for the 1980's," 1980

World, Effort, Change, Parting

“The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

A shattering moment in America's fall from power (2008)

War, Communication, Country

“The episode in Sodom is undoubtedly the earliest account in human history of the entrapment of homosexuals, a strategy widely practiced by the law enforcement agencies of modern Western countries, especially those of the United States. In effect, the men of Sodom were entrapped by two strangers, who in truth were not travelers but angels, that is to say, God’s plain-clothesmen. These agents of the Biblical vice-squad wasted no time punishing the offenders.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 162.

Men, God, Truth, Law

“When Nikita Khrushchev wrapped himself in the bloody mantle of the Czars he broke Hungary, he broke the little Communist parties over the western world, and he broke the hearts of many honest men who had trusted a little too far, a little too long.”

James Cameron (journalist) (1911–1985) British journalist

The News Chronicle, November 14, 1956

Men, World, Heart

“The non-institutional elements of Bretton Woods, such as the gold-backed dollar standard, have gone by the wayside, but the World Bank and the IMF soldier on… Western governments tax their citizens to fund the World Bank, lend this money to corrupt Third World dictators who abscond with the funds, and then demand repayment which is extracted through taxation from poor Third World citizens, rather than from the government officials responsible for the embezzlement. It is in essence a global transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. Taxpayers around the world are forced to subsidize the lavish lifestyles of Third World dictators and highly-paid World Bank bureaucrats who don't even pay income tax.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

World Bank Hearing, May 22, 2007 http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2007/cr052307.htm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNZdba8hDDY 2000s, 2006-2009

Money, World, Wealth

“Tomas Bata and Bata-System of management are not well known today even though their success and heritage value are undisputed and awe-inspiring in the New Economy. T. Bata died in 1932 in a plane crash. By the time of his death he had introduced fundamental changes in management philosophy and techniques. Many of Bata approaches have been ‘discovered’ during the last 20 years by the Western World as part of what has become known as the ‘Quality Revolution’. Quality management was practiced by the Bata enterprises since before the World War I, through 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, well before the ‘gurus of quality’ even started thinking about the subject. Japanese visitors came to Zlin to learn about the Bata system well before the World War II. In addition, Bata executives traveled to Japan in 1937 and predicted the industrial rise of Japan at that time.”

Myron Tribus (1921–2016) American academic

Myron Tribus (2000), cited in: Fisher, N. I., and V. N. Nair. "Quality management and quality practice: Perspectives on their history and their future." Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry 25.1 (2009): 1-28.

Death, War, World, Travel

“The doubts that Mr. Balfour expressed nearly thirty years ago, in an Address delivered in Glasgow, have not, so far, been answered. And it is probable that many people, to whom six years ago the notion of a sudden decline or break-up of our western civilisation, as a result not of cosmic forces but of its own development, would have appeared almost fantastic, will feel much less confident to-day, notwithstanding the fact that the leading nations of the world have instituted a league of peoples for the prevention of war, the measure to which so many high priests of Progress have looked forward as meaning a long stride forward on the road to Utopia.”

J. B. Bury (1861–1927) Irish historian and freethinker

referring to Arthur Balfour's A Fragment on Progress https://books.google.com/books?id=voxJAAAAYAAJ (1891) The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry Into Its Origin and Growth (1921)

War, People, World, Feeling

“But he was a keen-eyed observer. He noticed that the Portuguese had landed artillery to protect the area in which Christians lived. On a visit to a Portuguese vessel to see Father Coelho he observed that the ship, though small, was heavily armed. He was also well aware of the interest that the western daimyos were manifesting in the arms and equipment of the Portuguese and of their attempts to strengthen themselves by friendship with the foreigners. Hideyoshi acted with firmness and in 1587 the activities of the missionaries were prohibited throughout the length and breadth of Japan.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

Friendship

“They're cheering a young lad, the champion playboy of the Western World.”

John Millington Synge The Playboy of the Western World

Act III.
The Playboy of the Western World (1907)

World

“In general, Western culture is deeply post-Christian. It is the product of the Enlightenment, which introduced into European culture the leaven of secularism that has by now permeated Western society. While most of the original Enlightenment thinkers were themselves theists, the majority of Western intellectuals today no longer considers theological knowledge to be possible. The person who follows the pursuit of reason unflinchingly toward its end will be atheistic or, at best, agnostic.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

[2008, July, God Is Not Dead Yet, Christianity Today, 52, 7, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/july/13.22.html?start=5]

Knowledge, Personality

“What makes the spectacle of Western bourgeois society so repulsive is the waste and squander of resources on needless products of status or display (e. g., the large, heavy automobile; the extravagant packaging of consumer items) for the sake of consumption.”

