Western Society Quotes:

Give 'em all the same grub and all the same pay/And the war would be over and done in a day." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 3

- Erich Maria Remarque

topic: War, Giving, Would Be, War Movie, Birdsong

I believe in free will. Of those that, like us, are in a privileged situation at least. For you, for me: people who are living in western society, people who are not repressed, who are free. We can choose. The things go largely like you want them to go. You control your own life. Your own will is extremely powerful.

- J. K. Rowling

topic: Wise, Witty, Powerful, Western Society

The Western societies which espouse free market capitalism survive by the pursuit of greed and, in their own way, like Communism, throw into leadership men and women (mostly men) who know how to gain, exert and manipulate power.

- Davis McCaughey

topic: Leadership, Men, Greed, Western Society, Free Market Capitalism

At the heart of that western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man...is the touchstone of value, and all society, all groups, and states, exist for that person's benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any western society.

- Robert Kennedy

source: Robert F. Kennedy's Day of Affirmation Address at the University of Capetown, South Africa, www.mtholyoke.edu. June 6, 1966.

topic: Heart, Men, Practice, Western Society, Enlargement

Since Western society is deteriorating, it has become overrun with immorality, and God is going to judge it, and destroy it. And the only way the black people caught up in this society can be saved is not to integrate into this corrupt society, but to separate from it, to a land of our own, where we can reform ourselves, lift up our moral standards and try to be godly.

- Malcolm X

source: Malcolm X (2015). “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, p.282, Ballantine Books

topic: Godly, Land, People, Western Society, Deteriorating

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.

- Lewis Mumford

topic: Technology, Novelty, Arbitrary, Western Society

An effective proclamation of the Gospel in contemporary Western society will need to confront directly the widespread spirit of agnosticism and relativism which has cast doubt on reason's ability to know the truth, which alone satisfies the human heart's restless quest for meaning.

- Pope John Paul II

topic: God, Heart, Doubt, Western Society, Relativism

I like the analogy that the way that we live in Western Society, the energy that we consume in the form of fossil fuels, is the energy equivalent in pre-fossil fuel terms of having 500 slaves.

- John Lindsay

source: Source: williamlittlesociology.wordpress.com

topic: Way, Fossils, Energy, Western Society

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak. What I see in my country, progressively over these years, is that the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer. The rich have become indifferent through a philosophy of greed, and the poorer have become hopeless because they're not properly cared for. That's actually something that is happening in many Western societies. Your own, I am told, is not free from it.

- John le Carre

topic: Country, Philosophy, Years, Western Society

Growing terrorism, permissive societies, democracy collapsing through lack of law and order. If things continue on their present track, the disintegration of Western societies will occur much sooner than you think under the hammer blows of fascism and communism. Freedom is not something that does not have a breaking point, and your enemies would like you to reach that point.

- Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

source: "Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President". Book by Jimmy Carter, p. 444, 1995.

topic: Thinking, Blow, Point Break, Western Society, Law And Order

I did not write it [Coming of Age in Samoa] as a popular book, but only with the hope that it would be intelligible to those who might make the best use of its theme, that adolescence need not be the time of stress and strain which Western society made it; that growing up could be freer and easier and less complicated; and also that there were prices to pay for the very lack of complication I found in Samoa - less intensity, less individuality, less involvement with life.

- Margaret Mead

topic: Growing Up, Stress, Book, Western Society, Samoa

To have the United States suddenly come up with a peace proposal after a whole series of terrorist attacks is going to show to the world that this sort of method is something that western societies can't stand.

- Henry A. Kissinger

topic: United States, World, Proposal, Western Society

A society which believes in a worthwhile future saves in the present so as to invest in the future. Contemporary Western society spends in the present and piles up debts for the future, ravages the environment, and leaves its grandchildren to cope with the results as best they can.

- Lesslie Newbigin

topic: Believe, Future, Grandchildren, Western Society

There is a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most people want more income and strive for it. Yet as Western societies have got richer, their people have become no happier.

- Richard Layard, Baron Layard

source: "Happiness: Lessons from a New Science". Book by Richard Layard, April 7, 2011.

topic: Heart, People, Income, Western Society

Many journalists are influenced by a myopic multiculturalism that is suspicious of anything Western, while giving the benefit of the doubt to non-Western societies.

