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The West Quotes

Quotes tagged as "the-west" Showing 1-30 of 60
Thomas Sowell
“It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in the Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States.”
Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.”
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Theodor W. Adorno
“What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.”
Theodor W. Adorno

Bill Bryson
“People in the West like to shoot things. When they first got to the West they shot buffalo. Once there were 70 million buffalo on the plains and then the people of the West started blasting away at them. Buffalo are just cows with big heads. If you've ever looked a cow in the face and seen the unutterable depths of trust and stupidity that lie within, you will be able to guess how difficult it must have been for people in the West to track down buffalo and shoot them to pieces. By 1895, there were only 800 buffalo left, mostly in zoos and touring Wild West shows. With no buffalo left to kill, Westerners started shooting Indians. Between 1850 and 1890 they reduced the number of Indians in America from two million to 90,000.

Nowadays, thank goodness, both have made a recovery. Today there are 30,000 buffalo and 300,000 Indiands, and of course you are not allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot. There you have a capsule history of the West.”
Bill Bryson

Mona Eltahawy
“When Westerners remain silent out of 'respect' for foreign cultures, they show support only for the most conservative elements of those cultures. Cultural relativism is as much my enemy as the oppression I fight within my culture and faith.”
Mona Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution

Imre Kertész
“The West in general should stand up more for its own values. It is not always worthwhile to compromise.”
imre kertesz

John L. Esposito
“As we have seen in the data, resentment against the West comes from what Muslims perceive as the West's hatred and denigration of Islam; the Western belief that Arabs and Muslims are inferior,; and their fear of Western intervention, domination, or occupation. (p. 141)”
John L. Esposito, Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think

Verlyn Klinkenborg
“How these humans dispose themselves! Unlike anything else in creation. Or rather like everything else in creation all at once. Legs of one beast. Arms of another. Proportions all awry to a tortoise's eye. Torso too squat. Too little neck. Vastly too much leg. Hands like creatures unto themselves. Senses delicately balanced. And yet each sense dulled by mental acuity. Reason in place of a good nose. Logic instead of a tail. Faith instead of the certain knowledge of instinct. Superstition instead of a shell.”
Verlyn Klinkenborg, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile

Mona Eltahawy
“Western liberals who rightly condemn imperialism [are] yet are blind to the cultural imperialism they are performing when they silence my critiques of misogyny. They behave as if they want to save my culture and faith from me, and forget that they are immune to the violations about which I speak.”
Mona Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution

Peter Frankopan
“The age of empire and the rise of the west were built on the capacity to inflict violence on a major scale.”
Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads Illustrated Ed.

T.S. Eliot
“Mr. Babbitt is a stout upholder of tradition and continuity, and he knows, with all his immense and encyclopaedic information, that the Christian religion is an essential part of the history of our race. Humanism and religion are thus, as historical facts, by no means parallel; humanism has been sporadic, but Christianity continuous. It is quite irrelevant to conjecture the possible development of the European races without Christianity � to imagine, that is, a tradition of humanism equivalent to the actual tradition of Christianity. For all we can say is that we should have been very different creatures, whether better or worse. Our problem being to form the future, we can only form it on the materials of the past; we must use our heredity, instead of denying it. The religious habits of the race are still very strong, in all places, at all times, and for all people. There is no humanistic habit: humanism is, I think, merely the state of mind of a few persons in a few places at a few times. To exist at all, it is dependent upon some other attitude, for it is essentially critical � I would even say parasitical. It has been, and can still be, of great value; but it will never provide showers of partridges or abundance of manna for the chosen peoples.”
T.S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays Ancient & Modern

T.S. Eliot
“I admit that all humanists � as humanists � have been individualists. As humanists, they have had nothing to offer to the mob. But they have usually left a place, not only for the mob, but (what is more important) for the mob part of the mind in themselves. Mr. Babbitt is too rigorous and conscientious a Protestant to do that: hence there seems to be a gap between his own individualism (and indeed intellectualism, beyond a certain point, must be individualistic) and his genuine desire to offer something which will be useful to the American nation primarily and to civilization itself. But the historical humanist, as I understand him, halts at a certain point and admits that the reason will go no farther, and that it cannot feed on honey and locusts.

