Great West Quotes

And yep, here's yet one more heterosexual man who loves his wife. I'm telling you, it's a trend! Women I know who are always complaining they can never meet a good straight man - maybe you're living in the wrong part of the country. Maybe you need to hitchhike. Route 70 West could be the path to a great marriage. Go ahead, stick out your thumb for romance. ~ John Waters

A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Brit said he was "comfortable" with Britain, the expatriate American said no. And I said yes. Driving across the arid lands, the red lands, I wondered what it was I loved. the places, the sagebrush basins, the rivers digging themselves deep canyons through arid lands, the incomparable cloud formations of summer monsoons, the way the underside of clouds turns the same blue as the underside of a great blue heron's wings when the storm is about to break.

Beyond that, for anything you can say about the United States, you can also say the opposite: we're rootless except we're also the Hopi, who haven't moved in several centuries; we're violent except we're also the Franciscans nonviolently resisting nucelar weapons out here; we're consumers except the West is studded with visionary environmentalists...and the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played out, a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realized, a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely. ~ Rebecca Solnit

I go to Saint Barth in the French West Indies for two weeks each year. That place is amazing. Amazing people, beautiful beaches, great wine, wonderful harbors ... It's incredibly romantic. ~ Brooke Burke

Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.
Alexander Supertramp, May 1992 ~ Christopher McCandless

It has been said that Canada is bounded 'on the north by gold, on the west by the East, on the east by history - and on the south by friends'.* We hope that will always be the case and we hope it will be the case not only with respect to the United States, your immediate neighbor to the south, but with respect to all your southern neighbors - and ours - who are bound by the great forces of geography and history which are distinctive to the New World. ~ Richard M. Nixon

[On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the great satirist. If she criticized the institutions of earth, it was because she had very definite ideas regarding the institutions of heaven. ~ Rebecca West

Men, discouraged by their failure to accomplish exactly what they desire, often speak of their lives as purposeless, but it is idle talk, for, in fact, no intelligent life which concerns itself vigorously and properly with the things about it can be said to be purposeless. Such a life adheres, automatically, to the law of progression, and therefore moves toward a great destiny of supreme power and accompanying joys. The only purposeless life is the one that does not use its faculties. It matters little what tasks men perform in life, if only they do them well and will all their strength. In the eternal plan they are given progressive value. In an infinite universe, one cannot possibly learn all or do all, at once. A beginning must be made somewhere and corner by corner, department by department, space by space, all will be known and conquered. In the end, all must be explored, and whether one begins in the east or the west cannot matter much. The big concern is the extent to which a man offers himself, mind and body, to his worthwhile work. Upon that will growth depend. ~ John A. Widtsoe

The history of my state of Oklahoma offers a great example of pursuing the American Dream. It was built and settled by pioneers moving West to seek better lives. ~ Mary Fallin

At heart, this job is about continuing to make great theatre for the people of Sheffield - a city I've known and loved since childhood. ~ Samuel West

The true Mason is not creed-bound. He realizes with the divine illumination of his lodge that as Mason his religion must be universal: Christ, Buddha or Mohammed, the name means little, for he recognizes only the light and not the bearer. He worships at every shrine, bows before every altar, whether in temple, mosque or cathedral, realizing with his truer understanding the oneness of all spiritual truth. All true Masons know that they only are heathen who, having great ideals, do not live up to them. They know that all religions are but one story told in divers ways for peoples whose ideals differ but whose great purpose is in harmony with Masonic ideals. North, east, south and west stretch the diversities of human thought, and while the ideals of man apparently differ, when all is said and the crystallization of form with its false concepts is swept away, one basic truth remains: all existing things are Temple Builders, laboring for a single end. No true Mason can be narrow, for his Lodge is the divine expression of all broadness. There is no place for little minds in a great work. ~ Manly P. Hall

Already the hour had struck, and at his great Master's bidding he must march with war into the West. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

She was supportive, didn't pry or expect anything from me, and sensed when I needed my space. If she were a guy, I'd probably date her. Or, if I were a lesbian. And if she were a lesbian. I guess we'd both have to be lesbians for that to work. Regardless, she made a pretty great friend. ~ Temple West

I'm a Christian. I believe that greatness has to do with the quality of love shown to the least of thy brethren and the quality of service to those who are catching hell. When you look at it in that sense, I'd say America has had great moments, but I wouldn't call it a great nation. I don't think there have been any great nations in the history of the world, because in every nation you find poor people being subjugated. So, I see the term "great nation" as a contradiction, as an oxymoron. ~ Cornel West

