Top 100 Quotes About Western Civilization
#1. Reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies.
Samuel P. Huntington
#2. In all of Western civilization, there have been societies that celebrating the homosexuality, the ancient Greeks. But they, in fact, protected the institution of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. They got the joke. And the American people get the joke.
Ken Blackwell
#3. If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.
Stanley Marion Garn
#4. Everything we did in the 1960s was designed to fission, to weaken faith in and conformity to the 1950s social order. Our precise surgical target was the Judeo-Christian power monolith, which has imposed a guilty, inhibited, grim, anti-body, anti-life repression on Western civilization.
Timothy Leary
#5. Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.
T Bone Burnett
#6. In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.
Samuel P. Huntington
#7. Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.
Tom Robbins
#8. Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples.
Christopher Dawson
#10. If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature's larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.
Terence McKenna
#11. To be sure, the story of Hurricane Katrina does have a moral for anyone not deliberately blind. The races are different. Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization-any kind of civilization-disappears.
Jared Taylor
#12. Western civilization, Christianity, decency are struggling for their very lives. In this worldwide civil war, race prejudice is our most dangerous enemy, for it is a disease at the very root of our democratic life.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
#13. Barring a miracle, the family that has existed since antiquity will likely crumble, presaging the fall of Western civilization itself. This is a time for concerted prayer, divine wisdom and greater courage than we have ever been called upon to exercise,
James Dobson
#14. ...to imitate Western civilization in its spirit, its mode of life and its social organization is impossible without dealing a fatal blow to the very existence of Islam as an ideological proposition.
Muhammad Asad
#15. Scientology is the science of knowing how to know answers. It is a wisdom in the tradition of ten thousand years of search in Asia and Western civilization. It is the Science of Human Affairs which treats the livingness and beingness of Man and demonstrates to him a pathway to greater freedom.
L. Ron Hubbard
#16. Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?
Pierre Schaeffer
#17. Western civilization has not yet learned the lesson that the energy we expend in 'getting things done' is less important than the moral strength it takes to decide what is worth doing and what is right to do.
Sydney J. Harris
#18. It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat
Jeffrey Burton Russell
#19. I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.
Niall Ferguson
#20. New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
H.L. Mencken
#21. When I was young I used to read about the decline of Western civilization, and I decided it was something I would like to make a contribution to.
George Carlin
#22. When Western civilization invaded the Near and Far East and what is now called the Third World it imposed its own ideas of a proper environment and a rewarding life. Doing this, it disrupted the delicate patterns of adaptation and created problems that had not existed before.
Paul Feyerabend
#23. Is Islam a religion of peace? I'm sure for some of the practitioners, but it's been hijacked by people who have an ideology that wants to destroy western civilization, and they're barbarians.
Jeb Bush
#24. The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that.
John Burdett
#25. Western civilization presents one of the most difficult tasks for historical analysis, because it is not yet finished, because we are a part of it and lack perspective, and because it presents considerable variation from our pattern of historical change.
Carroll Quigley
#26. There's a spirit to the western people, that is unique in the world.
Nikolas Schreck
#27. Western Civilization rests on great men, and nothing else. And we are no longer producing great men.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#28. Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
John Burroughs
#29. Christianity is the very root and foundation of Western civilization.
Dinesh D'Souza
#30. In Western Civilization, our elders are books.
Gary Snyder
#31. The separation of sex from emotion is at the very foundations of Western culture and civilization.
Shulamith Firestone
#32. At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it.
Whittaker Chambers
#33. Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.
Samuel P. Huntington
#34. The International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC) ... to establish a superior library reflecting the religious and intellectual traditions both of the Islamic and Western civilizations.
Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas
#35. In Western Civilization - America and Britain - if you see people talking and it becomes an argument and voices are raised, you are not surprised if violence follows. Hopefully it won't, but you are not surprised.
John Gimlette
#36. Western technology made slavery unnecessary; Western ideas made it intolerable.
Bernard Lewis
#37. Becoming a modern society is about industrialization, urbanization, and rising levels of literacy, education, and wealth. The qualities that make a society Western, in contrast, are special: the classical legacy, Christianity, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, civil society.
