Western Intellectuals Quotes

#1. In stark contrast with the views of the Greek philosophers and with those of the rest of western intellectuals to the present day, Chinese Taoist thought always defended individual liberty and laissez-faire while attacking the systematic and coercive use of violence typical of government. #Quote by Jesus Huerta De Soto

#2. Or why should one refrain from burning hatred, whatever its basis--race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today. Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, allowed unlimited freedom together with the various human rights; we forget that under Communism (and Communism is breathing down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) the identical flaws run riot in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that system does indeed attain 'equality'--the equality of destitute slaves. This eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today's free world. Indeed, the broader the personal freedoms are, the higher the level of prosperity or even of abundance--the more vehement, paradoxically, does this blind hatred become. The contemporary developed West thus demonstrates by its own example that human salvation can be found neither in the profusion of material goods nor in merely making money. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#3. Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise. #Quote by Jonathan Sacks

#4. There is a long dishonourable tradition of western intellectuals who have been duped by Moscow. The list includes Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, H. G. Wells, and Andre Gide. #Quote by Luke Harding

#5. Every age has found some alternative to American values appealing. The number of Western intellectuals enamored of fascism and all the various expressions of Marxism was legion. #Quote by Dennis Prager

#6. The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes. When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#7. Hence, when some members of the Iranian diaspora, especially women at the moment, use different tropes including the trope of the veil and the issue of gender to construct an image of oppression or to describe the 'silenced' Iranian woman, western intellectuals, policymakers, and publishing houses are all quick to introduce them as presenters of the authentic Iranian experience. #Quote by Mohammad Marandi

#8. If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped. #Quote by Paul Johnson

#9. In the late 1940s, a dystopian novel based on the notorious horrors of 'National Socialism' would probably have been very well-received. But it would have done nothing to shake the complacency of Western intellectuals concerning the system of state terror for which, at the time, so many of them had either a blind spot or a soft spot. #Quote by Christopher Hitchens

#10. And secretly I fell prey to the one of the besetting sins of western intellectuals, which normally I abhor: I began to experience envy of suffering, that profoundly dishonest emotion which derives from the foolish notion that only the oppressed can achieve righteousness or - more importantly - write anything profound. #Quote by Theodore Dalrymple

#11. 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. #Quote by Henry Flynt

#12. My parents were liberal intellectuals but even they expected me to stay at home and look after my younger siblings and do the housework. #Quote by Sara Paretsky

#13. Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile. "The Great Bovine City of the World," breathed Lindsey in wonder. Indeed, the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats. From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in everchanging cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killingfloor. #Quote by Thomas Pynchon

#14. Repetita iuvant. Italy, a land of great saints, poets, sailors, artists, statesmen, businessmen, lawyers, intellectuals, professors, journalists, whores, gangsters, religious parasites and dickheads. #Quote by William C. Brown

#15. The Christian religion, hand in hand with various philosophical outlooks, has motivated, sanctioned, and shaped large portions of the Western scientific heritage. Modern Christians ought to drink deeply at the well of historical precedent. If we do, we will never feel intimidated by positivists and others who deny that religion has any role in genuine scholarship.
In the broad scope of history, that claim is itself a temporary aberration-a mere blip on the screen, already beginning to fade. #Quote by Nancy Pearcey

#16. The reality of the Islamic metaphysical world was not taken seriously despite the fact that Iqbal, who was the ideological founder of Pakistan, had shown much interest in Islamic philosophy, although I do not think that he is really a traditional Islamic philosopher. He himself was influenced by Western philosophy, but at least was intelligent enough to realize the significance of Islamic philosophy. The problem with him was that he did not know Arabic well enough. His Persian was very good, but he could not read all the major texts of Islamic philoso- phy, which are written mostly in Arabic. Nevertheless, he wrote on the development of metaphysics in Persia, and he had some philosophical substance, much more than the other famous reformers who are men- tioned all the time, such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan or Muh:ammad 'Abduh. #Quote by Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#17. Humanism is not a pompous philosophy to be talked and debated about by a handful of intellectuals - it is the purest form of moral compass, which defines the civilized heart of thinking humanity. #Quote by Abhijit Naskar

#18. In anthropology, which historically exists to 'give voice' to others, there is no greater taboo than self-revelation. The impetus of our discipline, with its roots in Western fantasies about barbaric others, has been to focus primarily on 'cultural' rather than 'individual' realities. The irony is that anthropology has always been rooted in an 'I' - understood as having a complex psychology and history - observing a 'we' that, until recently, was viewed as plural, ahistorical, and nonindividuated. #Quote by Ruth Behar

#19. I had the only beard in the Western Hemisphere that made Bob Dylan's look good. #Quote by Bill Walton

#20. As immigrants fly across oceans they shed their old clothing because clothes maketh the man and new ones help ease the transition. Men's clothing has less international variations; the change is not so drastic. But those women who are not used to wearing western clothes find themselves in a dilemma. If they focus on integration, convenience and conformity they have to sacrifice habit, style and self-perception. #Quote by Manju Kapur

