The West Quotes

“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

“Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“I sketched North America onto my crude and now crowded map, and Hao was astounded to learn that it was not a piece of Europe, as he had always assumed.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“   "Fine! Fine! I'm listening...but it's not very interesting!...
   "Oh, that's what you think! that's what you think! but nothing is very interesting, dear Professor Y! jot this down! take some notes!"
   "What notes?"
   "Just write!...that if it weren't for wars, alcohol, blood pressure and cancer, the people in our atheistic Europe would soon be bored to death of life!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Conversations with Professor Y

“I walked around the sad honkytonks of Curtis Street; young kids in jeans and red shirts; peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlours. Beyond the glittering street was darkness, and beyond the darkness the West. I had to go.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“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

“In the West, we've gone from living in holier-than-thou societies to more-liberal-than-thou ones. Call it secular piety but both are just different forms of the same sanctimoniousness.”
― Stewart Stafford

“But neither will anyone ask us whether we will it or do not will it when the spiritual strength of the West fails and the West starts to come apart at the seams, when this moribund pseudocivilization collapses into itself, pulling all forces into confusion and allowing them to suffocate in madness.
Whether such a thing occurs or does not occur, this depends solely on whether we as a historical-spiritual Volk will ourselves, still and again, or whether we will ourselves no longer. Each individual has a part in deciding this, even if, and precisely if, he seeks to evade this decision.
But it is our will that our Volk fulfill its historical mission.”
― Martin Heidegger, The Self-Assertion of the German University

“They say the drowning man relives his life as he drowns. Well, I was not drowning in water, but I was drowning in West. I drowned westward through the hot brass days and black velvet nights. It took me seventy-eight hours to drown. For my body to sink down to the very bottom of West and lie in the motionless ooze of History, naked on a hotel bed in Long Beach, California.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“Why did the Roman Empire - the greatest civilizing force there has ever been - fall? It was because it became infected at every level by the negative liberty of Christianity. The Roman people started thinking of their personal salvation rather than their collective strength. Once the poison of individualism has spread among the people, Rome's fate was sealed. The collective collapsed. The Dark Ages came upon the West. Once the cohesion of the people has gone, everything fails.”
― Steve Madison, The Quality Agenda: The Search for Excellence

“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.

“It is a truism, easily forgotten, that the West, in its modern phase, has not stood still. Also easily forgotten is the fact that "the West" is a relative concept only. Without an "East" or a "non-West" to compare it with, it would quite simply not exist; there would be no word for it in our vocabulary. If the concept of the West did not exist, of course, the spatial variations within the geographical area now subsumed under "the West" would loom larger in our minds. The difference between France and America might seem just as great as those between China and the West.”
― Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past

“I like Western values. Since the time we were in Central Asia, the momentum of Turks has been towards the West. But this shouldn't be interpreted as worship of, or dependence on the West.”
― Hilmi Özkök

“We all know what is meant by the term 'international community,' don't we? It's the West, of course, nothing more, nothing less. Using the term 'international community' is a way of dignifying the West, of globalising it, of making it sound more respectable, more neutral and high-faluting.”
― Martin Jacques

“Rarely has the West in its quasi-totality taken up such a persistent and negative image of a people (the Turks).”
― Stéphane Yerasimos

“As a practitioner of hindsight I know that Grandfather was trying to do, by personal initiative and with the financial resources of a small and struggling corporation, what only the immense power of the federal government ultimately proved able to do. That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken. He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“In the hour of their disspiritedness, the haggard face and form that drooped and fainted were authentic enough They had worked hard and hoped hard, and their disappointment was as great as their expectations had been. But the money movtie demeans the. They were in no race for wealth - that was precisely what disgusted Grandfather with the mining business. They were makers and doers, they wanted to take a piece of wilderness and turn it into a home for a civilization. I suppose they were wrong - their whole civilization was wrong - but they were the antithesis of mean or greedy. Given the choice, any one of them would have chosen poverty, with the success of their project, over wealth and its failure.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 Guide