Cassellos Western Quotes

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

There is no better place to heal a broken heart than on the back of a horse. ~ Missy Lyons

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. ~ Wafa Sultan

Reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies. ~ Samuel P. Huntington

Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on [E]arth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Insofar as there is a crime problem in Western Europe, it is largely the product of immigration. Seventy percent of the inmates of France's jails, for instance, are Muslim. The Muslims of Western Europe are generally not atheists. Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' [H]uman [D]evelopment [I]ndex are unwaveringly religious.
Other analyses paint the same picture: the United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious adherence; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality. The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms. ~ Sam Harris

India is often said to be the most diverse country on Earth. And diversity worked so well there that its eastern and western provinces split off into Pakistan and Bangladesh amid oceans of blood. According to the map in a Daily Mail article titled 'Worlds Apart,' Africa is the most ethnically diverse continent on Earth, yet it continues to eat itself alive due to ongoing tribal conflicts that may have been exploited by colonialists but that existed long before Europeans ever set foot in Africa and have persisted - and even escalated - once the colonialists began their slow retreat. European history is replete with homicidal group conflicts that may on their surface appear to have been rooted in religion or ideology but were more deeply entwined with things such as cultural, linguistic, and phenotypical differences. ~ Jim Goad

People don't really have much of a choice when the heart falls. I'm lucky enough that mine just so happened to fall for you, Misty." - Dylan to Misty in, When the Heart Falls ~ Kimberly Lewis

Am I witch? I don't know. That's what they call me. They say it's because I follow the rhythms of the earth, honor the seasons, dance under the moon and seek the ancient herbal wisdom of our ancestors. "Folk Lore, poppycock, myths," they say as they sneer at the rosemary in my cup, the comfrey brewing on the stove and turmeric stains on my hands. "Western medicine and science have replaced all that nonsense," they say. They make witches out to be evil and then call me a witch because I am seeking the knowledge & ancient wisdom that the world seems hell bent on forgetting. Well, they can call me what they like, but I know I am not evil. This is what I know: I am an intuitive woman who instinctively knows that this sacred earth holds healing that western medicine will never be able to replace. I will be here holding space. I will be their witch. So, here I am- A kitchen witch sipping her Rosemary tea, mixing up her herbal potion, dancing under the moon, and fighting for the knowledge & wisdom of our grandmothers to not be forgotten. ~ Brooke Hampton

Who today reflects that in the Battle of the Somme alone, where every man was an eager volunteer of 'Kitchener's Army', more British lives were lost than in the whole of the Second World War? Or that in the first day's fighting of any major attack on the Western Front, more men were killed than the Americans lost in eight years fighting in Vietnam? - 31,000 at the time these words are written. The average man and woman of today is not interested in such profitless comparisons. Modern life does not want to hear about these inconceivable calamities of the past. ~ Arthur Stanley Gould Lee

I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that - I don't mind people being happy - but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It's a really odd thing that we're now seeing people saying "write down three things that made you happy today before you go to sleep" and "cheer up" and "happiness is our birthright" and so on. We're kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position. It's rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don't teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say, "Quick! Move on! Cheer up!" I'd like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word "happiness" and to replace it with the word "wholeness." Ask yourself, "Is this contributing to my wholeness?" and if you're having a bad day, it is. ~ Hugh Mackay

Germany was the centerpiece in Western and Eastern Europe in both wars. ~ Anonymous

As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of a sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more than the cultivation of an ever-shrinking horizon of self-preservation and and self-expression. ~ Stanley Hauerwas

It can no longer be claimed on demographic grounds that the 'vast majority' of Americans believe in Christ and the gospel. We do remain a highly religious people, especially when compared with Western Europe, but Americans are increasingly satisfying their metaphysical needs through forms of spirituality that have little or nothing to do with orthodox Christianity. ~ Michael Babcock

When I'm critical of modern approaches to ecology, I'm really trying to remind my reader of the long relationship that Western civilization has had to these forests that define the fringe of its place of habitation, and that this relationship is one that has a rich history of symbolism and imagination and myth and literature. So much of the Western imagination has projected itself into this space that when you lose a forest, you're losing more than just the natural phenomenon or biodiversity; you're also losing the great strongholds of cultural memory.

(Source: discussing "Deforestation in a Civilized World.") ~ Robert Pogue Harrison

In 1981, while doing postdoctoral field work in cultural anthropology, Bonnie A. Nardi lived with villagers in Western Samoa, trying to understand the cultural reasons that people there have an average of eight children. ~ Katie Hafner

Spiritual space is lost in gaining convenience. I saw the need to create a mixture of Japanese spiritual culture and modern western architecture. ~ Tadao Ando

Interesting Fact: During World War II Germans could spot American spies when they sat in this L Cross position. It became popular in the states after cowboys in Western movies used it, but had not caught on in Germany. ~ Vanessa Edwards

The basic problem is that most Western countries have privatised the next generation. Having children tends to be regarded as a personal choice rather than a social good. ~ Tony Abbott

Sculpting them in a drizzle shawl,
I would have have weaved your dreams
in my distinct eyes;
I would have taken your cheeks,
and decorated them with full moon sights,
writing verses with starry eyes;
I would have invented diction suiting
your stammering tongue,
writing stories about your happy childhood;
I would have traveled beside western winds,
bringing roses from far lands, from Samarkand,
from the rose gardens touching Turkish valleys,
from mountains smelling of Azerbaijan.
I would have portrayed you a an honest mother,
buying your children a happy house, a giant sky;
I would have made orchards of your ripe smiles,
tending rains and sunlight into their broad borders;
Ah, I would have sown your braided hair
into almonds, saffron and homegrown walnuts,
into tufts of a lifelong breeze. ~ Ashfaq Saraf

