Western Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The eventual place the American army should take on the western front was to a large extent influenced by the vital question of communication and supply.

Kelly Miller (scientist)

.. Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.

The events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe.

Western civilization has not yet learned the lesson that the energy we expend in 'getting things done' is less important than the moral strength it takes to decide what is worth doing and what is right to do.

Sydney J. Harris

Spring hangs her infant blossoms on the trees, Rock'd in the cradle of the western breeze.

Within the context of Western music, jazz has always contained certain radical or revolutionary aspects. These are: improvisation, collective composition and individuality or the personal sound (based on amazing variations in sonority, timbre and pitch).

Women had been on the verge of taking over the world-the Western world, anyway. Then some sexist pig in Silicon Valley invented the cell phone and women took a sidetrack on which all four billion of them would soon be happily talking to each other twenty-four hours a day, getting nothing else done, and Men Would Be Back.

John Sandford (novelist)

One cannot fail to observe a crushing irony: the gospel of relativistic tolerance is perhaps the most evangelistic movement in Western culture at the moment, demanding assent and brooking no rivals.

It is not education, but education of a certain kind, that will serve us. And the current model of western, urban-centered, school-based, education, which is so often more focused on turning children into efficient corporate units rather than curious and open-minded adults, will only lead us further down the wrong path.

For many Washington liberals, terrorism was not the instrument of political fanatics and evil men, but was the product of social conditions - poverty, racism and oppression - for which the Western democracies, including Israel were always ultimately to blame.

I maintain that Western popular culture at its best is worthy of respect and should be cherished as much as the operas of Wagner.

Learn obedience first. Among these Western nations, with such a high spirit of independence, the spirit of obedience is equally strong. We are all of us self-important, which never produces any work. Great enterprise, boundless courage, tremendous energy, and, above all, perfect obedience; these are the only traits that lead to individual and national regeneration. These traits are altogether lacking in us.

Swami Vivekananda

The Western sexual revolution sucks. It has not worked well enough for women.

There is that wish, in the name of democracy, to level down, because high cultural standards are despised and rejected, and even feared, in our Western Democracies. Don't let anyone else have what I've not got, or can't enjoy! - is the secret theory. A very large number of writers in the British and American popular press profess to be preaching democracy when in fact they are only trying to make envy respectable!

Discussions of Western civilization are too often confined to works of high art that reflect a relatively narrow element of public taste and experience.

The great principle of Western society is that competition rules here as it rules in everything else. The best man - that is to say, the strongest and cleverest - is likely to get the best woman, in the sense of the most beautiful person.

The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold, freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of hemp--with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestral Britain.

James Lane Allen

This is what is meant by "sacrifice", literally, the "making sacred" of an animal consumed for dinner. Yet sacrfice, because it dwells on the death, is a concept often shocking to the secular modern Western mind - to people who calmly organize daily hecatombs of beasts, and who are among the most death-dealing carnivores the world has ever seen.

Margaret Visser

All things journey: sun and moon, Morning, noon, and afternoon, Night and all her stars; 'Twixt the east and western bars Round they journey, Come and go! We go with them!

The paradigm of Western culture is that the essence of persons is dangerous; thus, they must be taught, guided, and controlled by those with superior authority.

The years between 1800 and 1825 were distinguished, so far as our domestic development was concerned, by the growth of the Western pioneer Democracy in power and self-consciousness.

This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else's.

Joseph Campbell

The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.

The eastern light our spires touch at morning, The light that slants upon our western doors at evening, The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight, Moon light and star light, owl and moth light, Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade. O Light Invisible, we worship Thee!

Western civilization, because of fortuitous historical circumstances, has spread itself more widely than any other local group that has so far been known.