Daniel Bell book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Source: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Chapter 6, The Public Household, p. 274

“Western civilisation, with its own spirituality, has permeated all corners of the earth. My thesis is that this is the spirituality of money.”

Ulrich Duchrow (1935) German theologian

"Spirituality for democracy and social cohesion versus the spirituality of money," Verbum et Ecclesia 35(3) http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ve.v35i3.1332

Money

“Here is an empire in which is the only relic of the oldest civilization of the world—one which, 2,700 years ago, according to some authorities, had a system of primary education—which had its system of logic before the time of Aristotle, and its code of morals before that of Socrates. Here is a country which has had its uninterrupted traditions and histories for so long a period—that supplied silks and other articles of luxury to the Romans 2,000 years ago! They are the very soul of commerce in the East, and one of the wealthiest nations in the world. They are the most industrious people in Asia, having acquired the name of the ants of the East…You find them not as barbarians at home, where they cultivate all the arts and sciences, and where they have carried all, except one, to a point of perfection but little below our own—but that one is war. You have there a people who have carried agriculture to a state of horticulture, and whose great cities rival in population those of the Western world. Now, there must be something in such a people deserving of respect. If in speaking of them we stigmatize them as barbarians, and threaten them with force because we say they are inaccessible to reason, it must be because we do not understand them; because their ways are not our ways, nor our ways theirs. Now, is not so venerable an empire as that deserving of some sympathy—at least of some justice—at the hands of conservative England?”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1857/feb/26/resolutions-moved-debate-adjourned in the House of Commons (26 February 1857) on China. 1850s

War, People, World, Education

“You’ve got to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

The Report newsmagazine, January 22, 2001.
2001

People

“Marxism is a flight from the magic of the person and the mystique of hierarchy. It distorts the character of western culture, which is based on the charismatic power of person. Marxism can work only in pre-industrial societies of homogeneous populations. Raise the standard of living, and the rainbow riot of individualism will break out. Personality and art, which Marxism fears and censors, rebound from every effort to oppress them.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 36

Fear, Art, Effort, Personality

“A century after the death of Patrick… there were few Romans left in western Europe. [By the mid sixth century] the whole subtle substructure of Roman political organization and Roman communication has vanished. In its place have grown the sturdy little principalities of the Middle Ages, Gothic illiterates ruling over Gothic illiterates, pagan or occasionally Arian—that is, following a debased, simpleminded form of Christianity in which Jesus was given a status similar to that of Mohammed in Islam.”

Thomas Cahill book How the Irish Saved Civilization

Source: How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995), Ch. VI What Was Found

Death, Age, Communication

“The tendency in Africa for nations to become independent and, at the same time, the need to do justice to all, does not only mean being just to the black man of Africa but also being just to the white man of Africa. They are the people, not only in the Union but throughout major portions of Africa, who brought civilisation here, who made possible the present development of black nationalism by bringing the natives education, by showing them the Western way of life, by bringing to Africa industry and development, by inspiring them with the ideals which Western civilisation has developed for itself.”

Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966) Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966

As Prime Minister in Parliament on 3 February 1960, in his impromptu reply to Harold Macmillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ speech, 10 quotes by Hendrik Verwoerd (Politics Web) https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/hendrik-verwoerd-10-quotes-hendrik-verwoerd-politics-web-20-september-2016, sahistory.org.za (20 September 2016)

Life, People, Education, Justice

“I write this sitting in my hand-built adobe-style home looking out on the Bitterroot Valley… It's a place where the "Old" West and the "New" confront one another daily in often bazarre ways. …I'm sort of a New Westerner myself. Because of relatively recent inventions like solar panels, satellites, cell phones, composting toilets, and four-wheel drive vehicles, I'm able to live where no one has since the Salish had the valley. …perhaps it all just seems new because the prism through which we're accustomed to view the history of the region has only recently been polished sufficiently to gain the deep view.”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

Way, Home, History

“The moment that the topic of the pre-European African past is raised, many individuals are concerned for various reasons to know about the existence of African “civilizations.” Mainly, this stems from a desire to make comparisons with European “civilizations.” This is not the context in which to evaluate the so-called civilizations of Europe. It is enough to note the behavior of European capitalists from the epoch of slavery through colonialism, fascism, and genocidal wars in Asia and Africa. Such barbarism causes suspicion to attach to the use of the word “civilization” to describe Western Europe and North America.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 53.