The great maritime city of Asiatic Ionia, was of old the meeting-place of the East and the West. Here the Phoenician trader from the Baltic would meet the Hindu wandering to Intra, from Extra, Gangem; and the Hyperborean would step on shore side by side with the Nubian and the Aethiop. ~ Anonymous

Those of the Elven-race that lived still in Middle-earth waned and faded, and Men usurped the sunlight. Then the Quendi wandered in the lonely places of the great lands and the isles, and took to the moonlight and the starlight, and to the woods and caves, becoming as shadows and memories, save those who ever and anon set sail into the West and vanished from Middle-earth. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

We have all heard a great deal about the opportunities of bygone years. We envy the men who discovered and settled the West. We wish that all the railroads were not built so that those opportunities would still be open. Why, the opportunities of yesterday are as nothing compared with the opportunities that await the courageous, resourceful man today! There are fortunes to be made that will make those of Astor and Rockefeller seem picayune. ~ F.C. Minaker

First is our unbreakable rule that every candidate must be a trained trooper, blooded under fire, a veteran of combat drops. No other army in history has stuck to this rule, although some came close. Most great military schools of the past - Saint Cyr, West Point, Sandhurst, Colorado Springs - didn't even pretend to follow it; they accepted civilian boys, trained them, commissioned them, sent them out with no battle experience to command men . . . and sometimes discovered too late that this smart young 'officer' was a fool, a poltroon, or a hysteric. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

I defy my honored opponents to give me the name of a single man imprisoned in the United States, Great Britain, or West Germany for being an atheist. But in former communist countries, millions of our Christian brothers and sisters in faith have passed through jails or been killed. Who has fought for freedom and obtained it - atheists or Christians? ~ Richard Wurmbrand

The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific:
The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons,
Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like
dolphins through the grey sea-smoke
Into pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this
dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this
is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars. ~ Robinson Jeffers

She warned him that, if he got killed, she should cut down the great cedar at the south-west corner of Groby. It kept all the light out of the principal drawing-room and the bedrooms above it ... He winced: he certainly winced at that. She regretted that she had said it. It was along other lines that she desired to make him wince. ~ Ford Madox Ford

A city plays the role of a great big magnet that's sucking people up. ~ Geoffrey West

Although leaves remained on the beeches and the sunshine was warm, there was a sense of growing emptiness over the wide space of the down. The flowers were sparser. Here and there a yellow tormentil showed in the grass, a late harebell or a few shreds of purple bloom on a brown, crisping tuft of self-heal. But most of the plants still to be seen were in seed. Along the edge of the wood a sheet of wild clematis showed like a patch of smoke, all its sweet-smelling flowers turned to old man's beard. The songs of the insects were fewer and intermittent. Great stretches of the long grass, once the teeming jungle of summer, were almost deserted, with only a hurrying beetle or a torpid spider left out of all the myriads of August. The gnats still danced in the bright air, but the swifts that had swooped for them were gone and instead of their screaming cries in the sky, the twittering of a robin sounded from the top of a spindle tree. The fields below the hill were all cleared. One had already been plowed and the polished edges of the furrows caught the light with a dull glint, conspicuous from the ridge above. The sky, too, was void, with a thin clarity like that of water. In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, ~ Richard Adams

In the time of to Augustine, the conversation in the West mostly had been a Christian reaction to outside ideas. After Augustine, the Great Conversation would be about his ideas for centuries. ~ John Mark Reynolds

The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting. ~ Jessamyn West

To me, no painter has ever quite understood the light, the distances, the aboriginal ghostliness of the American West as well as Maynard Dixon. The great mood of his work is solitude, the effect of land and space on people. While his work stands perfectly well on its claims to beauty, it offers a spiritual view of the West indispensable to anyone who would understand it. ~ Thomas McGuane

To be candid with you, free agency hurts all sports. It's great for athletes making an enormous amount of money. But to say it helps the sports, I don't believe that. ~ Jerry West

We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don't care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it's the worst recovery since the Great Depression. ~ Arthur Laffer

British prime minister William Gladstone summed up the West's opinion of "the Turk": Let me endeavor very briefly to sketch, in the rudest outline, what the Turkish race was and what it is. It is not a question of Mahometanism simply, but of Mahometanism compounded with the peculiar character of a race. They are not the mild Mahometans of India, nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the cultured Moors of Spain. They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them; and, as far as their dominion reached, civilisation disappeared from view. ~ Eric Bogosian