#21. Micah lifted his head. "I can make nsesene. Kisozi showed me how."
Joshua choked and turned the sound into a cough.
"How interesting, Micah." She beamed at the boy. "Perhaps you can prepare it for us sometime."
The boy shrugged and started to read again.
Perhaps I shouldn't tell Mother that nsesene are grasshoppers. #Quote by Debra Holland

#22. The eastern part of the Roman Empire spoke mostly Greek, and the western parts spoke mostly Latin. So very soon, you begin getting different emphases between the Eastern church and the Western church. #Quote by Justo L. Gonzalez

#23. Meet the future; the future mode of transportation for this weary Western world. Now I'm not gonna make a lot of extravagant claims for this little machine. Sure, it'll change your whole life for the better, but that's all. #Quote by Butch Cassidy

#24. If the European grows accustomed not to rule, a generation and a half will be sufficient to bring the old continent, and the whole world along with it, into mortal inertia, intellectual sterility, universal barbarism. It is only the illusion of rule, and the discipline of responsibility which it entails, that can keep Western minds in tension. Science, art, technique, and all the rest live on the tonic atmosphere created by the consciousness of authority. If this is lacking, the European will gradually become degraded. Minds will no longer have the radical faith in themselves which impels them, energetic, daring, tenacious, towards the capture of great new ideas in every order of life. The European will inevitably become a day-to-day man. Incapable of creative, specialized effort, he will always be falling back on yesterday, on custom, on routine. He will turn into a commonplace, conventional, empty creature, like the Greeks of the decadence and those of the Byzantine epoch. #Quote by Jose Ortega Y Gasset

#25. Through the same cold sunlight, colder as the day declines, and through the same sharp wind, sharper as the separate shadows of bare trees gloom together in the woods, and as the Ghost's Walk, touched at the western corner by a pile of fire in the sky, resigns itself to coming night, they drive into the park. #Quote by Charles Dickens

#26. The world will be changed by western women. #Quote by Dalai Lama

#27. I couldn't even see that woman because I have blinders on when you are around, and every single thought in my head is about you. #Quote by Carolyn Brown

#28. Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell: It fell upon a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound, And maidens call it love-in-idleness. #Quote by William Shakespeare

#29. The right to freedom of expression is justified first of all as the right of an individual purely in his capacity as an individual. It derives from the widely accepted premise of Western thought that the proper end of man is the realization of his character and potentialities as a human being. #Quote by Thomas I. Emerson

#30. Life in the trenches has been well documented, though mostly from the point of view of the victors. Especially in the English-language literature on World War I, there is not a huge amount that captures the experiences of the ordinary German soldier. The present translation of my grandfather's memoirs of his time on the Western Front may offer some redress. #Quote by Gunther Simmermacher

#31. 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. #Quote by Tom Hanks

#32. People say that human rights is a Western construct foisted on others. But that's not true. Equality, dignity, respect and justice are as much an integral part of the Islamic tradition. #Quote by Cherie Blair

#33. Britain won its wars on the playing fields of Eton. America developed its mettle at the muddy gaps of the Cumberlands, in the swift rapids of its rivers, on the limitless reaches of its western plains, in the silent vastness of primeval forests, and in the blizzard-ridden passes of the Rockies and Coast ranges. #Quote by Harvey Broome

#34. For example, while new fascism would necessarily diabolize some enemy, both external and internal, the enemy would not necessarily be Jews. An authentically popular American Fascism would be pious, antiblack, and since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well; in western Europe, secular and, these days, more likely anti-Islamic than anti-Semitic; in Russia and easter Europe, religious, anti-Semitic, Slavophile and anti-Western. New Fascism would probably prefer the mainstream patriotic dress of their own in place and time to alien swastikas or fasces. #Quote by Robert Paxton

#35. I went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It's difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It's our duty to break taboos. #Quote by Peter Greenaway

#36. The Catholic Church built and ran hospitals, schools, and centres for the poor and unemployed generations before the secular state became involved, and even today a visit to almost any main street in the Western world or to a village or town in the developing world will show Catholic charities and outreach organizations operating in what are often the most challenging of conditions. #Quote by Michael Coren

#37. This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am petting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy. I am opaque, so much black asphalt. But at the same second, the second I know I've lost it, I also realize that the puppy is still squirming on his back under my hand. Nothing has changed for him. He draws his legs down to stretch the skin taut so he feels every fingertip's stroke along his furred and arching side, his flank, his flung-back throat.
I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator--our very self-consciousness--is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends. I get in the car and drive home. #Quote by Annie Dillard

#38. Like other intellectuals, he welcomed the mindless drudgery as a refreshing change of pace. #Quote by Philip Zaleski

#39. The fact is Burke is smarter than two thirds of the Western Australian Labor Party rolled together #Quote by Paul Keating