War, Behavior, Past

“The Labour Party has now been taken over by extremists…The Labour Party is now committed to a programme which is frankly and unashamedly Marxist, a programme initiated by its National Executive and now firmly endorsed by its official Party Conference. In the House of Commons the Labour Left may still be outnumbered, but their votes are vital to the continuance of Labour in office, and that gives them a strength out of proportion to their numbers. And make no mistake, that strength, those numbers, are growing. In the constituency Labour parties, in the Parliamentary Labour Party, in Transport House, in the Cabinet Room itself, the Marxists call an increasing number of tunes…let's not mince words. The dividing line between the Labour Party programme and Communism is becoming harder and harder to detect. Indeed, in many respects Labour's programme is more extreme than those of many Communist parties of Western Europe.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Party Conference (8 October 1976) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103105 Leader of the Opposition

Communication, Housing

“Russia has always been several centuries behind western civilization. The Church, intrusted with secular power, is joined with the State. It prohibits any change of faith and even possesses the power to deprive a heretic of his property. Moreover, anyone proved to be a heretic or a nonconformist may be sent to a penal colony.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 68

Faith, Change

“I think, that it is our common duty from now on to stop Chinese penetration of the international Communist movement and in relation to Western powers to show China as the main present and future troublemaker.”

Ivan Agayants (1911–1968) KGB officer

Quoted in "The Deception Game: Czechoslovak Intelligence in Soviet Political Warfare" - by Ladislav Bittman - Political Science - 1972.

Thinking, Future

“I think faith in each other is much harder than faith in God or faith in crystals. I very rarely have faith in God; I occasionally have little spasms of it, but they go away, if I think hard enough about it. I am incandescent with rage at the idea of horoscopes and of crystals and of the nonsense of 'New Age', or indeed even more pseudo-scientific things: self-help, and the whole culture of 'searching for answers', when for me, as someone brought up in the unashamed Western tradition of music and poetry and philosophy, all the answers are there in the work that has been done by humanity before us, in literature, in art, in science, in all the marvels that have created this moment now, instead of people looking away. The image to me... is gold does exist, and for 'gold' say 'truth', say 'the answer', say 'love', say 'justice', say anything: it does exist. But the only way in this world you can achieve gold is to be incredibly intelligent about geology, to learn what mankind has learnt, to learn where it might lie, and then break your fingers and blister your skin in digging for it, and then sweat and sweat in a forge, and smelt it. And you will have gold, but you will never have it by closing your eyes and wishing for it. No angel will lean out of the bar of heaven and drop down sheets of gold for you. And we live in a society in which people believe they will. But the real answer, that there is gold, and that all you have to do is try and understand the world enough to get down into the muck of it, and you will have it, you will have truth, you will have justice, you will have understanding, but not by wishing for it.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

From Radio 4's Bookclub http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00f8l3b 2000s

Love, God, People, Truth

“As to the second question about Gabala Radar Station, I think that you are under the influence of what was previously customary to call "western propaganda." As Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said in public, which was reconfirmed during his preliminary consultations with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, we perceive no threat from Iran. We do not understand why to justify construction of elements of a US missile defense system in Europe they should be using a thesis about a threat from Iran. We have repeatedly adduced facts, assessments, and professional estimates showing that there is no such threat, which President Putin particularly emphasized. If the American side has suspicions about the presence of any such threat, they can easily be removed by the real-time use of information from Gabala Radar Station. Today I told my friend and colleague, Mr. Mottaki, as well as the President of Iran, Mr. Ahmadinejad, about this. My firm impression is that our explanation was received with full understanding.”

Sergey Lavrov (1950) Russian politician and Foreign Minister

Answering the press questions, in Teheran, June 20, 2007. http://www.acronym.org.uk/proliferation-challenges/regional-challenges/iran/russian-foreign-minister-sergey-lavrov-iran-june-20-2007

Understanding, Question, Thinking, Time

“The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.”

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian

This "aphorism" was expressed in different forms by Josh Billings and Socrates. note: Often misquoted as, "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge," and often misattributed to Stephen Hawking.
Source: Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected (1995).

Knowledge, Science, History

“The US has always taken velvet revolution into consideration by promoting Western culture in the society and by causing strife between people and the government through propaganda, organizing certain individuals, psychological warfare and making intentional use of media, intellectual circles, university student's establishments and feminism movements in order to implement its interfering policies.”

