Western Culture Quotes

“Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilization. It is basically an anti-Western ideology.”
― Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

“Living with long-term suffering in American culture feels like being off-key. Suffering quiets and slows, but our culture prefers a crescendo.”
― K.J. Ramsey, This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers

“It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. ("You taught me language," says Caliban to Prospero, "and my profit on't is I know how to curse.")”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“Monotheism exhibits what is essentially a pathological personality pattern projected onto the ideal of God: the pattern of the paranoid, possessive, power-obsessed male ego. This God is not someone you would care to invite to a garden party. Also interesting is that the Western ideal is the only formulation of deity that has no relationship with woman at any point in the theological myth. In ancient Babylon Anu was paired with his consort Inanna; Grecian religion assigned Zeus a wife, many consorts, and daughters. These heavenly pairings are typical. Only the god of Western civilization has no mother, no sister, no female consort, and no daughter.”
― Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

“Nowadays, our leaders prefer to search for the causes of crime and poverty in the actions or inaction of those at the very bottom of society. The obscene transfers of wealth over the past forty years from that bottom to a privileged few at the top--and from much of the Third World to financial elites in the West--are all excused as the natural evolution of the Market, when, in fact, they are products of unparalleled greed by those who shape and direct that Market.”
― Juan González, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America

“Our [western] culture cuts us off from our natural roots, instead of contributing toward the cultivation of the natural beings we are. This tradition has, in this way, rendered us extraneous to our environment, extraneous to one another as living beings, en even extraneous to ourselves.”
― Luce Irigaray

“We do not have any clear, common and simple relation to reality and to ourselves. That is the big problem of the Western world.”
― martin heidegger

“But it is on occasions like this that I always think how different everything would be if we in the Orient had developed our own science. Suppose for instance that we had developed our own physics and chemistry: would not the techniques and industries based on them have taken a different form, would not our myriads of everyday gadgets, our medicines, the products of our industrial art - would they not have suited our national temper better than they do?”
― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

“As a result of being propagated into a toxic way of life, the act of breaking from that life has been a rite of passage taken by those who wish to listen deep for their authentic self.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“The biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity — and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.”
― Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest

“Thus Western man enacted an extraordinary dialectic in the course of the modern era - moving from a near boundless confidence in his own powers, his spiritual potential, his capacity for certain knowledge, his mastery over nature, and his progressive destiny, to what often appeared to be a sharply opposite condition: a debilitating sense of metaphysical insignificance and personal futility, spiritual loss of faith, uncertainty in knowledge, a mutually destructive relationship with nature, and an intens insecurity concerning the human future. In the four centuries of modern man’s existence, Bacon and Descartes had become Kafka and Beckett.”
― Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View

“For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its own being. The driving impulse of the West’s masculine consciousness has been its dialectical quest not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally,
to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life, and thus to recover its connection to the whole: to differentiate itself from but then rediscover and reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of soul.”
― Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View

“The obstinacy of those people is funny. That someone may simply be fed up with them and their ways and may want to look for another company, that just cannot enter their heads. They can’t believe it. There must be a trick behind it, a dishonest trick, something crooked, something political, something they can understand. They’re so used to sniffing at their own behinds that when someone wants to get a breath of fresh air, to turn at last to something different, and more important, and threatened, something that's got to be
saved at all costs, it's quite beyond them.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven

“...the Western cultural chorus is shouting ever louder that authenticity is only found in following your flesh. To specifically deny what your body wants is a scandal in our culture. When pursuing your desire for same-gender sex and romance would publicly mark you as a hero - denying it makes you a villain.”
― Rachel Gilson, Born Again This Way

“About the worst thing an honest man can do is make an honest mistake." John Wayne”
― John Wayne, The Quotable John Wayne: The Grit and Wisdom of an American Icon

“What was right and true yesterday is wrong and false today. What was immoral and shameful — promiscuity, abortion, euthanasia, suicide — has become progressive and praiseworthy. Nietzsche called it the transvaluation of all values; the old virtues become sins, and the old sins become virtues.”
― Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization

“We have a special role in the world. There is no Western Civilization without Westernkind, and no other civilization has done more to benefit and elevate humanity. The world needs us to be proud, to do what we do best: to create order from chaos, knowledge from ignorance, liberty from tyranny, comfort from suffering, beauty from ugliness. The world needs us.”
― Jason Köhne

“Capturing moments other may never get to experience.”
― Ann Edall-Robson

“The “Sons of the Pioneers” are amongst America’s earliest Country/Western singing groups. One weekend we’d drive south of the border to Tijuana, Mexico and the next weekend it would be to Knott’s Berry Farm, where I heard the “Sons of the Pioneers” singing Tumbling Tumble Weeds, Cool Clear Water and other Western songs that made the group famous. On many occasions, they performed with Roy Rogers, who was a movie cowboy and Dale Evans his cowgirl wife, from Victorville, California. The “Sons of the Pioneers” were popular at that time and were inaugurated into the Country Music Hall of Fame later in 1976. It was a summer that I will never forget! Knott’s Berry Farm is a 160-acre amusement park in Buena Park, California and the singing group has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Hollywood Blvd.”
― Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater One...."