These marvels were great and comfortable ones, but in the old England there was a greater still. The weather behaved itself.
In the spring all the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang; in the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and, if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed; in the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory; and in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush. ~ T.H. White

The privilege of money, as Edgar's parents saw it, was that you could get yourself into the great wild beauty - the thousand-meter-deep sea, the wide open West, an island inhabited mostly by dangerous animals, and feel alive and real - and then come over the crest of the hill and have someone meet you with a silver tray containing fresh fruit, aged scotch, a cold towel for your hands, and show you to a seat with a perfect view from which to tell the story of your adventure. ~ Ramona Ausubel

Come watch with me the shaft of fire that glows in yonder West; the fair, frail palaces, The fading Alps and archipelagoes and great cloud continents of sunset-seas. ~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The real problem with us Africans is our inability to recognize the saviors among us
Being confident is often confused with proudness
The West may look smarter collectively, but in actual fact the greatness can be traced back to a handful of people who had the brain waves and courage to invent great things of value.
It's never too late. ~ Peter Ojo

There's a lot of imagination in Asia, and I believe that the next Google will come from there, and the next Pixar. I believe that the great new media companies will come out of Asia and surpass the big media conglomerates that exist right now in the West. ~ Shekhar Kapur

I loved Enso Roshi's teachings. I loved learning about life. I loved life. It was a good thing to feel. I loved life, and I loved learning, and I was still learning. I was not, yet, done. At the end of our journeys, there would be an end to the journey. Maybe. If I was lucky. If providence shone down upon me gently. I would find love. I would find acceptance. Complete love. Complete acceptance. I would know, that the self, is an illusion. I would come to enlightenment, but that would also mean, there would be no 'I' there. I would realize that the 'I' was an illusion, all along, just like some great dream. This is what the wise sages say, the great teachings, the mystical teachings, not only from the East, but also from the West. The Gospel of Saint Thomas. Thomas Merton. Thomas, like I was Thomas, and also doubting, the main reasons I'd chosen the name. If nothing else, it was lovable, just as it is. My life. Even the parts I didn't love, could I love them? The struggles. It was all part of the journey, and would I not look back fondly on this, at some time? Look at how arduous and sincere I'd been. Look at how worried I'd been. Look at how insecure I'd been. Look at how I'd struggled. Trying to find my way. Would I not look back upon myself, affectionately and fondly and with love? ~ T. Scott McLeod

Don't mind being as miserable as you like with me - I have a great turn that way myself - [VW] ~ Vita Sackville-West

In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just 'disappeared' as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns. ~ Jeremiah Wright

Always she thought of him as climbing some mountain in his mind, like that great one to the west on which his eyes would dwell so often and from which he seemed to derive something that was even more than strength. ~ Elizabeth Yates

The older I get, I'm definitely getting pulled towards the West Coast, because it's a different quality of life. New York is great when you're in your early 20s and you're running around and it's really fun, but it's a place for me to get things done. ~ Erin Wasson

Thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different. No, there is a wilderness in the East; it's the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wildbuck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the Gap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins. There were not great Arizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy. ~ Jack Kerouac

Einstein's prediction of light deflection could not be tested immediately in 1915, because the First World War was in progress, and it was not until 1919 that a British expedition, observing an eclipse from West Africa, showed that light was indeed deflected by the sun, just as predicted by the theory. This proof of a German theory by British scientists was hailed as a great act of reconciliation between the two countries after the war. ~ Stephen Hawking

Rebellion even in its smallest forms can eventually birth great change. With change comes hope. ~ Catherine Adel West

Russia, Russia unwashed, backward, appealing Russia, so ashamed of your own backwardness, so orientally determined to conceal it from us by clever deceit. So sensitive and so suspicious in the face of the wicked, civilized west. I shall always remember you slyly, touchingly, but with great shouting and confusion pumping hot water into our sleeping car in the frosty darkness of a December morning in order that we might not know, in order that we might never realize, to how primitive a land we had come. ~ George F. Kennan