Samuel P. Huntington
#38. My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of western civilization, to make it a feminist world.
Marilyn French
#39. Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case ... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#40. My argument is simple, which is, that for several thousand years in Western civilization, marriage has been the union of one man and one woman. Research is overwhelming that children need mothers and fathers.
Gary Bauer
#41. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#42. This knowledge, the knowledge that the physical well-being of the citizen is an important foundation for all of the activities of the nation, is as old as Western civilization itself. But it is a knowledge which today, in America, we are in danger of forgetting.
John F. Kennedy
#43. The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a free falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli.
Thomas E. Woods Jr.
#44. By working and living in New York, you are breathing Western civilization, continuously reminded of its benefits and its values.
Ibn Warraq
#45. Some Westerners [ ... ] have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.
Samuel P. Huntington
#46. It was Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic priest and professor, who earned the title of father of international law.
Thomas E. Woods Jr.
#47. Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.
Terence McKenna
#48. It's a path that grows government, restricts freedom and liberty and compromises those values, those Judeo-Christian, Western civilization values that made us such a great and exceptional nation in the first place.
Paul Ryan
#49. Rabindranath Tagore put it gently to a Western audience in New York in 1930: 'A great portion of the world suffers from your civilisation.' Mahatma Gandhi was blunter: asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, 'It would be a good idea'. 'The
Shashi Tharoor
#50. It would be putting it mildly to say that the lesbian represents a threat to patriarchal protocol: Western civilization has for centuries been haunted by a fear of 'women without men' - of women indifferent or resistant to male desire.
Terry Castle
#51. The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state.
Ludwig Von Mises
#52. No more astounding relic of the subjection of women survives in western civilization than the status of the prostitute ... In connection with what other illegal vice is the seller alone penalized, and not the buyer?
Crystal Eastman
#53. There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.
Rebecca West
#54. An important aspect of the Eurasian worldview is an absolute denial of Western civilization. In the opinion of the Eurasians, the West with its ideology of liberalism is an absolute evil.
Aleksandr Dugin
#55. Indeed it is the protean ability of Western civilization to be self-critical and self-correcting - not only in producing wealth but over the whole range of human activities - that constitutes its most decisive superiority over any of its rivals.
Paul Johnson
#56. Elvis Presley is the main founding father of rock music. He was an unheralded genius behind a new music that changed western civilization for all time.
Peter Noone
#57. The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former.
Samuel P. Huntington
#58. The birthplace of 'Western' civilization is generally agreed to be Greece, and its birth date is generally agreed to be some time during the 6th century B.C.E. Obviously, there is not one single dramatic moment that definitively started the whole thing.
Brendan Myers
#59. The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.
Cormac McCarthy
#60. Shakespeare is, essentially, the emanation of the Renaissance. The overflow of his fame on the Continent in later years was but the sequel of the flood of the Renaissance in Western Europe. He was the child of that great movement, and marks its height as it penetrated the North with civilization.
George Edward Woodberry
#61. Well, we can't afford blindness anymore. There are tens of thousands of thugs who loathe liberty and love death, and want to annihilate Western civilization.
Tony Snow
#62. Egypt gave birth to what later would become known as 'Western Civilization,' long before the greatness of Greece and Rome.
John Henrik Clarke
#63. All of Western civilization is highly influenced by the Bible, so much so that today people take for granted that our morals and our values are not common sense, but biblically based.
Karla Perry
#64. Clint Eastwood said, the only things America has contributed to civilization are the western and jazz. And I don't think westerns are bad, but lots of people make great cinema. But jazz is right there.
Robert Wyatt
#65. It's only Western civilization that, God forbid, you talk about dying, when it's the only thing we know for certain, right? Everyone's going to die, so what's the big problem? 'Oh, God. Don't talk about it. Don't think about it.' I mean, I'm one of them. I'm not a big fan of talking about dying.
Abel Ferrara
#66. Osbert was the only one who didn't seem suspicious. He was so interested in the Decline of Western Civilization that he missed the version of it taking place under his nose.