Ahmad Khatami (1960) Iranian ayatollah

Cleric says US seeks velvet revolution http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=16910&sectionid=351020101, Press TV, 20 Jul 2007. Velvet Revolution

People, Universe

“For a thousand years, the Bible was almost the only book people read, if they could read at all. The stories that were officially told and portrayed were Biblical and religious stories. That other fount of Western civilization as we know it today — the Greek classics — went largely unknown until the Renaissance. For our purposes, there's a noteworthy difference between these two literatures: in the Bible people are hardly ever said to be mad as such, whereas in Greek drama they go off their rockers with alarming frequency. It was the rediscovery of the classics that stimulated the long procession of literary madpeople of the past four hundred years.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

People, Books, Literature, Reading

“I think that the figure of the nerd provides a beautiful template for analyzing the transformation of the disciplinary society into the control society. The nerd, in his cliche form, first stepped out upon the world stage in the mid-1970s, when we were beginning to hear the first rumblings of what would become the Cambrian explosion of the information society. The nerd must serve as comic relief for the future-anxieties of Western society. And the transformation I'm talking about is already in full swing: the police gaze of 19th- and 20th-century disciplinary society made visible the individual, which is illuminated by power. In our burgeoning technological control society, the individual is x-rayed and algorithmized. Even worse: the individuals x-ray themselves, willingly putting themselves on display.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2016/04/14/the-story-of-traceroute-about.html

World, Beauty, Thinking, Future

“We either must jump in this mess strongly regardless of the risk or refuse to take our rightful place in the world. More than at any time since the Napoleonic period Western Civilization and Christianity are at stake. That puts it strongly but is no exaggeration just the same. Lincoln was a moral and upright man. He was a pacifist at heart. But when there was no other alternative he did not equivocate nor cravenly talk of peace when there was no peace. He grabbed the bull by the horns; realizing that the nation could not endure half slave and half free, he threw down the gauntlet and eradicated the evil. We are faced with the same thing and the longer we wait the worse it becomes.”

Nile Kinnick (1918–1943) College football player

Letter to his parents regarding World War II (April 25, 1941)

World, Peace, Evil, Time

“Judaism’s campaign to make divinity invisible has never fully succeeded. Images are always eluding moral control, creating the brilliant western art tradition. Idolatry is fascism of the eye. The western eye will be served, with or without the consent of conscience.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 139

Art

“The tragedy of Africa seemingly has no end. Viewing it from afar, the casual Western onlooker can be forgiven if the scenes begin to meld: Ethiopian famine in 1987, Somalian civil war and ensuing famine in 1992, and now Central Africa in 1997. The pictures and footage assume the role of media footnotes: snapshots of hopelessness, disaster, and death that seem as far away as the moon and as unrealistic as some science fiction film. Yet, like the African crises before it, the tragedy of Central Africa is very real and, in a global age, perhaps not as distant as some would like to think. With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy.”

Michael Johns (1964) American businessman

"Africa Deserves a Closer Look," The World and I, February 1997, by Michael Johns.

Death, War, Age, Thinking

“After all, animal rightists have not invented the vision of the wolf lying down with the lamb in Isaiah 11:6, or the universal command to be vegetarian in Genesis 1:29, or indeed the vision of the earth in a state of childbirth awaiting its deliverance from suffering in Romans 8: in these, and in other ways, animal rightists can claim to be rediscovering and reactualizing visionary elements already present within the Western religious tradition.”

Andrew Linzey (1952) British theologian and divine

Source: Animal Gospel: Christian Faith as if Animals Mattered (1998), pp. 54-55

Way, Lying, Suffering, Universe

“Just meeting Rubinstein was a thrill for any pianist. He was a real link to tradition in western piano music. He was a friend of Rachmaninoff and he knew Debussy. The man was an inspiration to three generations of pianists.”

