Western Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Commentators who today talk of 'The Dark Ages' when faith instead of reason was said to ruthlessly rule, have for their animadversions only the excuse of perfect ignorance. Both Aquinas' intellectual gifts and his religious nature were of a kind that is no longer commonly seen in the Western world.

David Berlinski

I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West … Out of place everywhere, at home nowhere. Perhaps my thoughts and approach to life are more akin to what is called Western than Eastern, but India clings to me, as she does to all her children, in innumerable ways … I am a stranger and alien in the West. I cannot be of it. But in my own country also, sometimes I have an exile's feeling.

Jawaharlal Nehru

The Japanese have a word for it. It's Judo - the art of conquering by yielding. The Western equivalent of Judo is, "Yes dear".

If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.

Walter Lippmann

Canada has become trouble recently … It's always the worst Americans who go there … We could have taken them over so easy. But I only want the western part, with the ski areas, the cowboys, and the right wingers. They're the only good parts of Canada.

In point of fact, Western philosophy has never set itself free of Christianity: wherever Christianity did not have a hand in the construction of modern philosophy it served instead as a stumbling block.

Jacques Maritain

Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.

Jacques Maritain

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

John Millington Synge

The crisis afflicting this country, along with other countries of the Western world, is a crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of the dominant economic system that prevails in all those countries.

Despite what the Palestinian public-relations industry, i. e. the western media might tell you, this isn't about territory, and it isn't about justice or human rights, because Arab societies don't know the meanings of those words. It's about Jew-hatred, as mandated by the Qur'an, and as preached in the mosques and taught to the children in Arab countries, day in and day out, generation after poisoned generation. The Arabs don't hate Jews because of Israel. They hate Israel because of Jews.

I am not worthy to speak loudly of Adolf Hitler, nor do his life and deeds call for sentimental arousal. He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations. He was a reformer of the highest order, and his historical fate was that he lived in a time of unequalled cruelty, which felled him in the end. Thus the ordinary Western European may look upon Adolf Hitler. And we, his close followers, bow our heads at his death.

We consider it a great crime to work against the Western and Christian style of life: it is not just the bomber but the ideologist who is the danger.

Jorge Rafael Videla

Buddhism is not concerned just with private destiny, but with the lives and consciousness of all beingsAny attempt to understand Buddhism apart from its social dimension is fundamentally a mistake. Until Western Buddhists understand this, their embrace of Buddhism will not help very much in the efforts to bring about meaningful and positive social change, or even in their struggle to transform their ego.

Sulak Sivaraksa

I believe that human brilliance manifests itself only in flashes, among rare individuals. For this reason, humanity as a whole is enormously destructive: the creation of something as devastating as Western culture, which is now allowed to spread throughout the world, offers sufficient proof of this fact.

Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations, and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection.

Charles Lindbergh

The American mind — the Bostonian as well as the Southern or Western — likes to walk straight up to its object, and assert or deny something that it takes for a fact; it has a conventional approach, a conventional analysis, and a conventional conclusion, as well as a conventional expression, all the time loudly asserting its unconventionality.

I've spent a lot of time in London over the last few years and I liked the idea of the Mughal emperor Babur meeting with modern-day disaffected youth and talking to them about their actions. He was a sharp literary critic who could be very sweeping and cruel about poetry if he thought it was bad poetry, and he said some fantastic things that I quoted word for word in the opera. I read the Baburnama – the memoirs of Babur – and quoted lines from it. Writing badly will make you ill. What a beautiful thing to say. I read that book and I thought, how dramatic! If he had been a figure in western history it would have been an opera. War, murder, love, tragedy, poetry. It always jumped out at me as something worth doing.

Western field-work conjures up images of struggle on horseback […]—toughing it out on one canteen a day as you labor up and down mountains. The value of a site is supposedly correlated with the difficulty of getting there. This, of course, is romantic drivel. Ease of access is no measure of importance. The famous La Brea tar pits are right in downtown Los Angeles. To reach the Clarkia lake beds, you turn off the main road at Buzzard's Roost Trophy Company and drive the remaining fifty yards right up to the site.

Stephen Jay Gould

Now, if I could get Mark to put down his phone and stop taking breaks, we'd be able to finish up before Oprah comes on. – Bubba Bubba, what are you going to do when they cancel her show? – Caleb Shut your mouth, boy. That's sacrilege in this store. You talk like that, and I'll toss you through the window like an old-timey hobo in a Western. – Bubba

Sherrilyn Kenyon

I was familiar with that and Rio Bravo. Rio Bravo was what John Carpenter did, that brilliant move of taking a western and turning it into an urban flick. And from there you got, you know, all the cop genre movies of the time.

Her blue eyes sought the west afar,
For lovers love the western star.

I do not feel that the West has really become less condescending toward foreign cultures than the Greeks and Romans were: it has only become more tolerant. Mind you, not toward Islam—only toward certain other Eastern cultures, which offer some sort of spiritual attraction to the spirit-hungry West and are, at the same time, too distant from the Western world-view to constitute any real challenge to its values.

In fact, Western culture has spent decades drawing lines and boxes around interconnected phenomena. We've chunked the world into pieces rather than explored its webby nature.

Margaret Wheatley

The politics of the unpolitical—these are the politics of those who desire to be pure in heart: the politics of men without personal ambition; of those who have not desires wealth or an unequal share of worldly possessions; of those who have always striven, whatever their race or condition, for human values and not for national or sectional interests. For our Western world, Christ is the supreme example of this unselfish devotion to the good of humanity, and the Sermon on the Mount is the source of all the politics of the unpolitical.

Finding in 'primitive' languages a dearth of words for moral ideas, many people assumed these ideas did not exist. But the concepts of 'good' or 'beautiful', so essential to Western thought, are meaningless unless they are rooted to things.