Kimel Western Quotes

When I first went to college, I went to Western Michigan. I had been rejected by a bunch of schools for theater. I was like, 'I'm obviously not cut out for this, so I might as well just go into film.' ~ Alexander Koch

His expression combined that of a Middle-western farmer appraising his wheat-crop and that of an actor wondering whether he is observed - the public manner of all good Americans. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The question in their minds was, why did the outside world, and particularly the Western world, produce all these landmines, and send them to Afghanistan? This business must be stopped. It's a dirty business to produce such a horrible device. ~ Mohsen Makhmalbaf

The most formidable enemy we face is far more destructive and even more successful than any acts of terrorism - liberalism, which has become a cancer to America and to western civilization at large. Over the past one hundred years, liberalism has done more damage to the American cause of Liberty and our prosperity than any attack by any group in any war ever could have hoped for. ~ Daniel Rundquist

One good reason for the popularity of "reductionism" among the philosophical outposts of the Western Establishment is that it can be, and is, used as a device for trying to take the wind, so to speak, out of the sails of Marxism ... In essence reductionism is a kind of anti-Marxist caricature of Marxist determinism. It is what anti-Marxists pretend that Marxist determinism is. ~ Claud Cockburn

The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry. ~ Lafcadio Hearn

The prostitutes were from the lowest social levels and, like all women who catered to foreign men, came to be called rashamen, "Western sheep," and were ostracized from Japanese society. 29 From this group of Japanese women the Western artists and photographers found their models. ~ Eleanor M. Hight

As so often during the US military intervention in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, there was excessive focus by the media on the actions of Western governments as the prime mover of events. This was accompanied by an inadequate understanding of the significance of developments on the ground in Iraq and Syria as the force really driving the crisis in both countries. ~ Patrick Cockburn

But it is these four heroes, whom I will discuss from time to time in this book, whose poems, novels, stories, articles, memoirs, and encyclopedias opened my eyes to the soul of the city in which I live. For these four melancholic writers drew their strength from the tensions between the past and the present, or between what Westerners like to call East and West; they are the ones who taught me how to reconcile my love for modern art and western literature with the culture of the city in which I live. ~ Orhan Pamuk

What is this you bring my America?
Is it uniform with my country?
Is it not something that has been better told or done before?
Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship?
Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a prettiness? - is the good old
cause in it?
Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians,
literats, of enemies' lands?
Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here?
Does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners?
Does it sound with trumpet-voice the proud victory of the Union
in that secession war?
Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?
Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my
strength, gait, face?
Have real employments contributed to it? original makers, not
mere amanuenses?
Does it meet modern discoveries, calibres, facts, face to face?
What does it mean to American persons, progresses, cities? Chi-
cago, Kanada, Arkansas?
Does it see behind the apparent custodians the real custodians
standing, menacing, silent, the mechanics, Manhattanese,
Western men, Southerners, significant alike in their apathy,
and in the promptness of their love?
Does it see what finally befalls, and has always finally befallen, each
temporizer, patcher, outsider, partialist, alarmist, infidel,
who has ever ask'd any thing of America? ~ Walt Whitman

Raub's quarters were gross. They were decorated like something out of a hunting lodge crossed with a whore's boudoir from a bad Western film. ~ Jennifer Foehner Wells

Keep a spur handy. ~ Meg Mims

The equation of the Western left-hand path with Satanism is inaccurate insofar as the practice of the left-hand path predates the imposition of the Judeo-Christian ideology in Europe. There was - and still is - the practice of the left-hand path philosophy in a purely pagan or heathen (i.e. pre-Christian) context, which does not need to refer to Satan or Lucifer to be intelligible. ~ Stephen E. Flowers

This book explores an unrecognized but mighty taboo - our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are. Briefly, the thesis is that the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East - in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man's natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction. ~ Alan W. Watts

You know, in our culture today, our Western, reductionist, Roman, linear, fragmented ... culture, we don't ask how to make a pig happy. We ask how to grow it faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper, and that's not a noble goal. ~ Joel Salatin

... the very appearance of the word 'oriental' as a serious geographic or cultural term triggers alarm bells for any American academic. The late Edward Said's Orientalism argued that the word 'oriental' is a fundamentally pejorative term for certain parts of the non-Western world, not only indicating that they are inferior but also justifying Western colonization or domination of them. ~ Peter A. Lorge

