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Western Culture Quotes

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Western Culture Quotes

“The Japanese have two words: "uchi" meaning inside and "soto" meaning outside. Uchi refers to their close friends, the people in their inner circle. Soto refers to anyone who is outside that circle. And how they relate and communicate to the two are drastically different. To the soto, they are still polite and they might be outgoing, on the surface, but they will keep them far away, until they are considered considerate and trustworthy enough to slip their way into the uchi category. Once you are uchi, the Japanese version of friendship is entire universes beyond the average American friendship! Uchi friends are for life. Uchi friends represent a sacred duty. A Japanese friend, who has become an uchi friend, is the one who will come to your aid, in your time of need, when all your western "friends" have turned their back and walked away.”

CultureFriendshipFriendsJapanFriendMangaJapaneseWestern CultureCultural DifferencesAnimeJapanese CultureOtakuJapanophile
Book:The Japanophile's Handbook
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“Girls should be taught at school that giving birth to an unnaturally over-sized western baby that no longer fits down the birth canal may lead to a multitude of long term health problems.”

GivingShouldLongProblemSchoolGirlTermTaughtHealthBabyBirthFitFemaleWesternLong TermGirlsProblemsBabiesLeadSchoolsWestern CivilizationWestern WorldGiving BirthWestern CultureDownSchool EducationSchool QuotesFemalesGiving QuotesOverGirl QuotesWestern PhilosophyLongerBirth MotherSchool Of LifeMultitudeCanalFitsUnnaturallySized
Author:Steven Magee
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“Whereas, in the west, individuality and drive are considered positive qualities, they are not seen the same way, in Japan. In that country, if you are too much of a rugged individualist, it might actually indicate that you are a weak, unreliable character and that you are selfish, in a childish, willful kind of way.”

CultureIndividualityJapanIndividualismJapaneseWestern CultureCultural DifferencesJapanese CultureChildishnessChildishIndividualist
Book:The Japanophile's Handbook
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“In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.”

LifePhilosophyReligionFaithBeliefAtheismCapitalismIslamMetaphysicsPostmodernismWestern WorldPragmatismWestern CultureIslamic TerrorismIslamismIslamic FundamentalismGrand NarrativesPhilosophical Scepticism
Book:The Meaning of Life
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“Very poor children learn to beg, lie and steal from their parents – they would hardly survive otherwise. Prosperous parents tell their children that nobody should lie, steal or kill, and that idleness and gambling are vices. They then send them to schools where they suffer if they do not disguise their thoughts and feelings and are taught to admire killers and stealers like Achilles and Ulysses, William the Conqueror and Henry the Eighth. This prepares them for life in a land where rich people use acts of parliament to deprive the poor of homes and livelihoods, where unearned incomes are increased by stock-exchange gambling, where those who own most property work least and amuse themselves by hunting, horse-racing and leading their country into battle.”

PhilosophyPoliticsPovertyEconomySocietyHypocrisyWestern CivilizationWestern CultureWealth Gap
Book:Poor Things
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“Nowadays, our leaders prefer to search for the causes of crime and poverty in the actions or inaction of those at the very bottom of society. The obscene transfers of wealth over the past forty years from that bottom to a privileged few at the top--and from much of the Third World to financial elites in the West--are all excused as the natural evolution of the Market, when, in fact, they are products of unparalleled greed by those who shape and direct that Market.”

WisdomWealthPovertyUnited StatesCrimeThird WorldWestern CultureElitism
Book:Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America
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“To the ordinary cultivated student of civilization the genesis of a Church is of little interest, and at all events we must not confound the history of a Church with its spiritual meaning. To the ordinary observer the English Church in history means Hooker and Jeremy Taylor — and should mean Andrewes also: it means George Herbert, and it means the churches of Christopher Wren. This is not an error: a Church is to be judged by its intellectual fruits, by its influence on the sensibility of the most sensitive and on the intellect of the most intelligent, and it must be made real to the eye by monuments of artistic merit. The English Church has no literary monument equal to that of Dante, no intellectual monument equal to that of St. Thomas, no devotional monument equal to that of St. John of the Cross, no building so beautiful as the Cathedral of Modena or the basilica of St. Zeno in Verona. But there are those for whom the City churches are as precious as any of the four hundred odd churches in Rome which are in no danger of demolition, and for whom St. Paul's, in comparison with St. Peter's, is not lacking in decency; and the English devotional verse of the seventeenth century — admitting the one difficult case of conversion, that of Crashaw — finer than that of any other country or religion at the time.”

ArtReligionCivilizationWestern CultureChurch Of England
Book:For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays Ancient & Modern
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“The obstinacy of those people is funny. That someone may simply be fed up with them and their ways and may want to look for another company, that just cannot enter their heads. They can’t believe it. There must be a trick behind it, a dishonest trick, something crooked, something political, something they can understand. They’re so used to sniffing at their own behinds that when someone wants to get a breath of fresh air, to turn at last to something different, and more important, and threatened, something that's got to be saved at all costs, it's quite beyond them.”

