Western Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

In contemplating the pecuniary resources needed for the removal of such a number to so great a distance [freed slaves to Africa], my thoughts and hopes have long been turned to the rich fund presented in the western lands of the nation...

A soggy little island huffing and puffing to keep up with Western Europe.

Of England

[Australian Reserve Bank] Governor MacFarlane said recently when Paul Volcker broke the back of American inflation it's regarded as the policy triumph of the Western world. When I broke the back of Australian inflation they say, "Oh, you're the fellow that put the interest rates up." Am I not the same fellow that gave them the 15 years of good growth and high wealth that came from it?

Makeup: Western equivalent of the veil. A daily reminder that something is wrong with women's normal looks. A public apology.

I cannot emphasize enough how wrongheaded this is. Withholding criticism and ignoring differences are racism in its purest form. Yet these cultural experts fail to notice that, through their anxious avoidance of criticizing non-Western countries, they trap the people who represent these cultures in a state of backwardness. The experts may have the best of intentions, but as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

if you hope at this juncture to cut the Gordian knots of socialism and communism by appealing to the center of Western capitalism, you will, far from remedying any of the ills of your society, commit a mistake which those to come will have to erase. For if Marxism has come to a deadlock in its social and economic policies, capitalism has also bogged down.

Ruhollah Khomeini

It was as if the whole western mind-training of individual differences had been made background instead of figure, so that you'd look at another human being and say, "Here we are." You'd see differences more as clothing, rather than as core stuff.

Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite... If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sum right.

Richard Dawkins

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)

The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.

Whittaker Chambers

Our soul, our true self, is the most mysterious, essential, and magical dimension of our being. In fact, it is not a separate reality, as traditional Western thought views it, but the cohesive force that unites our body, heart, and mind. It is not a ghost trapped somehow in the physical machinery of our body but the very essence of our being.

The butchering may continue as it will, it shall remain the historical guilt of the Western powers that they did not promptly provide the sharpest preventative measures against the continued attack-politics Germany undertook. Possibilities existed for this, but no measures were seized upon.

Friedrich Kellner

When I look at western civilization, it's so messed up. They want to overcomplicate everything, and I think they do it through intellectualizations or apathies, or whatever, but they want to overcomplicate everything and sometimes I think they've been conditioned to want to overcomplicate everything so that, therefore, they don't have to act.... And perception... what does it take? It takes for us to tell ourselves the truth. It takes for us to tell ourselves the truth. That's what it takes. Not to lie to ourselves.

I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation.

The story of dance in the Western world is as much an alternative vision of the events of history as is the folk history told for generations by primal people.

Jamake Highwater

I was convinced before the war started that it was a great disaster, a great wrong. Even after the campaign in Poland my conviction didn't change because on 3rd September, the third day of our going to war, the Western Powers had declared war on Germany. After the campaign in France in 1940 my conviction became uncertain, but when I heard one or two months after the armistice with France that now Hitler was to go with Russia, the old conviction came up again and it was at this moment that I changed the place of living for my family, moved them from Berlin to the place where they are today.

Walter Warlimont

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, race was already a weapon in the struggle between absolutism, aristocracy, and the middle class. The warfare spread to the arts and philosophy in the nineteenth century, by which time independent shoots in other cultures had also borne fruit, leaving the grand harvesting on a world-wide scale to our generation.
Viewed in the light of such facts, the race question appears a much bigger affair than a trumped-up excuse for local persecution. It becomes rather a mode of thought endemic in Western civilization. It defaces every type of mental activity — history, art, politics, science and social reform.

Islamic revival sought the reunification of the spiritual with the social-political, and of contemporary life with cultural traditions, against the western imperialism that was forcing their separation.

Richard A. Horsley

But, in the late twentieth century, it became more important to many leftists to save Third World culture, no matter how barbaric, from neo-colonialism, than to support equality and democracy. People on the left would defend brutal dictators (Castro, Mao, Pol Pot, Khomeini, et al.) simply because they opposed Western imperialism. As a result, all politics that were derived, no matter how loosely, from Marxism, lost credibility, and finally died in 1989. This was naturally a disaster for communists and socialists, but also for social democrats, for they had lost an ideological basis for their idealism. And, without idealism, politics becomes a form of accounting, a management of purely material interests.

The Chinese and their government are wedded to a different conception of society and polity: community-based rather than individualist, state-centric rather than liberal, authoritarian rather than democratic. China has 2,000 years of history as a distinct civilization from which to draw strength. It will not simply fold under Western values and institutions.

Faced by the dire nihilism of our time, we need a greater honesty... The Western search for unifying truth did not come to an end with Christianity, any more than with the physical theories of forty years ago.

Lancelot Law Whyte

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.

in Western estimation it is preferable to be a communist leader of a communist state, than to be a non-communist leader of a non-communist state having friendly relations with communist states. The anomaly does not cease here. It is even more dangerous to be pro-West. One disagreement in defence of a national cause, and out goes that civilian leader by a coup d'etat. He gets replaced by a tin-pot military dictator who would not dare to disagree about anything, including the vital national interests of his country.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

There is a pressing need to understand our technological destiny from principles more comprehensive than its own. This need lifts us up to ask about the great western experiment in a more than piecemeal way. It pushes us to try to understand its meaning in terms of some openness to the whole which is not simply sustenance for the further realisation of that experiment. But the exigency of our need for understanding must not blind us to the tightening circle in which we find ourselves. We are called to understand technological civilisation just when its very realisation has radically put in question the possibility that there could be any such understanding.

We have a system which, though far from perfect, is strong with idealism. It gives elbow room for men of all races and all beliefs. It is vital and dynamic. And it works. We have the means of shaping the world in our pattern. If we do, freedom will be assured for all men. The decision is in the hands of this generation. It is a challenge to our political competence. For Western civilization it is the greatest challenge of all time.

William O. Douglas