“Lewis's point is that Feurbach and Freud have cast a spell over Western culture, aiming to convince us that they are right and we are wrong. They present their speculative theories as if they were self-evident truths: Only a fool would think there is a God! Lewis helps us see that, in the first place, their approach is only a theory, and in the second, it is not a particularly plausible theory. It's only one way of looking at things - which is what the word theory really means - and there are other (and better) ways of seeing. Lewis's story gives us another way of looking at this "projection" theory, which makes us see that it is far more vulnerable than we might otherwise have realized.”
― Alister McGrath

“The idea that a professional tracker like Idriss could suddenly start suffering from a sort of poetic remorse, soulfulness, regret at the memory of the animals he had tracked down— such an idea could only come to birth in decadent brains and exquisite sensitivities freshly arrived from Europe — which were the beginning of all our troubles in Africa and elsewhere, be it said in passing.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven

“The West is the only civilization which has substantial interests in every other civilization or region and has the ability to affect the politics, economics, and security of every other civilization or region.”
― Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

“The Pakistani elite has not even observed, leave alone adopted the crucial aspects of modem western culture, whereby eighty percent of their problems were resolved through social welfare. Our people absorb their flair for fashions and their methods of entertainment, whereas the basics by which the West is exemplary remain unnoticed. They should see them plumbing, painting, cooking and struggling very hard to earn a living.”
― Tehmina Durrani, Edhi: A Mirror To The Blind

“We have reached a point in history where intellectual incapacitation feels like wholeness, and where forgetting trumps remembering.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“What amounts to a plague of mental illness is now addressed as ‘normal’ rather than as an indication that there is something terrifyingly wrong with our culture. The fact that we no longer understand mental illness as a message – that is, as a nondeclarative communication of an imbalance that requires rectification – not only demonstrates the degree of our emotional illiteracy, but our failure to understand the principle of balance as the axis of all existence.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“Have we become addicted [in 'Western civilization'] to a pathway that undermines our very evolution?”
― Giles Hutchins, The Illusion of Separation: Exploring the Cause of our Current Crises

“no one her in the Western world has time to spare, to sit and just be with anyone else, we drinking endless cups of tea. We were all victims of some invisible timetable ordering our every movement, governing our every step.”
― Ashok Ferrey, The Unmarriageable Man: A Novel

“As already noted, what happens with the criterion of "love" in a culture that highly values "freedom" is that "love" is defined in terms of "freedom." The "loving thing to do" becomes letting people do what they want to do, as long as the rights of others are not infringed. Like cake batter, love takes the shape of the mold into which it is poured. In the West, this mold consists of liberation and equality. No society will stand with so meager a basis for thinking through its great moral challenges. Citizens of Western culture lack a robust enough moral vocabulary and ethic to explain why they object to things their consciences feel are wrong. In the public square, they are restricted to the language of freedom and equality in all moral matters. Such a "vapid" ethic fails to provide sensible answers for a number of great moral questions: abortion, euthanasia, gun laws, freedom of speech, sexual ethics, and so forth.”
― Rollin G. Grams & S. Donald Fortson III, Unchanging Witness: The Consistent Christian Teaching on Homosexuality in Scripture and Tradition

“Christianity probably has been the most important institution in the world in the last 2000 years. It has achieved more for western civilisation than has any other factor; it has helped far more people than it has harmed.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, A Short History of Christianity

“Enslaved by those proclaiming themselves ‘emancipators,’ exploited by those calling themselves ‘liberators,’ ours is an extraordinary oppression because we are named ‘oppressor’ at birth, an egregious persecution because we are named ‘persecutor’ at birth. Ours is a tormentor that justifies escalating cruelty by merely invoking our names. Ours is an inescapable affliction because atonement cannot be made for a grievance never committed, nor will peace ever be made with one so named at birth.”
― Jason Köhne, Born Guilty: Liable for Compensation Subject to Retaliation