Western Society Quotes

• All Quiet on the Western Front.

  Erich Maria Remarque

  War, Lost Youth, Quiet

  All Quiet on the Western Front ch. 12 (1929) (translation by A. W. Wheen) See Beers 1

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• Basically what Salomé did with Rilke as a mentor was direct him toward the Russian Orthodox Church, so he could project his love of the divine feminine onto the Virgin Mary. She wanted him to stop the cycle of being disappointed by the ultimate humanity of women. She was like, "You don't want me, you want the Virgin Mary." It's kind of a mystical concept! She also changed Freud's opinion, a little bit too late, about the female psyche, which he had so wrong. If it had been better publicized, it would have changed Western society's perception of the female psyche, too.

  Laura Marling

  Divine Feminine, Humanity, Perception

  Source: www.mtv.com

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• In Western society, and particularly in American society, imagination is stulified from infancy. The imaginative child is discouraged and upbraided. He is told that the process is mere dreaming, that it wastes time and leads nowhere. It is said to be "impractical." As the child grows and its imagination inevitably leads it to express unconventional ideas and to try new behavior, it is chided and even viciously punished for such signs of unorthodoxy.

  Philip Wylie

  Dream, Children, Ideas

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• Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

  Octavio Paz

  Writing, Beggar, Western

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• James Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.

  Raoul Peck

  Class, Identity, World

  Source: www.theskanner.com

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• It has been true in Western societies and it seems to be true elsewhere that you do not find democratic systems apart from capitalism, or apart from a market economy, if you prefer that term

  Peter L. Berger

  Economy, Democratic, Term

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• Western societies from ancient Athens to imperial Rome to the French republic rarely collapsed because of a shortage of resources or because foreign enemies proved too numerous or formidable in arms - even when those enemies were grim Macedonians or Germans. Rather, in times of peace and prosperity there arose an unreal view of the world beyond their borders, one that was the product of insularity brought about by success, and an intellectual arrogance that for some can be the unfortunate byproduct of an enlightened society.

  Victor Davis Hanson

  Views, Rome, Intellectual Arrogance

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• To have the United States suddenly come up with a peace proposal after a whole series of terrorist attacks is going to show to the world that this sort of method is something that western societies can't stand.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  United States, World, Proposal

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• I realized that everyone in Western society, in some weird way, believes that they've had the experience of producing feature films.

  William Gibson

  Believe, Way, Film

  Source: craphound.com

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• If you begin acting contrary to the public's interest, and there is no alternative governmental model, with which you're willing to engage, we, the people, will have to put forth our own extra governmental models and methods of trying to restore the balance of liberty to the liberal tradition of Western society.

  Edward Snowden

  People, Trying, Liberty

  Source: www.nesta.org.uk

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• There's a major fault in Western society. It makes room for only one god, and in only one gender. There's no balance, no co-existence, no partnership.

  Tomson Highway

  Balance, Rooms, Faults

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• The divides are not Islam and western society, the divide is between people who have different values. We must promote connections between people who want to contribute to human values. People who share that commitment can collaborate across cultural divides.

  Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im

  Commitment, People, Islam

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• If we look at the complexity of the challenges facing western societies today, we see that the problems are not really about outsiders, but have their roots much closer to home.

  Mariana Mazzucato

  Home, Roots, Challenges

  Source: www.salon.com

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• I think we can expect leaders of Muslim societies to cooperate with each other on many issues just as Western societies cooperate with each other.

  Samuel P. Huntington

  Thinking, Issues, Leader

  Interview with Amina Chaudary, www.theislamicmonthly.com. 2006.

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• Islam takes advantage of two structural flaws that exist in the Western society. One is political correctness and other is the decline of morality.

  Ali Sina

  Two, Political, Islam

  Source: myislam.dk

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• It’s not the plant-based foods that will make you ill, it’s the meat and the liquid meat (i.e.: dairy) that can lead to sickness and death. Consider this: If your food had a face or a mother (or comes from something that did), then it also has varying amounts of artery-clogging, plaque-plugging, and cholesterol-hiking animal protein, animal cholesterol, and animal fat. These substances are the building blocks of the chronic diseases that plague Western society.

  Rip Esselstyn

  Mother, Block, Animal

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• Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Democracies Have, Lust, Democracy

  Jean Baudrillard (1990). “Cool Memories”, p.14, Verso

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• In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint.

  Jonathan Sacks

  Self, Revolution, Ethics

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• Our Western society is showing its technological muscles in ever more threatening ways, but the experience of fear, anxiety and even despair has increased in equal proportion. Indeed, the paradox is that the powerful giants feel as powerless as a new-born babe.

  Henri Nouwen

  Powerful, Anxiety, Despair

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• The point of mythology or myth is to point to the horizon and to point back to ourselves: This is who we are; this is where we came from; and this is where we're going. And a lot of Western society over the last hundred years - the last 50 years really - has lost that. We have become rather aimless and wandering.

  J. Michael Straczynski

  Years, Horizon, Who We Are

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• But look, I was born in 1956, the peak year for births in US history. I think I'm very representative of many of the thought processes my generation have been through and, by and large, people of my age have had their imprint planted on the consciousness of western society for a long time.

  Tom Hanks

  Birthday, Thinking, Years

  "Desert island risks". Interview with Danny Leigh, www.theguardian.com. January 12, 2001.

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• The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.

  Albert Camus

  Spirit, Problem, Rebellion

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.20, Vintage

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• To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.

  Michel Houellebecq

  Desire, Unbearable, Principles

  Michel Houellebecq (2006). “The Possibility of an Island”, p.57, Vintage

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• Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so called pleasure.

  Erich Fromm

  Political, Intellectual, Progress

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• Thinking, or more precisely identification with thinking, gives rise to and maintains the ego, which, in our Western society in particular, is out of control. It believes it is real and tries hard to maintain its supremacy. Negative states of mind, such as anger, resentment, fear, envy, and jealousy, are products of the ego.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Spiritual, Fear, Real

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