Western Society Quotes - Page 2

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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It's a mistake to assume that Islamists always come from the slums. Indeed, many come from affluent families but for some reason just couldn't manage to integrate into Western society, even though they had good opportunities for advancement.

Otto Schily

Mistake, Opportunity, Affluence

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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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Western society is a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives; it is a society of boundless private charity; it is a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth.

Ibn Warraq

Self, Merit, Charity

Source: counterjihadreport.com

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I think forgiveness plays a very important part in Western society and it comes from the Judeo Christian heritage.

Ibn Warraq

Christian, Thinking, Play

Source: www.ruthfullyyours.com

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There was a time when only specialized Christian missionaries needed to be able to defend the gospel of Jesus Christ against the attacks of Islam. Today every Christian has an opportunity and obligation to present the gospel effectively and in Christian love to the Muslims who have permeated our Western society. When your neighbor, your mechanic, your favorite basketball player, your employer or employee, or even your children's friends could very well be Muslims, the need for proper understanding and an effective Christian witness is abundantly clear.

Josh McDowell

Basketball, Christian, Jesus

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Western society has many flaws, and it is good for an educated person to have thought some of these through, even at the expense of losing a lecture or two to tear gas.

Robert B. Laughlin

Two, Tears, Lectures

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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That new technologies and techniques would be forthcoming was a fundamental article of Christian faith. Hence, no bishops or theologians denounced clocks or sailing ships-although both were condemned on religious grounds in various non-Western societies.

Rodney Stark

Christian, Religious, Technology

Rodney Stark (2007). “The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success”, p.48, Random House

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Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.

Walter Lippmann

Fall, Government, Order

Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.241, Harvard University Press

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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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