#40. Many say that it is ethnocentric to claim that our religion is superior to others. Yet isn't that very statement ethnocentric? Most non-Western cultures have no problem saying that their culture and religion is best. The idea that it is wrong to do so is deeply rooted in Western traditions of self-criticism and individualism. To charge others with the "sin" of ethnocentrism is really a way of saying, "Our culture's approach to other cultures is superior to yours. #Quote by Timothy J. Keller

#41. Most Americans, and indeed most Europeans, would much rather ignore the fundamental conflict between Islam and their own worldview. This is partly because they generally assume that 'religion,' however defined, is a force for good and that any set of religious beliefs should be considered acceptable in a tolerant society. I can sympathize with that.
But that does not mean that we should be blind to the potential consequences of accommodating beliefs that are openly hostile to Western laws, traditions, and values. For it is not simply a religion we have to deal with. It is a political religion many of whose fundamental tenets are irreconcilably inimical to our way of life. We need to insist that it is not we in the West who must accommodate ourselves to Muslim sensitivities; it is Muslims who must accommodate themselves to Western liberal ideals. #Quote by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#42. The energy that was buried with the rise of the Christian nations must come back into the world; nothing can prevent it. Many of us, I think, both long to see this happen and are terrified of it, for though this transformation contains the hope of liberation, it also imposes a necessity for great change. But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reexamine themselves and release themselves from many thing that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long. #Quote by James Baldwin

#43. Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night. #Quote by Camille Paglia

#44. We have become the charnel house of the Western World. #Quote by William Kunstler

#45. Chiropractic works in harmony with the basic healing forces of the body, whereas the allopathic, western medical establishment doesn't have nearly as holistic a vision. #Quote by John Robbins

#46. An adult western is where the hero still kisses his horse at the end, only now he worries about it. #Quote by Milton Berle

#47. Our world must be hell, then. It must be the hell of some other place where all of us committed atrocious sins of some sort, and now we're stuck here until we die and either come back or are whisked off to some other hell. It couldn't be worse than this one, though. #Quote by Michael Monroe

#48. A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us? #Quote by Mark Steyn

#49. From the start the proportion of asocials in the camp was about one-third of the total population, and throughout the first years prostitutes, homeless and 'work-shy' women continued to pour in through the gates. Overcrowding in the asocial blocks increased fast, order collapsed, and then followed squalor and disease.
Although we learn a lot about what the political prisoners thought of the asocials, we learn nothing of what the asocials thought of them. Unlike the political women, they left no memoirs. Speaking out after the war would mean revealing the reason for imprisonment in the first place, and incurring more shame. Had compensation been available they might have seen a reason to come forward, but none was offered.
The German associations set up after the war to help camp survivors were dominated by political prisoners. And whether they were based in the communist East or in the West, these bodies saw no reason to help 'asocial' survivors. Such prisoners had not been arrested as 'fighters' against the fascists, so whatever their suffering none of them qualified for financial or any other kind of help. Nor were the Western Allies interested in their fate. Although thousands of asocials died at Ravensbrück, not a single black- or green-triangle survivor was called upon to give evidence for the Hamburg War Crimes trials, or at any later trials.
As a result these women simply disappeared: the red-light districts they came from had been flattened by Allied #Quote by Sarah Helm

#50. I told you I don't want to meet 'girls' and I'm not going to find a woman of any substance at the bars where you yahoos hang out."
"Then set up one of those online dating accounts. They have them for older folks now."
"Older folks?" Rohn let out a snort as that hit him hard, like a punch to the gut.
"Great. Thanks a lot." How the hell old did these kids think he was, anyway? Rohn had quite a few years left before he turned fifty ... #Quote by Cat Johnson

#51. I have never in my life encountered a religion as oppressive, cold, and stiff as Progressivism. I've never known a faith more eager to burn heretics at the stake. Even a fundamentalist Iranian Muslim would flinch if he came face to face with a western liberal's rigid dogmatism. I imagine that even a Saudi Arabian Islamic cleric would take one look at how American left wingers react when anyone deviates ever so slightly from their established orthodoxy, and say to himself, 'man, these people REALLY need to chill. #Quote by Matt Walsh

#52. intellectuals are typically privileged; privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices. #Quote by Noam Chomsky

#53. Rabindranath Tagore put it gently to a Western audience in New York in 1930: 'A great portion of the world suffers from your civilisation.' Mahatma Gandhi was blunter: asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, 'It would be a good idea'. 'The #Quote by Shashi Tharoor

#54. Virtually every news source lists the greater number of Palestinians killed in Arab-Israeli wars in order to depict the Israelis as guilty (of 'disproportionate response'). Had similar reporting taken place during World War II, the Western Allies would have been deemed the villains since Germany and Japan lost far more civilians than America or Britain. #Quote by Dennis Prager

#55. There is a great independence, and a confident immunity to risk, in all drinks made out of cactus. #Quote by Alan LeMay

#56. Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due. #Quote by Camille Paglia

#57. Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves. #Quote by Zadie Smith

#58. I'm very interested in music and where these sounds of Western music come from. #Quote by Ben Katchor