Arthur Rubinstein (1887–1982) Polish-American classical pianist

Emanuel Ax — reported in Joseph McLellan (December 21, 1982) "Concert Pianist Arthur Rubinstein Dies at 95", The Washington Post, p. A1.
About

Music

“Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 9: The Pursuit of Happiness

“The effects of Asian contacts on Europe, though considerably less, cannot be considered insignificant. The growth of capitalism in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in itself a profound and revolutionary change, is intimately connected with the expansion of European trade and business into Asia. The political development of the leading Western European nations during this period was also related to their exploitation of their Asian possessions and the wealth they derived from the trade with and government of their Eastern dependencies. Their material life, as reflected in clothing, food, beverages, etc., also bears permanent marks of their Eastern contacts. We have already dealt briefly with the penetration of cultural, artistic and philosophical influences, though their effects cannot still be estimated. Unlike the Rococo movement of the eighteenth century, the spiritual and cultural reactions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are deeper, and have not yet fully come to the surface. The influence of Chinese literature and of Indian philosophical thought, to mention only two trends which have become important in recent years, cannot be evaluated for many years to come. Yet it is true, as T. S. Eliot has stated, that most modern poets in Europe have in some measure been influenced by the literature of China. Equally the number of translations of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, which have been appearing every year, meant not for Orientalists and scholars but for the educated public, and the revival of interest in the religious experience of India, are sufficient to prove that a penetration of European thought by Oriental influences is now taking place which future historians may consider to be of some significance.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

Life, Education, Food, Literature

“If running a productive, Western-style economy were simply a matter of culture, it should be possible for African and Middle Eastern countries to import Western institutions and business methods, just as East Asian countries have done. But this is evidently not a straightforward task. Though it was justifiable at first to blame the evils of colonialism, two generations or more have now passed since most foreign powers withdrew from Africa and the Middle East, and the strength of this explanation has to some extent faded.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014)

Business, Evil, Country

“We have reached a crisis in world history, a crisis which demands swift and certain action…We believe in the freedom of the democratic way of life. If we serve that idea faithfully with tenacity of purpose, we have nothing to fear from Russian Communism…Communism seizes power by force, not by free choice of the people. The democratic nations must therefore have forces with which to fight it so that choice of government may be free. In the light of these convictions our task is clear. We must firstly believe in the Western way of life and serve it steadfastly. Secondly we must build up our fighting strength to be prepared to defend our ideals, for aggressive nations understand only the threat of force. The situation is already grave, but much is possible for a nation with clear intentions and the ability to carry them into action.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

New Year Message as Conservative candidate for Dartford (29 December 1950) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/100896 1950s

Life, People, World, Fear

“Probably the greatest single weakness of the Sino-Soviet bloc is her shaky economy. Here is a soft spot where peaceful pressures could be devastating. No amount of Soviet propaganda can cover up the obvious collapse of the Chinese communes and the sluggish inefficiency of the Soviet collectivized farms. Every single Soviet satellite is languishing in a depression. Even Pravda has openly criticized the lack of bare essentials and the shoddy quality of Russian-made goods. These factors of austerity and deprivation add to the hatred and misery of the people which constantly feed the flames of potential revolt. Terrorist tactics have been used by the Red leaders to suppress uprisings. In spite of the virtual "state of siege" which exists throughout the Soviet empire, there are many outbreaks of violent protest. All of this explains why the Soviet leaders are constantly pleading for "free trade," "long-term loans," "increased availability of material goods from the West." Economically, Communism is collapsing but the West has not had the good sense to exploit it. Instead, the United States, Great Britain and 37 other Western powers are shipping vast quantities of goods to the Sino-Soviet bloc. Some business leaders have had the temerity to suggest that trade with the Reds helps the cause of peace. They suggest that "you never fight the people you trade with." Apparently they cannot even remember as far back as the late Thirties when this exact type of thinking resulted in the sale of scrap iron and oil to the Japanese just before World War II. After the attack on Pearl Harbor it became tragically clear that while trade with friends may promote peace, trade with a threatening enemy is an act of self-destruction. Have we forgotten that fatal lesson so soon?”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

War, People, World, Peace

“While National Socialism brought about a new version and formulation of European culture, Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself. It is not only anti-bourgeois, it is anti-cultural. It means, in the final consequence, the absolute destruction of all economic, social, state, cultural, and civilizing advances made by western civilization for the benefit of a rootless and nomadic international clique of conspirators, who have found their representation in Jewry.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Speech at the Nazi party Congress at Nuremberg (September 1935) http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb58.htm 1930s