Human NatureSincerityWestern CivilizationWestern CultureCallousnessBelief In Humanity
Book:The Roots of Heaven
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“The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it. (p.272)”

WealthSocietyCapitalismEconomicsInequalityUtopiaWestern CultureProgressivismMilitary HistoryIncome Disparity
Book:Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power
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“In 2010, the cultural psychologists Joe Henrich, Steve Heine, and Ara Norenzayan published a profoundly important article titled "The Weirdest People in the World?" The authors pointed out that nearly all research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD). They then reviewed dozens of studies showing that WEIRD peopl are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature. Even within the West, Americans are more extreme outliers than Europeans, and within the United States, the educated upper middle class is the most unusual of all. Several of the peculiarities of WEIRD culture can be captured in this sample generalization: The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects rather than relationships.”

CulturePsychologyResearchWestern CultureCultural Psychology
Author:Jonathan Haidt
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“The idea that a professional tracker like Idriss could suddenly start suffering from a sort of poetic remorse, soulfulness, regret at the memory of the animals he had tracked down— such an idea could only come to birth in decadent brains and exquisite sensitivities freshly arrived from Europe — which were the beginning of all our troubles in Africa and elsewhere, be it said in passing.”

BarbariansWestern CivilizationWestern CultureWesternizationWestern Influence
Book:The Roots of Heaven
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“Autopsy of The West (Naskaristana 2754-2757) Food just tastes better when you eat with hands, sitting on the floor, together with family - which goes against the artificial, life-wrecking lifestyle invented by the west - in western narrative, isolation is liberation, the elderly is inconvenient, apathy is aesthetic - invasion is ambition, exploitation is exploration, indifference is etiquette, appropriation is innovation - this is the autopsy of the west, not biopsy, because we do biopsy of the living, not the dead. We cannot establish proper, healthy human integration, without first decolonizing the world, which is why it is imperative, that the world outgrows the west, no matter the country - in short, whether you're born in a first world civilization of the global south or a third world country of the north, like England or America, you must outgrow the west, if you want to be civilized, if you want to be human. The American must stop being american, you must outgrow everything that the pilgrims held near and dear, because the pilgrims were among apekind's most grotesque offenders, second only to their own forefathers, the british empire and other euro imperials. You cannot end dehumanization while abiding by the narrative established by the dehumanizers, you cannot end a pandemic while playing by the rules of the virus - you cannot heal a war-inflicted planet while studying from the rulebook of colonialism, that planted the germs of most of those wars in the first place - colonial history is not heritage, it's a crimescene. Civilization is care over conquest, civilization is integration over isolation, civilization is belonging - to burn the bridges with dehumanizers is the first requirement of civilization.”

ImperialismGeopoliticsDecolonizationEthnic CleansingWestern CultureColonial HistoryCultural StudiesCultural AppropriationGlobal SouthCivlization
Book:Nazmahal: Palace of Grace
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“We live in truly unbelievable times. Autism is an epidemic in most western countries, western governments are nothing more than corrupt corporations, and corporations are routinely suppressing information regarding the toxicity of many common household items. The result is that many people are unnecessarily suffering from easily preventable developmental problems, sickness and cancer.”

GovernmentTimeSufferingInformationDevelopmentWesternCancerCorporateCorporationsSicknessProblemsToxicAutismUnbelievableSuppressionWestern CivilizationToxic PeopleSufferCorporate CultureGovernment CorruptionToxicityWestern CultureAutism SpectrumCancer QuotesGovernmentsGovernment AbuseTimesSuffering QuoteProblems QuotesCorporate GreedSickness And HealthSuffering LifeInformSickness And DiseasesProblems In The WorldSuppressDevelopmental PsychologySickness Of The MindSuffering CrueltyTimes Of ChangeDevelopmental DisabilitySuppressed Science
Author:Steven Magee
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“The insidious reasons for a brown girl’s self-loathing won’t be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations—and what they mean about your worth—might not dawn on you while you’re playing cricket in the sand. What’s at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards.”

FeminismRacismSexismWestern CultureBeauty StandardsWestern IdealsWestern Influence
Book:Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
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“The Pakistani elite has not even observed, leave alone adopted the crucial aspects of modem western culture, whereby eighty percent of their problems were resolved through social welfare. Our people absorb their flair for fashions and their methods of entertainment, whereas the basics by which the West is exemplary remain unnoticed. They should see them plumbing, painting, cooking and struggling very hard to earn a living.”

StruggleFashionLaborWestern CultureShow OffEdhi
Book:Edhi: A Mirror To The Blind
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“Western culture, along with fake Christianity and capitalism, has transformed Western women into mere sex objects and showpieces of sexualized features. However, the greatest success of this culture and its business model has been its ability to convince women that being a single mother is a symbol of empowerment—that they are bold, not deceived. Marriage is seen as a form of bondage, while living like a mistress is portrayed as being a free and outstanding bird flying beyond the social cage. Women have also been led to believe that walking nearly naked in the streets a sign of power beauty with brain, and that the more they expose their bodies, the more they represent freedom.. Most women live under this illusion, thinking they are free and challenging outdated societal norms. But in reality, their thoughts and minds have been successfully hijacked. They have become mental slaves to new norms—norms carefully crafted and cleverly designed by a Western male-dominated society to use women for their own purposes, and by businesses to exploit their bodies for profit. In the past 50 to 70 years, nothing has been more commercialized than the female body.”