One of our best dates was actually a weekend when we went to the wedding of a friend from the Teams. The couple married in Wimberley, Texas, a small town maybe forty miles south of Austin and a few hours' drive from where we lived. We were having such a pleasant day, we didn't want it to end.
"It doesn't have to end," suggested Chris as we headed for the car. "The kids are at my parents' for the weekend. Where do you want to go?"
We googled for hotels and found a place in San Antonio, a little farther south. Located around the corner from the Alamo, the hotel seemed tailor-made for Chris. There was history in every floorboard. He loved the authentic Texan and Old West touches, from the lobby to the rooms. He read every framed article on the walls and admired each artifact. We walked through halls where famous lawmen-and maybe an outlaw or two-had trod a hundred years before. In the evening, we relaxed with coffee out on the balcony of our room-something we'd never managed to do when we actually owned one. It was one of those perfect days you dream of, completely unplanned.
I have a great picture of Chris sitting out there in his cowboy boots, feet propped up, a big smile on his face. It's still one of my favorites.
People ask about Chris's love of the Old West. It was something he was born with, really. It had to be in his genes. He grew up watching old westerns with his family, and for a time became a bronco-bustin' cowboy and ranch hand.
More than t ~ Taya Kyle

Today (1950), the hatred of the Moslem countries against the West is becoming hatred against Christianity itself. Although the statesmen have not yet taken it into account, there is still grave danger that the temporal power of Islam may return and, with it, the menace that it may shake off a West which has ceased to be Christian, and affirm itself as a great anti-Christian world Power. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

Zip codes might be great for sorting mail, but they should not determine the quality of a child s education or success in the future workforce," said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia. "With common standards and assessments, students, parents, and teachers will have a clear, consistent understanding of the skills necessary for students to succeed after high school and compete with peers across the state line and across the ocean. ~ Bob Wise

The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their Mother and from the Father in Heaven. You might go East so far the East became West and you returned to Britain across the great Ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus. ~ C.S. Lewis

I come from a stupid family. During the civil war my great uncle fought for the west. ~ Rodney Dangerfield

The Old West, mysterious, serious, with great beauty at every vista and terrible things happening whenever any people appeared.) ~ Amy Bloom

Because the sad fact is that the Enron Corporation and others manipulated with unfortunately great effect the energy market in the West Coast starting in 2000. ~ Jay Inslee

The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West will not contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we'll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written. ~ Ronald Reagan

I'm not a great fan of green screen. It's not much fun for actors. It's great for directors and technical people and cameramen. ~ Dominic West

But it was all a pipe dream. As well try to stop an avalanche as to stop the moving frontier. American immigrants and emigrants wanted their share of land - free land - a farm in the family - the dream of European peasants for hundreds of years - the New World's great gift to the old. Moving west with the tide were the hucksters, the lawyers, merchants, and other men on the make looking for the main chance, men who could manufacture a land warrant in the wink of an eye. This ~ Stephen E. Ambrose

Words should be used as tools of communication and not as a substitute for action ~ Mae West

In those days the Great Enemy, of whom Sauron of Mordor was but a servant, dwelt in Angband in the North, and the Elves of the West coming back to Middle-earth made war upon him to regain the Silmarils which he had stolen; and the fathers of Men aided the Elves. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

One of the West's singular migrations
from the Azores to California's Great Central Valley
is given faces and voices in Anthony Barcellos's new novel, Land of Milk and Money. Along with its triumphs, the Francisco family embodies the challenges to an immigrant family in a new land, including the often ignored difficulties posed by success and the loss of the old culture. A must read ... ~ Gerald Haslam

We in the West regard the universe as a creation of God; like an invention or a product. After he created the universe, God set himself to oversee it and manage it. We see God as our boss. He created the universe, he is present in it, he manages every part of it, but he is still separate from it. It's like he installed video cameras all over the universe, so he can see everything that happens, and he can cause this or that to happen, but he is not a part of what happens. The Eastern view is very different. To the Hindu, for example, God didn't create the universe, but God became the universe. Then he forgot that he became the universe. Why would God do this? Basically, for entertainment. You create a universe, and that in itself is very exciting. But then what? Should you sit back and watch this universe of yours having all the fun? No, you should have all the fun yourself. To accomplish this, God transformed into the whole universe. God is the Universe, and everything in it. But the universe doesn't know that because that would ruin the suspense. The universe is God's great drama, and God is the stage, the actors, and the audience all at once. The title of this epic drama is "The Great Unknown Outcome." Throw in potent elements like passion, love, hate, good, evil, free will; and who knows what will happen? No one knows, and that is what keeps the universe interesting. But everyone will have a good time. And there is never really any danger, because everyone is really God, a ~ Warren Sharpe

All pleasures should be taken in great leisure and are worth going into in detail; love is not like eating a quick lunch with one's hat on. ~ Mae West

In the West Indies and South America, slaves were worked to death and replaced with fresh imports, but in the continental North American colonies of Great Britain the situation was the opposite. By about 1710, as Morgan notes, "Virginia's slave population began to grow from natural increase, an unprecedented event for any New World slave population.…In 1700 Virginia had 13,000 slaves; in 1730, 40,000; in 1750, 105,000, of whom nearly 80 percent were Virginia born. ~ Henry Wiencek

The attitude that psychologists call inflation and the traditional lore of Cabalistic magic, borrowing a term from religion, calls spiritual pride is one of the most serious dangers of this work.