Humanism is either an alternative to religion, or is ancillary to it. To my mind, it always flourishes most when religion has been strong; and if you find examples of humanism which are anti-religious, or at least in opposition to the religious faith of the place and time, then such humanism is purely destructive, for it has never found anything to replace what it destroyed. Any religion, of course, is for ever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion. It is only renewed and refreshed by an awakening of feeling and fresh devotion, or by the critical reason. The latter may be the part of the humanist. But if so, then the function of humanism, though necessary, is secondary. You cannot make humanism itself into a religion.”
T.S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays Ancient & Modern

“We may well have numerous failed states in the Muslim world, I’ll give you that. But what we don’t have are failed societies. That’s a phenomenon that we only see in the West. Our societies are functioning, even if our governments are not, even if we don’t have state-imposed order. We still have functioning societies, we still have moral societies. Our people are still following a moral code. Can’t say the same about the West. And it’s interesting to me that the West uses this as an insult to the Muslim world, ‘‘Oh, look you have failed states’�. First of all, in most instances, you collapsed our states. And second of all, we can still function without them. Can you?”
Shahid Bolsen

“There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of coexistence and humanistic enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external enlargement of horizons.”
Edward Said إدوارد سعيد

Lin Yutang
“The result is a constant, unintelligent elaboration of the Chinaman as a stage fiction, which is as childish as it is untrue and with which the West is so familiar, and a continuation of the early Portuguese sailors' tradition minus the sailors' obscenity of language, but with essentially the same sailors' obscenity of mind.”
Lin Yutang, My Country And My People

Daniel J. Rice
“Eli returned to the river and paused for a moment midstream. His feet were balanced upon uneven stones. The current tumbled around him. The canyon walls were steep and jagged and solid. The colors beneath the surface stirred and glittered. He wanted to hold his face under water and breathe in their beauty. He dipped his fingers into the snow-cold transient texture and felt a tingle. He closed his eyes to see this sensation clearly. He breathed. He put his river-wet hand up to his face and felt the freshness permeate his skin. Water droplets dripped from his face and returned to the river. He opened his eyes as if they were separate from his body, separate from the tension of life, distant from any distraction. He breathed.”
Daniel J. Rice, THIS SIDE OF A WILDERNESS: A Novel

Fyodor Dostoevsky
“The west is a graveyard, where only the churches remain as tombstones of a civilization that once reached heaven.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I found the West and nights in bunkhouses, with the sounds of men coughing and drunks talking in their sleep. I found filthy motel rooms with stains on the walls and the forever miles of highways and roads. But I also found the sky, the rivers, and the wind, and I knew that the rooms were only for sleep, that the work was to be able to keep moving. Cities collect the runaways who are afraid of openness. The towns in the West collect the runaways who are afraid of not being able to keep leaving.”
Steve Saroff

Seraphim Rose
“The very term 'Middle Ages' is an interesting one because it exists only in the West. All other civilizations, whether Christian, such as Byzantine or Russian, or non-Christian, such as the Chinese or Indian, can be divided into two periods, that is, the ancient period when these civilizations were governed by their own native philosophy, world-view, tradition, and the modern period when they became overwhelmed by the West. And there’s no noticeable shading from one to the other. It’s merely a matter of one being overwhelmed by the other.”
Seraphim Rose, Orthodox Survival Course

Jessica Marie Baumgartner
“Westerners allowed so many outside influences into their homes that children were turned against the values and traditions of their parents and grandparents. They were bolstered and led to believe that they were more educated than previous generations and knew better than their elders.”
Jessica Marie Baumgartner, Reclaiming Femininity: Saving Women's Traditions & Our Future

Jessica Marie Baumgartner
“An obsession with youth, fame, and beauty led girls and young women to leave behind nearly everything that made them special, unique, and important.”
Jessica Marie Baumgartner, Reclaiming Femininity: Saving Women's Traditions & Our Future