Life QuotesWomen EmpowermentWomen S RightsBeauty QuotesSociety QuotesWomen QuotesWestern CultureZakiansariquotesZakiashkim
Book:"Zaki's Gift Of Love"
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“What amounts to a plague of mental illness is now addressed as ‘normal’ rather than as an indication that there is something terrifyingly wrong with our culture. The fact that we no longer understand mental illness as a message – that is, as a nondeclarative communication of an imbalance that requires rectification – not only demonstrates the degree of our emotional illiteracy, but our failure to understand the principle of balance as the axis of all existence.”

BalanceMemoryMental IllnessImbalanceDysfunctionWestern CultureDysfunctional FamiliesDesensitizationNormalizationNeuroses
Book:Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
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“But it is not just Western youth who will be destroyed due to this madness; it is Western Civilisation that will crumble as a result. What took millennia to build and shape will be broken apart in mere decades. Traditions and cultures that were passed down from generation to generation and have evolved and existed for thousands of years will be forgotten and lost. The rich Western heritage, history and Western way of life will all be washed away within a century of madness.”

Western CivilizationWestern CultureHeritage ProtectionSocietal CollapseWestern HistoryFall Of The West
Book:The Fall of Western Man
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“The ufo is nothing more than an assertion of herself by the Goddess into history, saying to science and paternalistically governed and driven organizations: You have gone far enough. We are going to turn the world upside down. Your science is going to be shown up for what it is, nothing more than a pleasant metaphor usefully extrapolated into the production of toys for healthy children. That's what science is good for. It is not some meta-theory at whose feet every point of view from astrology to acupressure to channeling need be laid to have the hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs down.”

ScienceUfoScientismRationalismWestern CultureGaian Mind
Author:Terence McKenna
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“Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed "the claims of the ideal." These are the three stages, profoundly interrelated, through which Western consciousness is forced to experience the blackmail of transcendence.”

MomentsCultureThreeConsciousnessChristianityStageIdealsClaimsWesternSupremeSocialismPrimitiveTranscendenceWestern CultureBlackmailMonotheismSinaiIbsen
Author:George Steiner
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“My new work deals with emptying my body: 'Boat emptying, stream entering.' This means that you have to empty the body/boat to the point where you can really be connected with the fields of energy around you. I think that men and women in our Western culture are completely disconnected from that energy, and in my new work I want to make this connection possible.”

ThinkingMenWantMeanBodyCultureEnergyDealsFieldsMen And WomenEmptyConnectionsWesternConnectedBoatStreamsEnteringDisconnectedWestern CultureNew Work
Author:Marina Abramovic
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“This Western culture of ours tends to sacrifice the full range of experience to a lower common denominator that's acceptable to more people; we end up with McDonald's instead of real food, Holiday Inns instead of homes, and USA Today instead of news and cultural analysis. And we do that with the rest of our lives.”

PeopleRealEndsHomeTodayCultureCommonOur LivesSacrificeNewsWesternRangeAnalysisUsaHolidayMediocrityAcceptableMcdonaldsCommon DenominatorWestern CultureInnsReal Food
Author:Kate Bornstein
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“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.”

ThinkingShouldMadeRunningAgeCultureEnemyClearPositionWesternMade ItSentimentsAdoptionAdversariesIntercourseWestern Culture
Book:The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa
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“They [the Templars] had read Avicenna, and they were not ignorant, like the Europeans. How could you live alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it to Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and Germanic?”

TwoCultureCenturyWesternIgnorantMysticalVulgarCrudeWestern CultureBarbaricAllureLibertineSuccumbingTemplars
Book:Foucault's Pendulum
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“...There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful.”

TryingFactsCultureFunPowerfulIssuesDangerousTruth IsWesternAppearancePrimariesVisualsHallsSincereTrustedSheerGorgeousImageryControversialReformationAdvancingAdmiringEccentricityWestern Culture
Author:Dave Hickey
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“I write my books to challenge my own feelings and theories. Perhaps most surprising was what I learned about rice farming. It was really interesting to think of how different Asian and Western cultures are as a result of the kinds of agricultural practices that our ancestors used for thousands of years. The life of a Chinese peasant in the Middle Ages was so dramatically different from the life of a European peasant - night and day different.”

ThinkingWritingYearsKindBookDifferentFeelingsAgeUsedNightCultureChallengesMy OwnInterestingResultsPracticeMiddleTheoryWesternChineseAncestorSurprisingAsianFarmingMiddle AgesRicePeasantsReally InterestingWestern Culture
Author:Malcolm Gladwell
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