- Nancy Pearcey

topic: Giving, Doubt, Myopic, Western Society, Multiculturalism

Basically what Salomé did with Rilke as a mentor was direct him toward the Russian Orthodox Church, so he could project his love of the divine feminine onto the Virgin Mary. She wanted him to stop the cycle of being disappointed by the ultimate humanity of women. She was like, "You don't want me, you want the Virgin Mary." It's kind of a mystical concept! She also changed Freud's opinion, a little bit too late, about the female psyche, which he had so wrong. If it had been better publicized, it would have changed Western society's perception of the female psyche, too.

- Laura Marling

source: Source: www.mtv.com

topic: Divine Feminine, Humanity, Perception, Orthodox Church, Western Society

Whether [new Protestant church movements] place their emphasis on new worship styles, expressions of the Holy Spirit’s power, evangelism to seekers, or Bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square, that is, at the heart of Western culture. And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting, all their reproduction will simply mirror this misapprehension.

- Alan Hirsch

topic: Teaching, Heart, Expression, Protestants, Western Society

Islam takes advantage of two structural flaws that exist in the Western society. One is political correctness and other is the decline of morality.

- Ali Sina

source: Source: myislam.dk

topic: Two, Political, Islam, Western Society, Correctness

While the Western society gives total freedom to the individuals to do whatever "consenting adults" please, which admittedly is better than having the government poke into your private life and your bedroom, like in Islamic countries, there are no moral compasses to tell what is right from wrong. The very notion of right and wrong has come under question. The motto is "if it feels good do it". Hedonism rules!

- Ali Sina

source: Source: myislam.dk

topic: Moral Compass, Western Society, Hedonism

Abolitionism did not find positive response in Africa as it did in Western societies and cultures.

- Ibn Warraq

source: Source: www.ruthfullyyours.com

topic: Society And Culture, Western Society, Positive Response

The rule of law does not guarantee freedom, since general law as well as personal edicts can be tyrannical. But increasing reliance on the rule of law clearly played a major role in transforming Western society from a world in which the ordinary citizen was literally subject to the arbitrary will of his master to a world in which the ordinary citizen could regard himself as his own master

- Milton Friedman

source: Milton Friedman (1975). “There's no such thing as a free lunch”, Open Court Pub Co

topic: Law, Ordinary, Doe, Ordinary Citizens, Western Society

I think we can expect leaders of Muslim societies to cooperate with each other on many issues just as Western societies cooperate with each other.

- Samuel P. Huntington

source: Interview with Amina Chaudary, www.theislamicmonthly.com. 2006.

topic: Thinking, Issues, Leader, Western Society

If we look at the complexity of the challenges facing western societies today, we see that the problems are not really about outsiders, but have their roots much closer to home.

- Mariana Mazzucato

topic: Home, Roots, Challenges, Society Today, Western Society

If you begin acting contrary to the public's interest, and there is no alternative governmental model, with which you're willing to engage, we, the people, will have to put forth our own extra governmental models and methods of trying to restore the balance of liberty to the liberal tradition of Western society.

- Edward Snowden

source: Source: www.nesta.org.uk

topic: People, Trying, Liberty, Western Society

I realized that everyone in Western society, in some weird way, believes that they've had the experience of producing feature films.

- William Gibson

source: Source: craphound.com

topic: Believe, Way, Film, Western Society

It's a mistake to assume that Islamists always come from the slums. Indeed, many come from affluent families but for some reason just couldn't manage to integrate into Western society, even though they had good opportunities for advancement.

- Otto Schily

topic: Mistake, Opportunity, Affluence, Western Society, Islamists

James Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.

- Raoul Peck

topic: Class, Identity, World, Western Society, American Writer

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.

- Ibn Warraq

source: Source: counterjihadreport.com

topic: Self, Merit, Charity, Western Society

I think forgiveness plays a very important part in Western society and it comes from the Judeo Christian heritage.

- Ibn Warraq

source: Source: www.ruthfullyyours.com

topic: Christian, Thinking, Play, Western Society

There was a time when only specialized Christian missionaries needed to be able to defend the gospel of Jesus Christ against the attacks of Islam. Today every Christian has an opportunity and obligation to present the gospel effectively and in Christian love to the Muslims who have permeated our Western society. When your neighbor, your mechanic, your favorite basketball player, your employer or employee, or even your children's friends could very well be Muslims, the need for proper understanding and an effective Christian witness is abundantly clear.