Those who enter the path of magic with too great an appetite for flattery or too strong a need for ego reinforcement will very likely find these things, but they are also rather too likely to find fanaticism, megalomania and mental breakdown along the same route. The thing has happened far too often in the history of magic in the West. ~ John Michael Greer

You're cute when you do that," he called to me.
"When I do what?"
"Turn in a circle like that. It's kind of penguin-y."
"Great," I called back. "Just what every girl dreams of being told by their inhumanly attractive, immortal vampire protector: they look kind of 'penguin-y. ~ Temple West

He was the man who rode into our valley out of the heart of the great glowing west and when his work was done, he left whence he had come--and he was Shane. ~ Jack Shaeffer

When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it. How is it? Why is it that the Apaches wait to die - that they carry their lives on their fingernails. They roam over the hills and plains and want the heavens to fall on them. The Apaches were once a great nation; they are now but few, and because of this they want to die and so carry their lives on their fingernails. Many have been killed in battle. You must speak straight so that your words may go as sunlight to our hearts. Tell me, if the Virgin Mary has walked throughout all the land, why has she never entered the wickiups of the Apaches? Why have we never seen or heard her?
"I have no father nor mother; I am alone in the world. No one cares for Cochise; that is why I do not care to live, and wish the rocks to fall on me and cover me up. If I had a father and mother like you, I would be with them and they with me ~ Dee Brown

The first thing to realize is that it is is a country that is still being imagined. Here every patch of earth has a story, all your places have nuances; if you say Cornwall to an English person, they think of smugglers, and King Arthur and fish. But there are great parts of my country about which American's know nothing beyond an idea of unimaginable vastness. Of course the Indians that live there know the spirits of these places, but that is not the point. You can't imagine how blue the sky is out West, Charlotte. So much space. It's really wild, not like your Lake District with its little stone walls. In the West the landscape is unmarked by man. ~ Daisy Goodwin

In terms of me being a Christian, going to Israel was really cool. Going to the West Bank, Bethlehem, floating in the Dead Sea - that was great for me. ~ Larry Fitzgerald

And yes,Percy,of course they are now in our United States. Look at your symbol,the eagle of Zeus. Look at the statue of Prometheus in Rockefeller Center,the Greek facades of our government builidings in Washington. I defy you to find any American city where the Olympians are not proeminently displayed, in multiple places. Like it or not-and believe me,plenty of people weren't very found of Rome,either-America is now the heart of the flame. It is the great power of the West.And so Olympus is here.And we are here. ~ Rick Riordan

And everyone loved sunsets. The light lost its sanity as it fell over the hills and into the Pacific--it went red and deeper red, orange, and even green. The skies seemed to melt, like lava eating black rock into great bite marks of burning. Sometimes all the town stopped and stared west. Shopkeepers came from their rooms to stand in the street. Families brought out their invalids on pallets and in wheelbarrows to wave their bent wrists at the madness consuming their sky. Swirls of gulls and pelicans like God's own confetti snowed across those sky riots. ~ Luis Alberto Urrea

But I hope that it will also be demonstrated soon that in my experiments in the West I was not merely beholding a vision, but had caught sight of a great and profound truth. ~ Nikola Tesla

Syntheses between East and West based simply on a similarity of "spiritualities" or "mystical experiences" could not be achieved even then - how much less so today! So we must judge any program as inadequate that tries simply to let India and Europe encounter each other at the halfway-station of Byzantine hesychasm, in the practice of the Jesus prayer and of certain bodily positions and breathing exercises - all ways in which Eastern Christianity reorientalized itself after the period of the great synthesis. ~ Hans Urs Von Balthasar

In the spring of 1931, West African natives in the Cameroons sent New York $3.77 for relief for the "starving"; that fall Amtorgs's new York office received 100,000 applications for job in Soviet Russia. On a single weekend in April, 1932, the 'Ile de france' and other transatlantic liner carried nearly 4,000 workingmen back to Europe; in June, 500 Rhode Island aliens departed for Mediterranean ports. ~ William E. Leuchtenburg

