Quotes About Western Culture

#1. I believe Western culture
rule of law, universal suffrage, etc.
is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.

Mark Steyn

#2. For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.

Neal Stephenson

#3. Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels.

Bell Hooks

#4. The pressure to succeed has a lot to do with why people overstep the line. It is a peculiar weakness of western culture where we have made a fetish of success.

Desmond Tutu

#5. 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

#6. According to this view, democracy is a product of western culture, and it cannot be applied to the Middle East which has a different cultural, religious, sociological and historical background.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

#7. It would be impossible to be a woman in Western culture and not have your own issues about your image and what you look like.

America Ferrera

#8. In the latter half of the last century the impact of the expanding influence of Western culture and economic system brought about in China a severe conflict.

Chen-Ning Yang

#9. As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism.

Christopher Dawson

#10. We're so terrified of death in Western culture that we have to make up a myth of an afterlife. I think there's something to be said for living your life very mindful of the fact that you're going to die because I think you carry yourself differently. It doesn't have to be this big, negative bummer.

Steve Earle

#11. The separation of sex from emotion is at the very foundations of Western culture and civilization.

Shulamith Firestone

#12. The university is the archive of the Western mind, it's the keeper of the Western culture, ... the guardian of our heritage, the teacher of our teachers, ... the dwelling place of the free mind.

Adlai E. Stevenson

#13. I see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture.

Joel Salatin

#14. 47 Ronin is a very special movie for me. Not only a Samurai thing. Not only a Hollywood fantasy. It has a very special mixture between Japanese traditional culture and Western culture for the costume, set, story. Everything. I believe it will be a very special film that no one has ever seen.

Hiroyuki Sanada

#15. The whole drive of western culture, the part of it which is serious, is towards an extreme objectification. It's carried to the point where the human subject is treated almost as if it's dirt in the works of a watch.

Henry Flynt

#16. One cannot fail to observe a crushing irony: the gospel of relativistic tolerance is perhaps the most "evangelistic" movement in Western culture at the moment, demanding assent and brooking no rivals.

D. A. Carson

#17. What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

Thomas Sowell

#18. Istanbul is a vast place. There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture.

Orhan Pamuk

#19. Color is one way the eye and the brain work together to define the external world. However, not all cultures see color in the same way, nor do they give it as much importance as in western culture.

Nita Leland

#20. Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature. Many women give up in despair: if that's how deep it goes they don't want to know.

Shulamith Firestone

#21. Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straight-shooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.

Camille Paglia

#22. If western culture is shown to be rich, it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to 'dissolve' harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.

Umberto Eco

#23. By the known rules of ancient liberty. The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist.

George Orwell

#24. There is something intrinsically, systemically wrong with white, western culture, and if we don't fix it, it won't continue.

James Cromwell

#25. I think angels definitely offer all the imaginative possibilities that vampires do, and I think they've actually been popular in Western culture for longer than vampires have been. I hope they become a part of the culture again in a new way.

Danielle Trussoni

#26. As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of a sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more than the cultivation of an ever-shrinking horizon of self-preservation and and self-expression.

Stanley Hauerwas

#27. The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.

Chen-Ning Yang

#28. In Western culture, the 'miracles' referenced in scripture seem to have been relegated to the past as if to imply that they were reserved exclusively for certain historical periods.

Mark Ireland

#29. Unless the relationship of law to Christianity is re-established, there is no future except destruction for Western culture.

R. J. Rushdooney

#30. It is not for us ... to send out missionaries to foreign peoples; it is our task to build up our own Western culture.

Carl Jung

#31. Business is the economic engine of our Western culture, and if it could be transformed to truly serve nature as well as ourselves, it could become essential to our rescue.

Karl-Henrik Robert

#32. Western culture is hell-bent on ignoring, disbelieving, and, in some cases, actively twisting the truth about what we should be eating - so much so that it can be hard for us to believe that we've been lied to all these years.

T. Colin Campbell

#33. A lot happened in Vancouver. It was my first Western experience. I learned English, which is my second language. I became very acquainted with Western culture. I had my first sewing machine when I was 9. I trained in fashion illustration when I was in school.

Jason Wu

#34. In most of the world, poetry has such a different reputation than it does in Western culture.

Eliza Griswold

#35. In our Western culture, although death has come out of the closet, it is still not openly experienced or discussed. Allowing dying to be so intensely present enriches both the preciousness of each moment and our detachment from it.

Ram Dass

#36. The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.

Stephen Gardiner

#37. I'm also thinking a lot lately that Descartes has so much to answer for - his idea, "I think therefore I am." Western culture is so built around this overly cerebral disembodied way we've created all of our institutions, and we're impoverished by it. We're so much smaller for it. So

Krista Tippett

#38. Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.

