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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• The Western societies which espouse free market capitalism survive by the pursuit of greed and, in their own way, like Communism, throw into leadership men and women (mostly men) who know how to gain, exert and manipulate power.

  Davis McCaughey

  Leadership, Business, Men

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• I believe in free will. Of those that, like us, are in a privileged situation at least. For you, for me: people who are living in western society, people who are not repressed, who are free. We can choose. The things go largely like you want them to go. You control your own life. Your own will is extremely powerful.

  J. K. Rowling

  Wise, Witty, Powerful

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• At the heart of that western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man...is the touchstone of value, and all society, all groups, and states, exist for that person's benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any western society.

  Robert Kennedy

  Heart, Men, Practice

  Robert F. Kennedy's Day of Affirmation Address at the University of Capetown, South Africa, www.mtholyoke.edu. June 6, 1966.

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• Since Western society is deteriorating, it has become overrun with immorality, and God is going to judge it, and destroy it. And the only way the black people caught up in this society can be saved is not to integrate into this corrupt society, but to separate from it, to a land of our own, where we can reform ourselves, lift up our moral standards and try to be godly.

  Malcolm X

  Godly, Land, People

  Malcolm X (2015). “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, p.282, Ballantine Books

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• Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.

  Lewis Mumford

  Technology, Arbitrary, Novelty

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• An effective proclamation of the Gospel in contemporary Western society will need to confront directly the widespread spirit of agnosticism and relativism which has cast doubt on reason's ability to know the truth, which alone satisfies the human heart's restless quest for meaning.

  Pope John Paul II

  God, Heart, Doubt

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• The enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and abiding practice of any western society.

  Robert Kennedy

  Freedom, Practice, Goal

  Robert F. Kennedy's Day of Affirmation Address at the University of Capetown, South Africa, www.mtholyoke.edu. June 6, 1966.

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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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• The big lie perpetrated on Western society is the idea of women’s inferiority, a lie so deeply ingrained in our social behaviour that merely to recognize it is to risk unravelling the entire fabric of civilization.

  Molly Haskell

  Lying, Civilization, Ideas

  Molly Haskell (2016). “From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Third Edition”, p.1, University of Chicago Press

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• The hope for the twentieth century rests on recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned (materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret vices) and going back to other characteristics that our Western Society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding a increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self discipline.

  Carroll Quigley

  War, Compassion, Men

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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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• 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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• The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again.

  Camille Paglia

  Female, Lasts, Worship

  Camille Paglia (2018). “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism”, p.34, Canongate Books

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

  Octavio Paz

  Writing, Beggar, Western

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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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• 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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• Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.

  Erich Fromm

  Self, Ideas, Feelings

  ERICH FROMM (1956). “THE ART OF LOVING”

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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 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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