State Road 60 is one of those great old Florida drives. From Tampa on the west coast to Vero Beach on the east, rolling through Mulberry and Bartow and Yeehaw Junction. Phosphate mines and orange groves and cows loitering near water holes in vast open flats dotted with sabal palms, stretching for miles, making the sky big. Here and there were the kind of occasional, isolated farmhouses that made people subconsciously think: Do they get Internet? In the middle of one overgrown field stood a single concrete wall, several stories high, covered with grime and mildew, the ancient ruins of a drive-in theater. The top of the wall was the last thing to catch a warm glow from the setting sun. ~ Tim Dorsey

Extend the sphere," Madison wrote, and, "you take in a greater variety of parties and interests," and you make it difficult for either a mob majority or a tyrannical minority to unite "to invade the rights of other citizens."

Whatever one's take on any of the debates of the day (especially the debate over slavery), and whatever one's philosophical understanding of the relationship of republicanism to land, commerce, finance, and labor, most agreed on practicalities. Also wanted to remove Spain from the Mississippi; also wanted the capacities to pacify hostile native Americans and put down rebellions of poor people; and all wanted Great Britain to get out of the way of their commerce.

All wanted "room enough," as Thomas Jefferson would put it in his 1800 inaugural address, to be protected from Europe's "exterminating havoc."

Expansion became the answer to every question, the solution to all problems, especially those two caused by expansion. ~ Greg Grandin

When I grew up in the early '90s, the new World Wide Web felt like a gimmick, and I had no idea of the changes in store. In the summers, I'd backpack through Europe, follow the Grateful Dead. I had a car and a tent and traveled around the Great Lakes and out West. Jack Kerouac was my guiding light, his 'On the Road' a sacred text. ~ Tony D'Souza

So what if people disagree about values? People also disagree about facts. . . .

In my view, the great intellectual challenge facing conservatives is to make the case for morality at a time when many in the West have ceased to believe in an external moral order. The decline of belief in such an order is the most important political development of the past two centuries. Indeed, this decline has created the "crisis of the West. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

your next great read! ~ Francis J. West Jr.

There are a bunch of places to stay in Des Moines, but I'd suggest finding a place on the west side of town. It's a great urban area that has a lot to offer tourists. ~ Zach Johnson

It happens that over a long period you are promised a great success, in which from the very start you do not believe, so dissimilar is it from the rest of fate's offering, and if from time to time you do think of it, then you do so as it were to indulge your fantasy - but when, at last, on a very ordinary day with a west wind blowing, the news comes - simply, instantaneously and decisevely destroying any hope in it - then you are suddenly amazed to find that although you did not believe in it, you had been living with it all this time, not realizingt he constant, close presence of the dream, which had long since grown fat and independent, so that now you cannot get it out of your life without making a hole in that life. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Peculiar Western self-hatred ... is nothing short of pathological. It is commendable that the West is trying to be more open, to be more understanding of the values of outsiders, but it has lost the capacity for self-love. All that it sees in its own history is the despicable and the destructive; it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure. What Europe needs is a new self-acceptance, a self acceptance that is critical and humble, if it truly wishes to survive. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth! ~ Rudyard Kipling

A flush came into the sky, the wan moon, half-way down the west, sank into insignificance. On the shadowy land things began to take life, plants with great leaves became distinct. They came through a pass in the big, cold sandhills on to the beach. The long waste of foreshore lay moaning under the dawn and the sea; the ocean was a flat dark strip with a white edge. Over the gloomy sea the sky grew red. Quickly the fire spread among the clouds and scattered them. Crimson burned to orange, orange to dull gold, and in a golden glitter the sun came up, dribbling fierily over the waves in little splashes, as if someone had gone along and the light had spilled from her pail as she walked. ~ D.H. Lawrence

But science, dominated by the spirit of religion is the key to progress and the hope of the future. For example, evolution's beautiful theory of the creation of the world offers many perplexing problems to the inquiring mind. Inevitably, a teacher who denies divine agency in creation, who insists there is no intelligent purpose in it, will infest the student with the thought that all may be chance. I say, that no youth should be so led without a counter balancing though. Even the skeptic teacher should be fair enough to see that even Charles Darwin, when he faced this great question of annihilation, that the creation is dominated only by chance wrote: "It is an intolerable thought than man and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long, continued slow progress." And another good authority, Raymond West, said, "Why this vast [expenditure] of time and pain and blood?" Why should man come so far if he's destined to go no farther? A creature that travels such distances and fought such battles and won such victories deserves what we are compelled to say, "To conquer death and rob the grave of its victory. ~ David O McKay