Noam Chomsky

#39. Modern Western culture has become a mixture of paganism and Christianity. We are a blend of both. We talk of God, but we often act as though we are atheists.

Billy Graham

#40. We were made to live slower than our fast-paced Western culture deems normal. But it means paddling upstream through strong currents.

Tsh Oxenreider

#41. Information and inspiration are everywhere ... history, art, architecture, everything an illustrator needs. Europe is, after all, the land that has generated most of the enduring myths and legends of Western culture.

John Howe

#42. I think I have made it clear that I never intended to make enemies. But in an age when anti-foreign sentiment was running high, it was unavoidable that in my position as an advocate of open intercourse and free adoption of Western culture, I should make some adversaries.

Fukuzawa Yukichi

#43. I mightn't be a shaman in the indigenous sense, but as a world-bridger between Western culture and the indigenous world, I knew I was playing a shamanistic role. Language was my medicine and with it I would do my best to record my awakening and help heal with my words ... The journey isn't over yet.

Rak Razam

#44. Because of our failure to live out our beliefs, our own lack of moral clarity, and our meddling with partisan politics, Western culture no longer looks to Christianity as its moral source.

Philip Yancey

#45. Really feeling your body move and the life inside of yourself is critical. Western culture is astoundingly disembodied and uniquely so.

Krista Tippett

#46. their great hope was to restore Western culture to its religious roots, to unleash the powers of the imagination, to reenchant the world through Christian faith and pagan beauty.

Philip Zaleski

#47. My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws of Western culture.

Liu Xiaobo

#48. It's sort of another innovation, probably a good innovation, of Western culture to separate the ideas between science and philosophy, but it's important to remember they weren't always separate realms of inquiry.

Brad Warner

#49. While they rightly question every aspect of their "own" Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of "cultural authenticity" and anticolonialism.

Sam Harris

#50. The paradigm of Western culture is that the essence of persons is dangerous; thus, they must be taught, guided and controlled by those with superior authority.

Carl R. Rogers

#51. There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

Steven Pinker

#52. In fact, Western culture has spent decades drawing lines and boxes around interconnected phenomena. We've chunked the world into pieces rather than explored its webby nature.

Margaret J. Wheatley

#53. Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.

Ayn Rand

#54. Put plainer, my sense is that western culture would be a damn sight poorer today if John Lennon had been forced to carry a goddamn BlackBerry.

Merlin Mann

#55. In Western culture, the joyous shouting of children often irritates us because it interferes with our depression. That is why we have invented a term, hyperactivity, so that we can, in good conscience, sedate the spontaneous joy in many of our children.

Ronald Rolheiser

#56. There are basically only two subject matters in all Western culture: sex and death. We do have some ability to manipulate sex nowadays. We have no ability, and never will have, to manipulate death.

Peter Greenaway

#57. Multiculturalism asserts that all cultures are equal and therefore none may criticize another; intellectuals and politicians are therefore reluctant to declare the obvious superiority of Western culture to Islamic culture.

Edwin A. Locke

#58. Sex IS power. Identity is power. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live.

Camille Paglia

#59. Stephen L. Carter coined the phrase 'the culture of disbelief' to describe the prevailing hostility in Western culture toward public expressions of faith.

Josh McDowell

#60. Our perception that we have 'no time' is one of the distinctive marks of modern Western culture.

Margaret Visser

#61. I had to confront my fears and master my every demonic thought about inferiority, insecurity, or the fear of being black, young, and gifted in this Western culture.

Lauryn Hill

#62. Our [western] culture embraces sex addiction. If I drink too much or rack up credit-card debt or lose the rent in Vegas, that's bad. But if I have many lovers, that's good.

Susan Cheever

#63. In Eastern culture, people see ghosts, people talk about ghosts ... it's just accepted. And in Western culture it's just not.

Jessica Alba

#64. our confidence is not in the solidity of Western culture or the basic goodness of modern democracy. Our confidence is in Jesus and him alone.

N. T. Wright

#65. Sharing knowledge is not part of Western culture

Fons Trompenaars

#66. The great achievement of Western culture since the Enlightenment is to make many of us peer over the wall and grant some respect to people outside it; the great failure of Western Culture is to deny that walls are inevitable or important.

James Q. Wilson

#67. For in Western culture, music itself is always in danger of being regarded as the feminine Other that circumvents reason and arouses desire.

Susan McClary

#68. In a lot of Western science fiction, you need some form of conflict, whether it's aliens or robots. I think in Western culture, being more suspicious of science, and hubris, you'll see a lot of fear of creating something that goes out of control.

Cynthia Breazeal

#69. In trying to become 'objective,' Western culture made 'objects' of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing 'touch' with them.

Gloria E. Anzaldua

#70. Western culture has allowed for the open admiration of beauty because it is a human value and a pleasure, rather than some perilous evil.