Meg Rosoff
#67. I believe in courtesy. It is the way we avoid hurting people's feelings. She thought that maybe, just maybe, western civilization was in decline because people did not take time to take tea at four o'clock.
E.L. Konigsburg
#68. As the publisher of the 'Tory,' I strive to defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity.
Pete Hegseth
#69. No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.
Christopher Dawson
#70. It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.
Huston Smith
#71. Many do not understand how precarious Western civilization is and what a joy it is. From it, we get real democracy. From it, we get the sort of intellectual tolerance that allows me to propound something that may be completely alien to you.
John Rhys-Davies
#72. American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.
Ishmael Reed
#73. The values of this Western civilization under the leadership of America have been destroyed. Those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights, and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke.
Osama Bin Laden
#74. I think that a lot of people are in love with stress. It's the dirty little secret of Western civilization. People often mistake stress for fuel ... to me, stress is just another bad drug that I don't want to do.
Jerry Stahl
#75. Western civilization is based upon the libertarian principle, and all its achievements are the results of the action of free men.
Ludwig Von Mises
#76. A lot of people thought of me as a threat to Western civilization.
John Milius
#77. Christianity and Western civilization-what countless crimes have been committed in thy name!
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
#78. It is a disturbing fact that Western civilization, which claims to have achieved the highest standard of health in history, finds itself compelled to spend ever-increasing sums for the control of disease.
Rene Dubos
#79. The freedom enjoyed in Western society under the rule of law and constitutional government explains both the quality of its civilization and its wealth.
Paul Johnson
#80. One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split -up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again.
Alvin Toffler
#81. This freedom of political discussion on the highest level is something which Western civilization has in common with that of classical antiquity, but with no other.
Christopher Dawson
#82. Because the Western civilization is dominated by dualistic thinking, holistic scientists and philosophers don't get the recognition they deserve.
Satish Kumar
#84. To provide its happy people with perpetual fun is now the deepest purpose of Western civilization.
Jeremy Seabrook
#85. What is the thread of western civilization that distinguished its course in history? It has to do with the preoccupation of western man with his outward command and his sense of superiority.
Arthur Erickson
#86. I started the Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979. The idea of bringing Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism into the mainstream of medicine was tantamount to the Visigoths being at the gates about to tear down the citadel of Western civilization.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#87. The Western front is the important one in this war - the intersection between Islam and a liberal democratic tradition so mired in self-loathing it would rather destroy our civilization just to demonstrate its multicultural bona fides.
Mark Steyn
#88. Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess.
Iain M. Banks
#89. Even allowing for the imperfection of myths, it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization.
Howard Zinn
#90. The exaltation of human reason and its capabilities, a commitment to rigorous and rational debate, a promotion of intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange
all sponsored by the Church
provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution.
Thomas E. Woods Jr.
#91. The main reason why Western civilization lacks Spirituality, or an awareness of our interconnectedness with one another and the universe, according to Gandhi, is that it has given priority to economic and technological development over human and community development.
Grace Lee Boggs
#92. The "west"-what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these businessmen, these shopkeepers, these racketeers with their blank stares and atrophied smiles ... is it with such vermin as this that a civilization so delicate and so complex must come to an end?
Emil Cioran
#93. Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define.
Michel Houellebecq
#94. Father Roger Boscovich is often credited as the father of modern atomic theory.
Thomas E. Woods Jr.
#95. (When asked what he thought of Western civilization): 'I think it would be a good idea.
Mahatma Gandhi
#96. The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.
Stephen Gardiner
#97. A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us?
Mark Steyn
#98. The new anthropology required each culture to be understood on its own terms, as a product of its own evolution rather than as merely an earlier stage in the ascent toward Western civilization.
Guy Deutscher
#99. Perhaps Western civilization is in a post-decline phase, or maybe the decline is just taking a really long time, like the Roman Empire's did. The Romans had gladiators and Christian-hungry lions and that sort of thing. We have MTV.
Tom Shales
#100. The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.
Aharon Appelfeld
