Quotes About Western

Western radicals fall for an equally inane error. Because it is easier to expose abuses of power in democracies, and because Western radicals are most concerned about abuses of power in their own countries, they assume that democratic abuses are the major or only abuses of power worth protesting about.

The worst aspect of the fear the ayatollahs spread was that Western intellectuals were afraid of admitting that they were afraid. If they had been honest, they would have forced society to confront the fact of censorship. As it was, their silence made the enemies of liberalism stronger.

large section of white Western liberal opinion does not recognise that it is truly racist to refrain from condemning the clerics who seek to oppress them.

Western democracies managed to fight without imposing restrictions on freedom of speech. Instead of Orwell's 'war atmosphere', there was an anti-war atmosphere.

Rabbis, priests and mullahs are, it seems, uniting to restrain free speech, lest any member of their collective flock should have his feelings hurt … The Rushdie affair is showing not just that some Muslims do not understand the merits of free speech. It shows that many Western clerics do not either.

the transgressive had come clean, they would have had to accept that they lampooned the bigotry of Christianity and the wickedness of Western governments because they knew that Christians were not so bigoted and Western leaders were not so wicked that they would retaliate by trying to kill them, while the Islamists they ignored just might.

here is something strange. Between the fatwa and the present, religious killers have murdered just one Western artist – the Dutch director Theo van Gogh, assassinated in 2004 for making a film with the Somali feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Yet in the same period Western culture changed, and not for the better.

As in Western Europe, apparently liberal laws the authorities say are aimed against the hate crimes of extremists suffocate wider debates.

hope I am not making the insulting error of pretending that democracies are as oppressive as dictatorships – such comparisons are the self-pitying and self-dramatising whines of spoilt Western children.

Self-consciousness, the curse of Western womanhood.

By branding the rule of President al-Asad as illegitimate, Western countries may have been morally just, but they thereby prematurely blocked any opportunity they might have had to play a constructive role in finding a political solution to the crisis. The question was what should have priority: being morally correct or helping to find a solution?

There's a spirit to the western people, that is unique in the world.

It is difficult, even now, for the Western mind to understand the complexities and subtleties of an Eastern-mind heart. The puzzle piece that seems to be missing is that, in Indian society, the heart and feelings are fundamental to, not separate from, life. This basic concept is the essence of their sacred prayers and scriptures.

A jolly young fellow from Yuma Told an elephant joke to a puma; now his skeleton lies beneath hot western skies- the puma had no sense of huma

But the Western countries that link their partnership with the poorest countries with respect for democracy also have to consider that they have obligations towards these countries.

For at this juncture, the West has cut itself off from its own Jewish and Christian roots—the faith, the ideas, the ethics and the way of life that made it the West. It now stands deeply divided, uncertain of its post-Christian identity, and with its dominance waning in the global era.

In losing God the Western world had lost its soul and its center. It had become "weightless"—groundless, centerless, meaningless, insignificant and immaterial, with an "unbearable lightness of being.

To flout the will of God openly will therefore be the fast track to social and national failure for Western nations.

Unity of space being thus reestablished, the infinity that is expanded in all directions by the picture is ruled by the Western perspective; and from perspective there runs a road straight to the comprehension of our astronomical world picture and its passionate pioneering into unending farness.

The question of how to either play an active role in a Western tragedy entering its final act, or to lamentably perish as a passive victim of the universal mechanisation that is to be its general theme, is at the heart of the present volume by Oswald Spengler entitled Man and Technics, originally published in 1931.

Even today it remains a moot point among the critics whether the very first extant poet of our Western civilization has ever been surpassed for the grandeur and sublimity of his diction.

Bernard Lewis was most likely unaware of the Turkish leader's fan base among Nazis and Fascists when he hailed Atatürk for taking, with his attempted obliteration of Islam, 'the first decisive steps in the acceptance of Western civilization'. Nevertheless, Lewis as well as Atatürk was working with an ideal of civilization originally posited by salon intellectuals in the eighteenth century, and reworked by various modernizers of the twentieth century.

The new hedonism seems unable to give people a reason to go on living. Its earliest fruits appear to be poisonous. Will this new "liberating" culture that our young have so enthusiastically embraced prove the deadliest carcinogen of them all? And if the West is in the grip of a "culture of death," as the pope contends and the statistics seem to show, is Western civilization about to follow Lenin's empire to the same inglorious end?

When Ted walked in the door, silence fell across the room. The silence must have been especially clumsy, perhaps even hitting its head and losing consciousness, because no one spoke. Instead, everyone watched. It seemed like a scene from an old western, where a gunfighter itching for a shoot-out walks into a saloon. I half expected to see tumbleweeds roll by.