War

“[…] ironically, the jihadis are just as opposed to the theory of evolution as creationists. So they have that in common […] This is an area in which Islamists agree 100% with the Discovery Institute and creationists. If that makes you uncomfortable … well, it should. […] I'm making a very narrowly defined point. The proponents of "intelligent design" are on the same page with radical Islamists, on that issue. And the devaluation of science by Islam, in favor of religion, is largely responsible for the appalling state of the Islamic world today. Western civilization has advanced to its current point because we DO have a strict division between these two disciplines. Science is not religion, and religion is not science. If we lose that clarity, we're in danger of losing everything. As I've tried to say at least 20 different ways, this is not a put down of religion. Religion is a civilizing force, as long it's not allowed to rule people's lives. The intelligent design movement is trying to erase these lines and bring us back into the Dark Ages. We should learn from the failure of Islam, but this is an issue that is obviously not going to rest easy.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

June 16, 2008 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/30370_Video-_Bobby_Jindal_Supports_Teaching_Intelligent_Design/comments/

People, Age, World, Religion

“Throughout the Near East lay rare tinder for anti-Western propaganda: a Moslem culture and history, bitter Arab nationalism galled by Jewish immigration under British protection and with massive American financial support, the remnants of a colonial status, and a sense of grievance that a vast natural resource was being extracted by foreigners under arrangements thought unfair to those living on the surface. This tinder could be, and was, lighted everywhere…”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Middle East

History, Support, Nature, Sense

“The idea that humans form pair bonds, and that males often invest in their young, has a long history in biological anthropology. Early incarnations of the idea were criticized for painting an overly simplistic picture, according to which “Man the Hunter” provisioned his dependent wife and children with meat in a stable nuclear family, suspiciously reminiscent of a 1950s-style Western family. However, with appropriate amendments and qualifications, the idea that pair bonding and biparental care are a central part of our evolutionary endowment appears to be viable.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 145

Children, Family, History, Idea

“Careful listening to current country and western and rock music with the help of an interpreter for coded phrases shows that young people are hearing a constant stream of messages about getting high, feeling good, going on trips, and using drugs of all kinds with all methods.”

Virgil Miller Newton (1938) American priest

Miller Newton (1983). The Teenage Drug Epidemic, El Paso Physician, vol 6, pp. 5-6.
On Teenage Drug Use

People, Music, Feeling, Help

“Greeks and Romans alike engaged openly in a variety of sanctioned atrocities, including adult human sacrifice. …according to …Cicero, human sacrifice was not restricted to the western Phoenicians but was widely accepted among Mediterranean societies as a pious act that would please the gods.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

What the Bones Tell Us (1997)

God

“We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of western European painting. Instead of making 'cathedrals' out of Christ, man, or 'life', we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings..”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 2. 1943-1945, p. 127

Life, Feeling, Nostalgia, Memory

“You open London Times and you find reviews of Western classical music concerts finding pride of place even if the concerts themselves have less than 200 people in a hall meant for 1,500. They do this because they want to highlight what they see as their socio-cultural legacy.”

Zakir Hussain (musician) (1951) Indian tabla player, musical producer, film actor and composer

Quote, I've never wanted to fit in Abbaji's shoes: Ustad Zakir Hussain

People, Music, Time

“Many well-meaning Dutch people have told me in all earnestness that nothing in Islamic culture incites abuse of women, that this is just a terrible misunderstanding. Men all over the world beat their women, I am constantly informed. In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience or their community. I wanted my art exhibit to make it difficult for people to look away from this problem. I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that "Islam is peace and tolerance."”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Chapter 16: Politics

Women, Men, People, World

“As much as I loved the ideas, I excelled at experimental failure, I found new ways to make experiments not work. I would mess up PCRs, add the wrong buffers, northerns, westerns, southerns. I would make them not work in quite ingenious ways, and I realized slowly, over the course of those years, that the secret to being a great scientist is to love the manual labor of it.”

Jonah Lehrer (1981) American science writer

Chimeras of Experience: A Conversation with Jonah Lehrer (2009)

Love, Secret, Way, Idea

“Muslims want you to give space to the Islam, but the Islam doesn't give you any space. The government says you should respect the Islam, but the Islam has no respect for you. The Islam wants to dominate and aims for the destruction of our Western civilisation. In 1945 nazism was defeated in Europe. In 1989 communism was defeated in Europe. Now the Islamic ideology has to be defeated. Stop the islamisation. Defend our freedom.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Fitna (27 March 2008)
2000s

Communication, Freedom

“The Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistress.”