For 500 years the West patented six killer applications that set it apart. The first to download them was Japan. Over the last century, one Asian country after another has downloaded these killer apps- competition, modern science, the rule of law and private property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. Those six things are the secret sauce of Western civilization. ~ Niall Ferguson

Many do not understand how precarious Western civilization is and what a joy it is. From it, we get real democracy. From it, we get the sort of intellectual tolerance that allows me to propound something that may be completely alien to you. ~ John Rhys-Davies

Roan studied the photo in his hand. Shiloh Gallagher
had to be twenty-nine years old according to what Maud
had told him. Damned if she didn't look twenty-five or so,
her features unlined. She wasn't model pretty, but she had
an arresting face, with huge intelligent-looking green eyes.
His gaze dropped to her mouth and he felt himself stir. Her
mouth would make any man go crazy. Her upper lip was
full, but thinner than her lower one. The shape of her mouth
made him feel heat in his lower body. "Is she married?"

"No," Maud said. She's single. Never did marry. I don't know why. Shiloh's
a beautiful girl."

She was hardly a girl, but Roan said nothing because he
was fully reacting to her as a woman. He wondered if she
was curvy or rail thin. He was disgruntled over his avid
curiosity. "I have no problem with it. You know I get up
early and come in late. She's going to have to fend for herself.
I'm not cooking for her."

"Right," Maud agreed. "She's pretty shaken up, Roan.
You might find that stressful until, hopefully, Shiloh will
start to relax."

Shrugging, he slid the photo onto the desk. "Maud, I just
hope I don't stress her out with my award-winning personality,"
he said, and he cracked a small, sour grin.

Maud cackled. "I think you'll like her, Roan. She's a
very kind person. An introvert like you. Just remembe ~ Lindsay McKenna

Science fiction lends itself readily to imaginative subversion of any status quo. Bureaucrats and politicians, who can't afford to cultivate their imaginations, tend to assume it's all ray-guns and nonsense, good for children. A writer may have to be as blatantly critical of utopia as Zamyatin in We to bring the censor down upon him. The Strugatsky brothers were not blatant, and never (to my limited knowledge) directly critical of their government's policies. What they did, which I found most admirable then and still do now, was to write as if they were indifferent to ideology - something many of us writers in the Western democracies had a hard time doing. They wrote as free men write. ~ Arkady Strugatsky

Nothing could be more comfortable than writing about the ballet from books. A ballet he had never seen was an art in another world. It was an unrivaled armchair reverie, a lyric from some paradise. He called his work research, but it was actually free, uncontrolled fantasy. He preferred not to savor the ballet in the flesh; rather he savored the phantasms of his own dancing imagination, called up by Western books and pictures. It was like being in love with someone he had never seen. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

When you go to other parks, they hang banners for the wild-card or Eastern Division or Western Division champions. Around here, they don't hang anything unless its for being world champions. ~ Chili Davis

To most people in the U.K., indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as 'what NASA does'. This perception is - in many respects - a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up U.S. and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match. ~ Martin Rees

The warden always seems to know which book to bring. When the sun is gunslinger blue, the warden brings a western. When rain slates against the towers and the world has gone hopeless with gray, it is Bible stories. When the halls ring with the cries of riot and the bars of my own cell rattle with pain, the warden drops a soft book on the floor, solace in its pages: the collected poems of Walt Whitman. And oh, my favorites, like the tastes of childhood. Every few months the warden passes me The White Dawn, and for a few precious days I traverse the open heavens on hard-packed moonlit snow and see the blue splashing arctic lights, and I fill my belly with frozen seal meat and laugh with my Inuit friends. ~ Rene Denfeld

This is my long-run forecast in brief: The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinetly. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards. I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse. ~ Julian Simon

But how shall an Occidental mind ever understand the Orient? Eight
years of study and travel have only made this, too, more evident that not
even a lifetime of devoted scholarship would suffice to initiate a Western
student into the subtle character and secret lore of the East. Every chap-
ter, every paragraph in this book will offend or amuse some patriotic or
esoteric soul: the orthodox Jew will need all his ancient patience to forgive
the pages on Yahveh; the metaphysical Hindu will mourn this superficial
scratching of Indian philosophy; and the Chinese or Japanese sage will
smile indulgently at these brief and inadequate selections from the wealth
of Far Eastern literature and thought. Some of the errors in the chapter on
Judea have been corrected by Professor Harry Wolf son of Harvard; ~ Will Durant

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense, and 'cathedral-like' structure of the highly educated and articulate personality
a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) there placement of complex inner density with a new kind of self
evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the 'instantly available.' ~ Richard Foreman

For women in my lifetime things have changed quite a bit, but not enough. They have only changed for women that have education and access to health care in the Western world. But look at the rest of the world. Still in many places, women are sold into premature marriages, prostitution, forced labor; they are forced to have children that they cannot support or that they don't want. They are abused, tortured, exploited and even killed with impunity. ~ Isabel Allende

Studies of immigration show that this resistance to heart disease is not just something in African or Chinese genes. When people move from low-risk to high-risk areas, disease rates skyrocket as they adopt Western diets and lifestyles. ~ Michael Greger