W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Western farmers were individualists cheifly in their dreams.”
Source: American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900
“Western feminists had been so focused on themselves they had ignored what was happening to other women in societies where they are seen only as sexual objects, mothers, and caregivers. Meanwhile, the concept of universal women’s rights yielded ground to the new ideals of multiculturalism and intersectionality. Women in Islamic societies who demanded equal rights were told that those were Western values. Western feminists came to believe that imposing their values on the Muslim world was a form of neocolonialism.”
Source: Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
“Western films don't do very well in India.”
“Western funerals: black hearses, and black horses, and fast-fading flowers. Why should black be the colour of death? Why not the colours of a sunset?”
Source: Novels of Yen-Ching
“Western governments ... will lose the war against dealers unless efforts are switched to prevention and therapy... All penalties for drug users should be dropped ... Making drug abuse a crime is useless and even dangerous ... Every year we seize more and more drugs and arrest more and more dealers but at the same time the quantity available in our countries still increases... Police are losing the drug battle worldwide.”
“Western governments are behaving like there is no upper limit to wireless radiation exposure of the masses.”
“Western governments have lost their way in the fog of greed.”
“Western governments should bear their responsibilities toward the welfare of their people and not try to make oil producers pay the costs”
“Western governments use thermal heating standards for public protection from the damaging effects of wireless radio frequency (RF) radiation. Eastern governments use biological standards that are much lower due to the extensive long term radiation damage that has been seen to occur in humans at the western thermal heating standard.”
“Western history has been a history of deed done, actions performed and results achieved.”
“Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.”
Source: Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom
“Western intellectual Islamologists have totally failed in their duties as intellectuals. They have betrayed their calling by abandoning their critical faculties when it comes to Islam.”
“Western intellectuals, and also Third World intellectuals, were attracted to the Bolshevik counter-revolution because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine which says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.”
“Western interests: imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, racism, and other negative -isms.”
“Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.”
Source: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying: The Spiritual Classic & International Bestseller: Revised and Updated Edition
“Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us: like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God-not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has it's own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions.”
“Western literature has been more influenced by the Bible than any other book.”
“Western man discovered and colonised the world, then went on to reach for the stars, yet the enemies of the West are intent on sending Western man crawling back to the primitive call of the id.
Instant unevolved animalistic pleasure is now the order of the day as the enemies of the West seek to undermine and destroy everything that once imparted the Western superego to the next generation.”
Source: The Fall of Western Man
“Western man had relearned-what the rest of the world had never forgotten-that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.”
Source: Childhood’s End
“Western man is schizophrenic.”
“Western man represents himself, on the political or psychological stage, in a spectacular world-theater. Our personality is innately cinematic, light-charged projections flickering on the screen of Western consciousness.”
Source: Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
“Western man wrote "his" history as if it were the history of the entire human race.”
“Western man, especially the Western critic, still find it very had to go into print and say: "I recommend you to go and see this because it gave me an erection."”
“Western Media is neither fair nor neutral; it is just money-monger, fake, and liar.”
“Western media only intensified the climate of fear and insecurity...”
“Western men hear about girls who are sold and forced to sell their bodies, but no one here is forced to do anything. I come to the bar to work, …and if I want to have sex with a client, I have sex with him. If I don't, then I won't. No one forces me to do anything I don't want to do. [NGO workers} come here trying to give us condoms or save us, [but] how can they help me when I make more money than them?'
—Vy, twenty-two-year-old hostess in Naughty Girls”
Source: Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work
“Western movies always seemed to show Indian women washing clothes at the creek and men with a tomahawk or spear in their hands, adorned with lots of feathers. That image has stayed in some people's minds. Many think we're either visionaries, `noble savages,' squaw drudges or tragic alcoholics. We're very rarely depicted as real people who have greater tenacity in terms of trying to hang on to our culture and values system than most people.”
“Western music is arguably America's greatest contribution to the 20th century, cultural or otherwise.”