Saki (1870–1916) British writer

"A Young Turkish Catastrophe"
Reginald in Russia (1910)

“In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 4

Age

“Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social conditioning influences but by a failure of social conditioning. Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live. Nature’s universal law of creation from destruction operates in mind as in matter. As Freud, Nietzsche’s heir, asserts, identity is conflict. Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.</b”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 2

Law, Sex, Failure, Nature

“Mark Twain said that faith is believing what you know ain't so. Well, political correctness is doing what you know ain't right. In every western country, Islamic extremists are allowed to exploit religious privilege for political ends by claiming to represent all Muslims, and the media always treat them as if they do. These groups give themselves official-sounding titles and talk a smooth line in community harmony, while doing all they can to prevent integration: to keep Muslims apart and ghettoised in a separate society, with a separate identity, separate rules and standards. In other words, they exist to cause division in society; to drive a wedge between communities that doesn't need to be there, any more than they need to exist as organisations.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"The Enemy Within" (18 July 2010) http://youtube.com/watch?v=NUiysSau8Qk 2010

Faith, Communication, Country

“Various expedients have been tried in the past for bringing together capital and labour to the greatest advantage of the community at large. Western countries such as Germany, Denmark, England have found out by experience that the best method of doing this is by a co-operation of the workers for purposes of mutual benefit. This idea of co-operation is based on the great principle of self-help and combination Self-help and combination for mutual benefit are, in fact, essential for our advancement as a community and Co-operative Societies bring these two forces together for our economic advantage, a thing which the most ignorant person can understand, work for and profit by.”

Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV (1884–1940) King of Mysore

Spoke on the occasion of the Economic Conference held during Dussera festival 1911 which brought wide awareness of the people on the effectiveness of Cooperative Societies. Modern_Mysore, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Open University, 26 November 2013, archive.org, 206-07 http://archive.org/stream/modernmysore035292mbp/modernmysore035292mbp_djvu.txt, As ruler of the state

Communication, Idea, Understanding, Past

“These differences in moral vision and map-making bred, In turn, conflicting institutional needs and social policies, within the constraints of an under-developed economy and society in terms of Western standards. Though both were ‘backward-looking’, the hierarchical and theocratic Byzantine ideal with its cultural affinity to Orthodox Tsarism, lent itself to a rural and patriarchal society whose political institutions would be subordinated to the religious controls of the clergy and their supporters among the notables; their suspicions of the West would be compensated by the eastward drive inherent in the Megali Idea and its dream of a restored Byzantine empire in Anatolia and the Aegean. Whereas the Hellenic vision”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1987), p. 203.

Dreams, Idea, Support

“I grew up during communism, when comics books were prohibited as capitalist decadent propaganda, western movies were censored, any book that could be in conflict with socialist ideology was prohibited and you went to jail for saying what you think. So I am allergic to any kind of censorship in the name of any ideology. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I would like to give all the ideologues a piece of advice – If you want something to be made, do it yourself. Everyone will be happy.”

Daniel Vávra (1975) Czech entrepreneur

An interview with Daniel Vavra: GamerGate and the gaming industry https://techraptor.net/content/interview-daniel-vavra (September 12, 2014)

Books, Communication, Hell, Thinking

“For anyone who at the end of Western philosophy can and must still question philosophically, the decisive question is no longer merely “What basic character do beings manifest?” or “How may the being of beings be characterized?” but “What is this ‘being’ itself?” The decisive question is that of “the meaning of being,” not merely that of the being of beings.”

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 18

Question, Decision

“The current fascination among Muslims with the history of the Crusades, the vast literature on the subject, both academic and popular, and the repeated inferences drawn from the final extinction of the Crusading principalities throw some light on attitudes in this matter. Islam from its inception is a religion of power, and in the Muslim world view it is right and proper that power should be wielded by Muslims and Muslims alone. Others may receive the tolerance, even the benevolence, of the Muslim state, provided that they clearly recognize Muslim supremacy. That Muslims should rule over non-Muslims is right and normal. That non-Muslims should rule over Muslims is an offense against the laws of God and nature, and this is true whether in Kashmir, Palestine, Lebanon, or Cyprus. Here again, it must be recalled that Islam is not conceived as a religion in the limited Western sense but as a community, a loyalty, and a way of life—and that the Islamic community is still recovering from the traumatic era when Muslim governments and empires were overthrown and Muslim peoples forcibly subjected to alien, infidel rule.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Return of Islam (1976)

Life, God, People, World

“The outcome of the Brexit Referendum could very likely to prove to be as significant and as beneficial to Europe as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. And the benefits of Brexit won’t just be felt in the UK and Europe - many African countries may reap long-term economic and political benefits from Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. Project Fear’s apocalyptic claims turned out to be bunkum. We are not in the midst of World War Three. Western Civilization has not collapsed.”

