Western History Quotes

#1. I first saw 'The Dinner Party' in 2007 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. While perusing the Heritage Panels, which honor 999 women who have made important contributions to Western history, I came upon the names of two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimke.

Sue Monk Kidd

#2. Haiti was founded by African slaves who rose against their European masters, had a revolution, and created a new state. There is no other such event in Western history.

Madison Smartt Bell

#3. Economically, legally, and politically powerless throughout much of western history, women have been linked to nature and the unknowable through metaphors of the body while the masculine has signified culture and mental activity.

Whitney Chadwick

#4. No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.

Wallace Stegner

#5. The Victorian era was perhaps the last point in Western history when magic and science were allowed to coexist.

Jonathan Auxier

#6. Racial hatred in America still exists but never was it anything like the time immediately after the Civil War. The western history of our nation would not be complete without the story of former slaves that helped develop the unique character of the West.

William Silverman

#7. Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.

Ayn Rand

#8. I get a little sick of these New Yorkers who want me to make some psychic thing, like 'The Left-Handed Gun.' They don't know anything about Western history.

Howard Hawks

#9. The Iraq War was the first conflict in western history in which an imperialist war was massively protested against before it had even been launched.

Noam Chomsky

#10. Not the last time in Western history, the revolutionaries armed themselves with a new religion to steel themselves for greater outrageous.

Niall Ferguson

#11. The intelligentsia has disdained commerce throughout Western history.

Peter Saunders

#12. Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.

Peter Drucker

#13. Western history has been a history of deed done, actions performed and results achieved.

Arthur Erickson

#14. There were some ages in Western history that have occasionally been called Dark. They were dark, it is said, because in them learning declined, and progress paused, and men labored under the pall of belief. A cause-effect relationship is frequently felt to exist between the pause and the belief.

Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke Of Norfolk

#15. Humans have been doin' awful things to each other throughout history. Humanity's not as great as you make it out to be. I do what needs to be done, and that's that. We're about to go to war, Earl. There ain't no humanity in war.

Michael Monroe

#16. She was dangerous. I'd heard the rumors, that she had a history as a wild woman, that she'd been married to a gambler, maybe even been one herself, that her past was scandalous at best. But who was I to judge? My past was littered with scandal.

Margaret Madigan

#17. One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

George Saintsbury

#18. How significant is Aristotle? Well, I wouldn't want to exaggerate, so let me put it this way: Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought.

Edward Feser

#19. Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.

Thomas Sowell

#20. We're the first people of the Western Hemisphere. American history doesn't start with Plymouth Rock; it starts with our ancestors. Others might call us "wetbacks," but we've had 40,000 years to dry out.

Mario T. Garcia

#21. Most people, and certainly all members of Western civilization, are [...] born into a world which differs radically from that of their ancestors, with the result that most of human history is a closed book to them.

Patricia Crone

#22. Planned parenthood in the social history of the Western countries is, indeed, a phenomenon instrin-sically related to those very changes in peoples attitudes which, on the political plane, have been causing the trend towards economic planning.

Gunnar Myrdal

#23. 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

#24. My history was the Western. I grew up with the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid and Bonanza. I felt as much a child of the West as someone born in Montana or Wyoming.

Clive Sinclair

#25. The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.

Thomas Carlyle

#26. In the USA, we learn "art history" as Western art history, and the history of Asian, or African art is a special case; we learn politics by examining our own government system, and consider other systems special cases, and the same is true of philosophy.

Jay L. Garfield

#27. 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

#28. Never underestimate the ability of political leaders to misread history on a monumental scale. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have both served to hasten western decline: they have both failed to achieve their objectives and in the process demonstrated an underlying western impotence.

Martin Jacques

#29. Rome, on the other hand, lost - suffering on that one day more battle deaths than the United States during the entire course of the war in Vietnam, suffering more dead soldiers than any other army on any single day of combat in the entire course of Western military history.

Robert L. O'Connell

#30. But you have to understand, my beard is so nasty. I mean, it's the only beard in the history of Western civilization that makes Bob Dylan's beard look good.

Bill Walton

#31. The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer.

Shulamith Firestone

#32. The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping and yet deeply personal tale of America's hidden 20th century history - the long and difficult trek of Southern blacks to the northern and western cities. This is an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation.