Olivia Pierson

#71. The secularization of Western culture was accompanied by the elevation of art to the position of a substitute religion to replace Christianity.

Leland Ryken

#72. When you consider the concept of vampirism, it is inherently part of a Western culture.

Park Chan-wook

#73. Holy shit," he said. "Oh, my God, holy shit." "Vince," I said, irritated because he had interrupted the first happy thoughts I'd had in days. "In traditional Western culture, we like to separate deity and feces." He

Jeff Lindsay

#74. We are relational creatures. All humans live in community and most people seek social interaction. In western culture, isolation is seen as one of the most stringent of punishments. Even criminals do not aspire to solitary confinement.

Gary Chapman

#75. The present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.

John Desmond Bernal

#76. Our western mind lacking all culture in this respect, has never yet devised a concept, not even a name for "the union of opposites through the middle path", that most fundamental item of inward experience which could respectably be set against the Chinese concept of Tao.

Carl Jung

#77. Common culture is in disrepute because many believe our Western tradition has promoted uniquely oppressive and imperialistic attitudes and practices. But it remains the case that no community can exist unless the people in it share important aspects of their lives in common.

George W. Carey

#78. Whereas in Western countries the constitution merely had to guarantee the rights of a per-existing civil society and culture, in Russia it also had to create these. It had to educate society - and the state itself - into the values and ideas of liberal constitutionalism.

Orlando Figes

#79. Even in the West, moreover, although the ethical ideal has been absolute monogamy, the legal norm has been merely relative monogamy, which is also known as successive polygamy.

J. Budziszewski

#80. The ego exists as a powerful force in Western man that cannot be dismissed or denied. The therapeutic goal is to integrate the ego with the body and its striving for pleasure and sexual fulfilment.

Alexander Lowen

#81. In a policy shift which the historian Guy de la Bedoyere has compared with Western Imperialism, the Romans converted militant Britons to their way of life with consumer entincements, introducing them to the urbane pleasures of hot spas and fine dining, encouraging them to wear togas and speak Latin.

Catharine Arnold

#82. Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#83. Roman political culture's extraordinary openness and willingness to incorporate outsiders, which set it apart from every other ancient Western society that we know.

Mary Beard

#84. I'm sure one of the frustrations of being a Western enthusiast of Japanese food and culture is you're confronted every day with the absolute certainty that you will die ignorant.

Anthony Bourdain

#85. Being from a minority culture, I realised the importance of looking at non-Western cultures in a positive way.

Ibn Warraq

#86. I think that Sufism fits all over the world. The concept is not anything that fits standard Western ideas - it's always related to culture, to music, to religion. It is a dominant religion in Senegal.

Youssou N'Dour

#87. 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

#88. Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience.

Alex Steffen

#89. Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing.

Rowan Williams

#90. No wonder modern humanity, even as it loudly proclaims its freedom and power to choose, is really an impotent herd drive this way and that, paralyzed by the disconnectedness of it all. It's just one damn thing after another.

Stanley Hauerwas

#91. In the past 30 years, officials of the Iranian regime and its apologists have labeled criticism, especially with regard to women's rights, as anti-Islamic and pro-Western, justifying its brutalities by ascribing them to Islam and Iran's culture.

Azar Nafisi

#92. I've been to Africa three times. All right? You can't bring Western reasoning into the culture. The same way you can't bring it into fundamental Islam.

Bill O'Reilly

#93. Behind the criticism of fashion as an artistic medium is a highly ideological prejudice: against markets, against consumers, against the dynamism of Western commercial society. The debate is not about art but about culture and economics.

Virginia Postrel

#94. During all my years as an evangelist,
my message has always been the Gospel of Christ.
It is not a Western religion, nor is it a message of one culture or political system . , .it is a message of life and hope for all the world.

Billy Graham

#95. The question, then, for Western companies, as much as for Western governments, is to decide whose side they are on: the Chinese officials who like to define their culture in a paternalistic, authoritarian way, or the large number of Chinese who have their own ideas about freedom.

Ian Buruma

#96. Spiritual space is lost in gaining convenience. I saw the need to create a mixture of Japanese spiritual culture and modern western architecture.

Tadao Ando

#97. I have yet to meet a single person from our culture, no matter what his or her educational background, IQ, and specific training, who had powerful transpersonal experiences and continues to subscribe to the materialistic monism of Western science.

Albert Einstein

#98. 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

#99. So pervasively has Enlightenment culture's anti-supernaturalism affected the Western church, especially educated European and North American Christians, that most of us are suspicious of anything supernatural.

Craig S. Keener

#100. Museums are western inventions where the rich and the powerful or the government and the state tend to exhibit the signs and symbol and images of their culture.

Orhan Pamuk