If a little is great, and a lot is better, then way too much is just about right! ~ Mae West

The approach was successful, and Patton did give us a detailed account of his forthcoming battle plans. He said we would first make a hole in the German lines, probably in the western or Lessay sector, and through this hole he would hurl his armor, fanning it out in two great spear-heads, one of which was to go west to Brest and cut off the Brittany peninsula; the other to go east and encircle the German Seventh Army. He said he would be ready to go within two weeks. ~ Mrs. Patton

Trip Advisor: Travel America with Haiku [Texas]
Grackles roosting,
sentinels on miles of phone line.
Don't Mess with Texas.

Austin rush hour, "Go
down Mopac. You don't wanna
mess with I-35."

Athens, Texas,
Blackeyed Pea Capital of the World.
Yup, just another shithole.

Killeen, Texas,
Kill City, Boyz from Fort Hood.
Spending every paycheck.

Texas A&M;,
Aggies football, the wired 12th man.
Too lazy to plant in the Spring.

Fredericksburg, Texas.
Polka Capital of Texas but
I could swear I saw Hitler there.

Ft. Worth, Texas,
Where the West Begins and
a great place to leave.

San Antonio, Texas,
Fiesta! Alamo City! Northstar Mall!
I've been to better tourist traps.

Dallas, Texas,
D-Town, City of Hate.
Don't miss the Galleria.

Lubbock, Texas,
Oil wells, Hub of the Plains.
Stinks like an armpit.

Waco, Texas,
The Buckle of the Bible Belt.
Lossen it up a notch.

Neck dragon tattoo, piercings,
purple haired kindergarten teacher.
Keep Austin weird. ~ Beryl Dov

I fully expect to be able to complete one more campaign goal - and that is to proudly report that signs have been erected as you enter our great state that say 'Welcome to Wild, Wonderful West Virginia: Open for Business!' ~ Joe Manchin

Any great artist is wrestling with their sadness and loneliness, their fears, anxieties and securities, and they're transfiguring those into complicated forms of expression that affect our hearts, minds and souls and remind us of who we are as human beings, the fragility of our human status and the inevitability of death. ~ Cornel West

To the dismay of those that stood by, about the body of Saruman a grey mist gathered, and rising very slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure it loomed over the Hill. For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

It wasn't true, the evidence was faked, but the odd thing is that, whether it s true or not, the consequences are the same: one large group of human beings
or another turned out to be triple-distilled sons-of-bitches, which proves that we all have it in us. Whether the Communists staged a diabolical lie or the Americans sowed plague in China, the one thing that matters is that, as a man, you're
in the gutter. Colonel Babcock. [...] Maybe the West is a civilization, but the Communists are an ugly truth about man. Don't accuse them of inhuman methods: everything about them is human. We're all one great, lovely zoological family, and we shouldn't forget it. That's how you came to be in the gutter Colonel and it's no use your taking refuge on an island and behaving like an ostrich - being English, I mean; the gutter is there, it's you, or rather in you; it flows in your veins. ~ Romain Gary

Devon glanced at him with mild surprise. "For a man who's seldom more than half sober, you've noticed a great deal."
"Have I?" West looked perturbed. "Forgive me - I seem to have become accidentally lucid." He reached for his wineglass. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Men, you are about to embark on a great crusade to stamp out runaway decency in the west. Now you men will only be risking your lives, whilst I will be risking an almost certain Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. ~ Harvey Korman

Somehow I have the feeling that in some book is the great treasure I've been looking for all my life. ~ Jessamyn West

The sun was just down and to the west lay reefs of bloodred clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some great fire at the earth's end. ~ Cormac McCarthy

He was one of the great intellectuals of the 1940s who completed
their higher studies in the West and returned to their country to
apply what they had learned there - lock, stock, and barrel - within
Egyptian academia. For people like them, "progress" and "the West"
were virtually synonymous, with all that that entailed by way of positive
and negative behavior. They all had the same reverence for the
great Western values - democracy, freedom, justice, hard work, and
equality. At the same time, they had the same ignorance of the nation's
heritage and contempt for its customs and traditions, which they considered
shackles pulling us toward Backwardness from which it was
our duty to free ourselves so that the Renaissance could be achieved. ~ Alaa Al Aswany

There's a great documentary on Tupac called 'Resurrection' about the last few years of Tupac's life and how he transformed. And, ironically, how this East Coast rapper became this West Coast icon, back when all that Death Row/Sean Combs stuff was going on. ~ Marco Rubio

Cixi's lack of formal education was more than made up for by her intuitive intelligence, which she liked to use from her earliest years. In 1843, when she was seven, the empire had just finished its first war with the West, the Opium War, which had been started by Britain in reaction to Beijing clamping down on the illegal opium trade conducted by British merchants. China was defeated and had to pay a hefty indemnity.