Tom Brokaw

#33. In the seventh century the Arabs created a new world into which other peoples were drawn. In the nineteenth and twentieth, they were themselves drawn into a new world created in western Europe.

Albert Hourani

#34. Toward the end of the Second World War, a
new consciousness arose amongst the public
and policy makers of the Western World. After
ten years of crippling economic depression
and another five at war, the public demanded
something new from their disintegrating
urban environments.

Lucas Mascotto-Carbone

#35. All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.

James Baldwin

#36. John Stockton is one of the true marvels, not just of basketball, or in America, but in the history of Western Civilization!

Bill Walton

#37. Answered prayers cover the field of providential history as flowers cover western prairies.

Theodore L. Cuyler

#38. Our western science is a child of moral virtues; and it must now become the father of further moral virtues if its extraordinary material triumphs in our time are not to bring human history to an abrupt, unpleasant and discreditable end.

Arnold J. Toynbee

#39. Manuscript editions didn't immediately die out with the printing explosion that burst across Europe in the 1460s and 1470s. Manuscripts continued to be produced into the 16th century, many decades after presses had spread to most minor cities in Western Europe.

Ian Lamont

#40. Japanese had never seen a Western-style circus, and most of them had probably never seen foreigners, either.

Frederik L. Schodt

#41. The story of dance in the Western world is as much an alternative vision of the events of history as is the folk history told for generations by primal people.

Jamake Highwater

#42. America and Western Europe are on a moneymaking, pleasure-mad spree unparalleled in the history of the world. God is generally ignored or ridiculed. Church members in many cases are only halfhearted Christians. Judgment is coming.

Billy Graham

#43. We got 16,000 wonderful vehicles. We got all the steel that we make our tanks out of. Of course, we couldn't have done without Western aid.

Georgy Zhukov

#44. 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

#45. I returned from the West, and brought home in my nostrils and nerves that benumbing lethargy, imprudent hostility, and arrogant superiority with which the West viewed the fate of Eastern Europe.

Sandor Marai

#46. 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

#47. In spite of overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen of western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the truth that the civilisation which surrounds him is a rare exception in the history of the world.

Henry James Sumner Maine

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

Noam Chomsky

#51. Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men.

Alexander Herzen

#52. Speaking of childhood fantasy, we were doing a Western, but we were also just hanging out. You work, and you ride and ride and ride, and then, for the next two hours, you look for a place to kick out, in this amazing canyon with so much heritage and so much history.

James Badge Dale

#53. Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history.

Richard Rohr

#54. I think readers nowadays are happy to have genres blurred. We're seeing that on screen too: The Pirates of the Caribbean mashes up history and fantasy, Cowboys and Aliens mixes the Western and the Science Fiction genres.

Colette Freedman

#55. Western man wrote "his" history as if it were the history of the entire human race.

John Oliver Killens

#56. (on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.

Bertrand Russell

#57. 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

#58. The western mind, because of it's unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics.

Terence McKenna

#59. Western conception of history has had great consequences over the last two hundred years. You see it in the invasion of Iraq. You see it in almost everything that is said and done.

Pankaj Mishra

#60. We are living through one of the most fundamental shifts in history- a change in the actual belief structure of Western society. No economic, political, or military power can compare with the power of a change of mind. By deliberately changing their images of reality, people are changing the world.

Willis Harman

#61. My history teacher could make us feel like he was imparting rare gossip to us when he was talking about Maria Theresa and the Habsburgs. I just loved that sense of - the Western canon is here, and it's gossipy and tawdry, and everyone is sort of goofy.

Mallory Ortberg

#62. If there are more than two sexes, then so be it and, of course, the assumption that there are two helps shape, as many have argued, the binary logic that underpins much of the history of western philosophy.

Alison Assiter

#63. The art music of the West has developed through out its history by means of individual geniuses, and out of the soil supporting them; non-Western musicians were born, and grew like the grasses of the field.

Toru Takemitsu

#64. The Western world doesn't really give enough credit to the importance in history of the Soviet invasion and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. For us it was a sideshow of the Cold War. For the Islamic world it was an unprovoked infidel invasion of a Muslim country not unlike Iraq.

Michael Scheuer

#65. 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

#66. A western audience might not appreciate 'Chanakya's Chant' because of its dependence on history and ancient statecraft. My book is a modern-day thriller that draws on a bedrock of history. My primary object is to entertain, not educate.

Ashwin Sanghi

#67. 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