Peter Whittle (politician) (1961) British author, politician, and journalist

100 Reasons to be Cheerful about the Brexit Results http://www.peterwhittleam.com/press-releases/100-reasons-to-be-cheerful-about-the-brexit-result (September 30, 2016)

War, World, Fear, Country

“More than a billion women around the world want to emulate western women’s lifestyles and are rapidly acquiring the material ability to do so. It is therefore vital that in our leadership we display some reserve and responsibility in our spending so that the world’s finite resources will be available for our children, their children and their children’s children.”

Louise Burfitt-Dons (1953) Activist, writer, blogger

Speech on the Hot Women Campaign at UK Aware (April 2008)

Women, Children, World

“Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other. This is one important side of the loneliness now experienced by people in the Western world.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 56

People, World, Communication, Sense

“Janera:: Do you think then that it’s good that the French are abolishing the headscarves or the yarmulke?
Roubini: I’m not in favor of restricting what people wear. It’s counterproductive and creates more separation. The effect of the French policy is that children will attend a religious school and won’t be exposed to the secular education that France offers. They won’t learn the value of western modern secular values.”

Nouriel Roubini (1958) American economist

Quoted in Janera Soerel, "Talking to Nouriel Roubini," Janera (2007-05-02).

Children, People, Education, School

“Behold him setting in his western skies,
The shadows lengthening as the vapours rise.”

John Dryden Absalom and Achitophel

Pt. I line 268.
Absalom and Achitophel (1681)

“Defenders of Western civilization should not sugarcoat Islam or downplay its violent tendencies out of a misguided fear of offending its adherents.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Source: 2010s, Marked for Death (2012), Ch. 3: "Islamofascism", p. 45

Fear

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Francis Fukuyama (1952) American political scientist, political economist, and author

1990s, The End of History and the Last Man (1992)

War, Democracy, History, Universe

“As I understand it, the benefits of multiculturalism are that the sterile white-bread cultures of Britain, Canada and Australia get some great ethnic restaurants and a Commonwealth Games opening ceremony that lasts until two in the morning. But in the case of those Muslim ghettoes — in Sydney, in Oslo, in Paris, Copenhagen and Manchester — multiculturalism means that the worst attributes of Muslim culture — the subjugation of women — combine with the worst attributes of Western culture — licence and self-gratification. Tattoed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of Northern England are as much a product of multiculturalism as the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in the vice-regal escort at Rideau Hall. Yet even in the face of the crudest assaults on its most cherished causes — women's rights and gay rights — the political elite turns squeamishly away.”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

Battered Westerner Syndrome inflicted by myopic Muslim defenders (2002)

Women, Game, Understanding

“Better off? The point is illustrated by the great African American boxer Muhammad Ali. In the early 1970s Muhammad Ali fought for the heavyweight title against George Foreman. The fight was held in the African nation of Zaire; it was insensitively called the "rumble in the jungle." Ali won the fight, and upon returning to the United States, he was asked by a reporter, "Champ, what did you think of Africa?" Ali replied, "Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!" There is a characteristic mischievous pungency to Ali's remark, yet it also expresses a widely held sentiment. Ali recognizes that for all the horror of slavery, it was the transmission belt that brought Africans into the orbit of Western freedom. The slaves were not better off—the boat Ali refers to brought the slaves through a horrific Middle Passage to a life of painful servitude—yet their descendants today, even if they won't admit it, are better off. Ali was honest enough to admit it.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Source: Books, America: Imagine a World without Her (2014), Ch. 8. Most likely a misattribution. A Newsweek article at the time of the match attributed the quote "Thank God our grandpappies caught that boat!" to George Foreman's manager Dick Sadler. "It Takes a Heap of Salongo", Newsweek (September 23, 1974), p. 72.

Life, God, Pain, Thinking

“We think of the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union as a Western victory in the Cold War, and some of us credit President Reagan more particularly with that victory. For Osama bin Laden and his followers, this was a Muslim victory in the jihad. And if one looks at what actually happened, this is not an implausible interpretation. It was, after all, the Taliban in Afghanistan that drove the Red Army to defeat and collapse. And, as he put it, "We have now dealt successfully with the more deadly, the more dangerous of the two infidel powers. Dealing with the soft, pampered, and degenerate Americans will be easy."”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

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

War, Thinking, Victory

Quotes about western page 3

Quotes about western
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