- Josh McDowell

topic: Basketball, Christian, Jesus, Western Society

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.

- Robert B. Laughlin

topic: Two, Tears, Lectures, Educated Person, Western Society

The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again.

- Camille Paglia

source: Camille Paglia (2018). “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism”, p.34, Canongate Books

topic: Female, Lasts, Worship, Western Society, Female Power

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

- Octavio Paz

topic: Beggar, Western, Western Society

In Western society, and particularly in American society, imagination is stulified from infancy. The imaginative child is discouraged and upbraided. He is told that the process is mere dreaming, that it wastes time and leads nowhere. It is said to be "impractical." As the child grows and its imagination inevitably leads it to express unconventional ideas and to try new behavior, it is chided and even viciously punished for such signs of unorthodoxy.

- Philip Wylie

topic: Dream, Children, Ideas, Western Society

It’s not the plant-based foods that will make you ill, it’s the meat and the liquid meat (i.e.: dairy) that can lead to sickness and death. Consider this: If your food had a face or a mother (or comes from something that did), then it also has varying amounts of artery-clogging, plaque-plugging, and cholesterol-hiking animal protein, animal cholesterol, and animal fat. These substances are the building blocks of the chronic diseases that plague Western society.

- Rip Esselstyn

topic: Mother, Block, Animal, Western Society, Clogging

Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.

- Erich Fromm

source: ERICH FROMM (1956). “THE ART OF LOVING”

topic: Self, Ideas, Feelings, Western Society

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

source: "Desert island risks". Interview with Danny Leigh, www.theguardian.com. January 12, 2001.

topic: Birthday, Thinking, Years, Western Society

Thinking, or more precisely identification with thinking, gives rise to and maintains the ego, which, in our Western society in particular, is out of control. It believes it is real and tries hard to maintain its supremacy. Negative states of mind, such as anger, resentment, fear, envy, and jealousy, are products of the ego.

- Eckhart Tolle

topic: Fear, Real, Believe, Western Society, Anger Resentment

Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so called pleasure.

- Erich Fromm

topic: Political, Intellectual, Progress, Western Society

To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.

- Michel Houellebecq

topic: Desire, Levels, Unbearable, Inaccessible, Western Society

The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.

- Albert Camus

source: Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.20, Vintage

topic: Spirit, Problem, Rebellion, Western Society, Factual

Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.

- Jean Baudrillard

source: Jean Baudrillard (1990). “Cool Memories”, p.14, Verso

topic: Democracies Have, Lust, Democracy, Social Democracy, Western Society

The point of mythology or myth is to point to the horizon and to point back to ourselves: This is who we are; this is where we came from; and this is where we're going. And a lot of Western society over the last hundred years - the last 50 years really - has lost that. We have become rather aimless and wandering.

- J. Michael Straczynski

topic: Years, Horizon, Who We Are, Western Society, Where We Came

In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint.

- Jonathan Sacks

topic: Self, Revolution, Ethics, Western Society, Self Restraint

It has been true in Western societies and it seems to be true elsewhere that you do not find democratic systems apart from capitalism, or apart from a market economy, if you prefer that term

- Peter L. Berger

topic: Economy, Democratic, Being True, Western Society

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.

- Victor Davis Hanson

topic: Views, Rome, Intellectual, Insularity, Intellectual Arrogance

That new technologies and techniques would be forthcoming was a fundamental article of Christian faith. Hence, no bishops or theologians denounced clocks or sailing ships-although both were condemned on religious grounds in various non-Western societies.

- Rodney Stark

source: Rodney Stark (2007). “The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success”, p.48, Random House

topic: Christian, Religious, Technology, Forthcoming, Western Society

Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.

- Walter Lippmann

topic: Fall, Government, Order, Western Society, Arrested

The divides are not Islam and western society, the divide is between people who have different values. We must promote connections between people who want to contribute to human values. People who share that commitment can collaborate across cultural divides.

- Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im

topic: Commitment, People, Islam, Western Society, Different Values