“Western notions of individual autonomy and rule of law simply do not apply in the desert. An attack on one tribesman is an attack on all, and in a landscape where a murderer can quickly and quietly slip away, it matters little whether the accused is guilty or innocent. His entire clan is held accountable for thar—retribution. The resulting skein of honor and revenge, so familiar in the modern Middle East, is eternal, seemingly without beginning and without end. When the first recourse of victims is to their cousins, and not to the police or to an independent judicial system, poverty and political instability are the usual outcomes.”
Source: A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
“Western parents try to respect their children’s individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they’re capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits, and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.”
“Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.”
Source: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
“Western people often see obscenity where there is only symbolism.”
“Western philosophers gained access to Asian and African traditions initially by noting similarities and differences. But that, as A.C. Mukerji, of Allahabad, was to note in 1932, is not to do philosophy, but is at best a preparation.”
“Western philosophy must be discussed; eastern philosophy must be experienced.”
“Western progress (from one damned thing to another) seems to be essentially the MO of nowhere fast. But, on the other hand, the don't-set-foot-outside-your-own-village/cave ideal or injunction that you find in Buddhism and even in the Daoism of which I'm fonder, seems . . . defeatist. And more than that, it is in contradiction to what nature actually does. Somewhere, somehow, I feel as if these two opposing principles have to be reconciled.”
“Western record companies haven't always dealt with African musicians in the best way. Giving them a lot of money and telling them they're going to be bigger than Phil Collins is the wrong way to do it!”
“Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world.”
“Western science has been our god. In the variety of its power it has preserved, comforted, healed, warmed, fed and entertained us and we have felt free to criticize and occasionally reject it as men have always rejected their gods, but in the knowledge that, despite our apostasy, this deity, our creature and our slave, would still provide for us; the anaesthetic for the pain, the spare heart, the new lung, the antibiotic, the moving wheels and the moving pictures. The light will always come on when we press the switch and if it doesn’t we can find out why.”
Source: The Children of Men
“Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Western science is approaching a paradigm shift of unprecedented proportions, one that will change our concepts of reality and of human nature, bridge the gap between ancient wisdom and modern science, and reconcile the differences between Eastern spirituality and Western pragmatism.”
Source: Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy
“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.”
“Western societies want men to be upstanding, proactive citizens who take responsibility for themselves, who work with others to improve their communities and nation as a whole. The irony is that society is not giving the support, guidance, means, or places for these young men even to be motivated or interested in aspiring to these goals. In fact, society - from politics to the media to the classroom to our very own families - is a major contributor to this demise because it is inhibiting young men's intellectual, creative, and social abilities right from the start. And the irony is only compounded by the fact that men play such a powerful part in society, which means they are effectively denying their younger counterparts the opportunity to thrive.”
Source: Man, Interrupted: Why Young Men are Struggling & What We Can Do About It
“Western society doesn't make it easy to increase our longevity potential. Our youth-driven culture and our neglect of the aged promote a wholesale denial of the realities of aging. The marketplace is full of products and devices promising to make us look and feel younger. In addition, conventional Western medicine focuses on treatment and replacement therapy, prescribing expensive drugs, removing a failed organ and transplanting a new one, or replenishing a depleted hormone. Very little emphasis has been placed on preventing disease and maintaining a vigorous state of health day to day.”
Source: Secrets of Longevity: Hundreds of Ways to Live to Be 100
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Western society is so unappealing. On a material level, it is clearly more comfortable and protected from the hardships of the natural world. But, as societies become more affluent they tend to require more, rather than less, time and commitment by the individual, and it's possible that many people feel that affluence and safety simply aren't a good trade for freedom.”
Source: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
“Western spiritual seekers began picking and choosing from Eastern philosophies based on their preferences. Wanting to get away from myth and dogma, they mixed and matched, shook and stirred, mashed and meshed, blended and juiced . . . and in the process, well, they lost their way. They created a number of philosophical inconsistencies.”
Source: More Likely to Quote Star Wars than the Bible: Generation X and Our Frustrating Search for Rational Spirituality
“Western States keep playing with, and around, Russia.”
“Western Tibetan Buddhists are always looking out there at the distant snow peaks and they lose the flowers along the path.”