Desperate for funds, Emperor Daoguang (father of Cixi's future husband) held back the traditional presents for his sons' brides – gold necklaces with corals and pearls – and vetoed elaborate banquets for their weddings. New Year and birthday celebrations were scaled down, even cancelled, and minor royal concubines had to subsidise their reduced allowances by selling their embroidery on the market through eunuchs. The emperor himself even went on surprise raids of his concubines' wardrobes, to check whether they were hiding extravagant clothes against his orders. As part of a determined drive to stamp out theft by officials, an investigation was conducted of the state coffer, which revealed that more "than nine million taels of silver had gone missing.

Furious, the emperor ordered all the senior keepers and inspectors of the silver reserve for the previous forty-four years to pay fines to make up the loss – whether or not they were guilty.

Cixi's great-grandfather had served as one of the keepers and his share of the fine amoun ~ Jung Chang

Small pleasures must correct great tragedies, therefore of gardens in the midst of war I bold tell. ~ Vita Sackville-West

My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love, And though the sager sort our deeds reprove, Let us not weigh them. Heaven's great lamps do dive Into their west, and straight again revive, But soon as once set is our little light, Then must we sleep one ever-during night. See Catullus 200:5. ~ Thomas Campion

But it would be broadcast, and in the great public theatre of his age; that unregulated market of braying narcissists, that Wild West of disinformation and fraud, that infinite sea of piracy, the great electorate where the constituency of billions voted their approval with a click of a mouse. The internet. It brought governments down and rewrote history ... ~ Adam Nevill

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the Sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. ~ Henry David Thoreau

For folks who have that casual-dude energy coursing through their bloodstream, that's great. But gays should not grow up alienated just for us to alienate each other. It's too predictable, like any other cycle of abuse. Plus, the conformist, competitive notion that by "toning down" we are "growing up" ultimately blunts the radical edge of what it is to be queer; it truncates our colorful journey of identity.

Said another way, it's like living in West Hollywood and working a gay job by day and working it in the gay nightlife, wearing delicate shiny shirts picked from up the gay dry cleaners, yet coquettishly left unbuttoned to reveal the pec implants purchased from a gay surgeon and shown off by prancing around the gay-owned-and-operated theater hopped up on gay health clinic steroids and wheat grass purchased from the friendly gay boy who's new to the city, and impressed by the monstrous SUV purchased from a gay car dealership with its rainbow-striped bumper sticker that says "Celebrate Diversity." Then logging on to the local Gay.com listings and describing yourself as "straight-acting."

Let me make myself clear. This is not a campaign for everyone to be like me. That'd be a total yawn. Instead, this narrative is about praise for the prancy boys. Granted, there's undecided gender-fucks, dagger dykes, faux-mos, po-mos, FTMs, fisting-top daddies, and lezzie looners who also need props for broadening the sexual spectrum, but they're telling their own stor ~ Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

That great portion of what is generally received as Christian truth is, in its rudiments or in its separate parts, to be found in heathen philosophies and religions. For instance, the doctrine of a Trinity is found both in the East and in the West; so is the ceremony of washing; so is the rite of sacrifice. The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic; the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian; of a divine kingdom is Judaic; of Angels and demons is Magian; the connection of sin with the body is Gnostic; celibacy is known to Bonze and Talapoin; a sacerdotal order is Egyptian; the idea of a new birth is Chinese and Eleusinian; belief in sacramental virtue is Pythagorean; and honours to the dead are a polytheism. Such is the general nature of the fact before us; Mr. Milman argues from it, - 'These things are in heathenism, therefore they are not Christian:' we, on the contrary, prefer to say, 'these things are in Christianity, therefore they are not heathen.' That is, we prefer to say, and we think that Scripture bears us out in saying, that from the beginning the Moral Governor of the world has scattered the seeds of truth far and wide over its extent; that these have variously taken root, and grown up as in the wilderness, wild plants indeed but living; and hence that, as the inferior animals have tokens of an immaterial principle in them, yet have not souls, so the philosophies and religions of men have their life in certain true ideas, though they are not directly divine. Wha ~ John Henry Newman