Western Quotes - Page 30

• The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.

  Walter Lippmann

  Democracy, Journalism, Crisis

  1920 Liberty and the News,'Journalism and the Higher Law'.

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• Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.

  Willa Cather

  Sports, Mean, Tiny

  Willa Cather (1970). “The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902”, U of Nebraska Press

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• As Western nations became more prosperous, leisure, which had been put off for several centuries in favor of the pursuit of property, the means to leisure, finally began to be of primary concern. But, in the meantime, any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared.

  Allan Bloom

  Mean, Men, Favors

  "The Closing of the American Mind: How higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students". Book by Allan Bloom, 1987.

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• The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Ignorance, Progress, Illusion

  Daniel J. Boorstin (2011). “Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected”, p.16, Vintage

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• X is not my real name. But if you study history, you'll find why no Black man in the Western Hemisphere knows his real name. Some of his ancestors kidnapped our ancestors from Africa and took us into the Western Hemisphere and sold us there, and our names were stripped from us and so today we don't know who we really are. I am one of those who admit it, and so I just put X up there to keep from wearing his name.

  Malcolm X

  Real, Men, Names

  Malcolm X's speech at the Oxford Union debate (December 3, 1964) as quoted in Saladin Ambar "Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era" (p. 36), 2013.

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• Swiftly walk o'er the western wave, Spirit of Night! Out of the misty eastern cave, Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joyand fear, Which make thee terrible and dear, Swift be thy flight!

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Dream, Night, Long

  'To Night'

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• Back of my forehead I feel tonight A whole sky full of stars. Under a western moon. Life is indeed lovely!

  Juan Ramon Jimenez

  Stars, Moon, Sky

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• The tender Evenlode that makes Her meadows hush to hear the sound Of waters mingling in the brakes, And binds my heart to English ground. A lovely river, all alone, She lingers in the hills and holds A hundred little towns of stone, Forgotten in the western wolds.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Heart, Rivers, Water

  Hilaire Belloc (1962). “Hilaire Belloc: An Anthology of His Prose and Verse”

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

  Jacques Maritain

  Religious, Source, Humanism

  Jacques Maritain (1968). “Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom”, New York : Scribner

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• 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

  Block, Philosophy, Hands

  Jacques Maritain (1955). “An essay on Christian philosophy”

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• The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free.

  Julian Assange

  Political Will, Bird, West

  "Julian Assange answers your questions". Q&A, www.theguardian.com. December 3, 2010.

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• Western media only intensified the climate of fear and insecurity...

  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

  Media, Insecurity, Climate

  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Letter to George W. Bush, May 8, 2006.

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• Everywhere you look - Britain, the States, western Europe - people are sealing themselves into crime-free enclaves. That's a mistake - a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation.

  J. G. Ballard

  Mistake, Europe, People

  "Cocaine Nights". Book by J. G. Ballard, 1996.

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• I attacked those Western playwrights who use their influence and affluence to preach to the world the nihilistic doctrine that life is pointless and irrationally destructive, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Until everyone is fed, clothed, housed and taught, until human beings have equal leisure to contemplate the overwhelming fact of mortality, we should not (I argued) indulge in the luxury of "privileged despair."

  Kenneth Tynan

  Indulge In, Luxury, Despair

  "Conference at Edinburgh (1963)". "Tynan Right and Left: Plays, Films, People, Places and Events". Book by Kenneth Tynan, p. 146, 1967.

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• Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range . . . come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River . . .

  Ken Kesey

  Oregon, Rivers, Looks

  Ken Kesey (2006). “Sometimes a Great Notion”, p.15, Penguin

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• In today's impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively called "conservative," as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual tradition presented no other alternatives.

  Camille Paglia

  Years, Intellectual, Twenties

  "Sex, Art and American Culture: New Essays". Book by Camille Paglia, 1992.

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• Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things , which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau.

  Camille Paglia

  Egypt, Personality, Lines

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

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• The piddling ignoramuses who deny that there is a distinct, discernible, objective western tradition are just woozy literati.

  Camille Paglia

  Tradition, Deny, Objectives

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Arion, Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• In the reign of the Greek Emperor Justinian , and again in the reign of Phocas , the Bishop of Rome obtained some dominion over the Greek Churches, but of no long continuance. His standing dominion was only over the nations of the Western Empire, represented by Daniel's fourth Beast.

  Isaac Newton

  Rome, Long, Greek

  Isaac Newton “Observations”, Lulu.com

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• It is one of history's most mocking ironies that the German customs union, which set out to dominate Europe and conquer Britain in the form of Bismarckian or Hitlerian military force, has at last vanquished the victor by drawing Britain into a Zollverein which comprises Western Europe and aspires to comprise the Mediterranean as well. If the ghosts of the Hohenzollerns come back to haunt this planet, they must find a lot to laugh at.

  Enoch Powell

  Military, Europe, Drawing

  "Enoch Powell on 1992". Book by Enoch Powell, p. 93. Speech in Grimsby, 1989.

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• It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.

  Huston Smith

  Civilization, Bears, Ancestry

  Huston Smith (1959). “The Religions of Man”

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• The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Order, Achievement, World

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.44, Penguin

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• Suzuki's works on Zen Buddhism are among the best contributions to the knowledge of living Buddhism... We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the author, first for the fact of his having brought Zen closer to Western understanding, and secondly for the manner in which he has achieved this task.

  D.T. Suzuki

  Grateful, Buddhism, Understanding

  D.T. Suzuki (2007). “An Introduction to Zen Buddhism”, p.7, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• The Western governments will be encouraged and persuaded to deal with the real representatives and listen to the real voice of the Kurdish people.

  Jalal Talabani

  Real, Government, Voice

  "Iraqi Kurds Hope Vote Legitimizes Leadership". Christian Science Monitor, May 15, 1992.

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• The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

  Michel Foucault

  Animal, Men, Needs

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”, p.59, Vintage

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