Jessica Marie Baumgartner
“Now that public schools and Western leaders are supporting child transgenderism, we will only witness a further increase in childhood mental illness and life-long struggles.”
Jessica Marie Baumgartner, Reclaiming Femininity: Saving Women's Traditions & Our Future

“The West is perceived as genuinely hostile towards Islam and the Muslim countries. . . . United in their common aim to harm Islam, they are considered by the Islamists as enemies of the Umma. Any strengthening of Islam represents a victory against the West. Thus every development or event in the Arab world is interpreted as reaction to the West. Furthermore, the Islamists� attitude towards the West and its institutions is ambiguous in a similar way as their view of the Zionists and the state of Israel, where hatred mixes with admiration.”
Andrea Nuesse, Muslim Palestine: The Ideology of Hamas

“The stationing of American and European troops in Saudi-Arabia and the following military fight against the Iraqi army brought the Arab world into their closest contact with the ominous "West" since colonial times. The broad public in most Arab countries sided with Iraq, thus contrasting in the most obvious way with their governments� positions. For the Islamists in all Arab states, especially those in Palestine, the Gulf-War was a great moment because it seemed to confirm their world view in an impressive manner; and those views were shared in an unprecedented way by the majority of the Arab population. In fact, the reaction of the population often pushed the Islamists to a more open position of support for Saddam Hussein than they had wished to take with regards to their main financiers, the Gulf-states and Saudi-Arabia. Nevertheless, the Western military intervention gave the Islamists the chance to become—for a short time—the leaders of the masses against their "corrupt" governments to an extent which they only had dreamt about until then.”
Andrea Nuesse, Muslim Palestine: The Ideology of Hamas

“Again and again, the Islamists stated that the Western intervention [in Iraq] was directed against the Muslim people and not against one political leader [Saddam Hussein] who did wrong. As a proof of this theory, they mentioned that the military and economic boycott, imposed by the "so-called security council", was sufficient to realise the two pretended aims of the US intervention: the withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait and the destruction of the Iraqi military power. Ḥa deplored the undifferentiated bombing of military and civilian targets that proved the "extent of the Western hatred of Islam and the Muslims" (madā ḅaqdihim ‘alā alIslām). This "ideological concept" (tas ṣawwur ‘aqā� idī) was said to link the West and the Jews more than just economic and security interests. According to Ḥa, one of the true goals of the Western invasion was the "establishment of the ‘Greater Israel�" as laid down in the texts of the Talmud. The invasion of Iraq should "facilitate Israel to conquer Jordan" (ghazw al-‘urdun).”
Andrea Nuesse, Muslim Palestine: The Ideology of Hamas

Ethan Rarick
“But the most significant reason for staying at Truckee Lake may have been their ignorance of the territory into which they had wandered. Back at home, Midwest winters froze noses and turned fingers numb, but a storm was fierce if it dropped three feet of snow. For the most part, the men and women of the Donner Party had no experience with the kind of mountain climate they were about to experience, no idea that snowstorms could bury livestock or buildings or a decent-sized tree. In the end the extraordinarily deep snows of the Sierra Nevada would have much to do with their suffering, but in the beginning their expectations were a blank. The families must have stayed at the lake, in other words, in part because they knew so little about it. Had they understood more about their surroundings, they might have left.”
Ethan Rarick, Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West

T.R. Fehrenbach
“One reason some patterns are indistinct is that no one wants to see them. Some men always reject the historic logic of their times. The West was unable to see the historic logic in the rise of Hitlerian Germany and adventurist Japan... The dominant pattern was Western weakness in the face of challenge.”
T.R. Fehrenbach

Herbert McCabe
“We have a whole society (known as the Free World) which is so structured as to destroy belief in love, to eat away at the confidence people have in each other, to replace friendship by competitiveness, generosity by domination and submission, community by national security, love by fear.”
Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason

Aldous Huxley
“And then,' says Dr. Poole, 'I liked what you said about the contacts between East and West- how He persuaded each side to take only the worst the other had to offer. So the East takes Western nationalism, Western armaments, Western movies and Western Marxism; the West takes Eastern despotism, Eastern superstitions and Eastern indifference to individual life. In a word, He saw to it that mankind should make the worst of both worlds.”
Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence

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