Israel worshipped a God who could grow angry, who changed his mind, a God involved in history, who cared so much about one group of people that their apostasies drove him to fits of impatience. The greatest philosophers of Greece spoke of an unchanging divine principle, far removed from our world, without emotion, unaffected by anything beyond itself. Improbably enough, Christian theology came to identify these two as the same God; this may be the single most remarkable thing to have happened in Western intellectual history. ~ William C. Placher

So what's the point of longing for a new, monumental category hidden somewhere in the non-Western discourse? On the contrary, shouldn't we emphasize that Western art historical thinking has not necessarily to be regarded as monumental? This would be a good condition for dialogue with scholars who are not (or do not want to be) affiliated with "our" tradition. ~ Ralph Ubl

In fact, Western culture has spent decades drawing lines and boxes around interconnected phenomena. We've chunked the world into pieces rather than explored its webby nature. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

The Coilhunter wasn't much of a talker. He liked to keep things short and sweet, just like the lives of criminals. Well, the short bit anyway. ~ Dean F. Wilson

Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case ... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two. ~ Arnold J. Toynbee

It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice. It wasn't weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we've had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day. ~ John Le Carre

For the record, Parmenides' metaphysics-which is even wilder than the D.B.P's, and in retrospect seems more like Eastern religion than Western philosophy-is describable as a kind of static monism, and Zeno's paradoxes (of which there are really more than four) are accordingly directed against the reality of (1) plurality and (2) continuity. For present purposes we are concerned with (2), which for Zeno takes the form, as Russell mentions, of regular physical motion. ~ David Foster Wallace

In Pennsylvania, I love the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in Farmington. It's a scenic area. We also enjoy visiting the Laurel Highlands in Western Pennsylvania. The mountains are really something to be seen, and it's a great area to be outside. ~ Troy Polamalu

The serene confidence with which Western journalists and liberal academics prescribe solutions to our [Singapore's] problems is a source of constant wonder to us. ~ Goh Keng Swee

Better known as the Secret of the Golden Flower, this is a famous neidan text that the Western world came to know through Richard Wilhelm's 1929 translation. The Chinese text used by Wilhelm was edited by Zhanran Huizhen zi in 1921. Besides this, at least five more versions are available, all of which date to the late Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and are ascribed to Lu Dongbin, who revealed them through spirit writing. ~ Monica Esposito

Daddy never believed in closure. He said it was a false psychological concept. Something invented by therapists to assuage white Western guilt. In all his years of study and practice, he'd never heard a patient of color talk of needing "closure." They needed revenge. They needed distance. Forgiveness and a good lawyer maybe, but never closure. He said people mistake suicide, murder, lap band surgery, interracial marriage, and overtipping for closure, when in reality what they've achieved is erasure. ~ Paul Beatty

There are tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people living in poverty and danger who might readily seek to enter a Western country if the opportunity is there. ~ Tony Abbott

In the following pages I argue that we have both philosophical and scientific reasons to doubt the adequacy of this widely accepted doctrine of materialism. In the history of Western philosophy, as we will see, it has turned out to be notoriously difficult to formulate a viable concept of matter. And physics in the twentieth century has produced weighty reasons to think that some of the core tenets of materialism were mistaken. These results, when combined with the new theories of information, complexity, and emergence summarized elsewhere in this volume, point toward alternative accounts of the natural world that deserve careful attention and critical evaluation. ~ Paul Davies

MANO: There's no question in my mind that we've always felt, in the heart of our Western, Christian culture, that Jesus was very much female. That is why the representations of Jesus with long hair have always been predominant in art. The Virgin Mary was later presented as a harmless sort of woman to whom we can address our need for a maternal outlet in prayer, as a safer way of dealing with the fact that Jesus was as much a woman as a man, particularly when he died.

DOOR: You said that if men don't overcome their wanting of women, society will crack.
MANO: We are coming to a point where the genders are clumsily engaging in civil war with each other. There's a lot of unpleasantness in the land. Men feel terribly threatened. Women have been crucified for many years, so they understand it and have their axes to grind as well. The truth of the matter is, Jesus on the cross is the female being exploited in every which way. I mentioned intercourse being, at its best, an act of penetration, but there are many other ways in which women have been sacrificed, whether from childbirth or being sold as wives or whatever, through history. So when the male S&M devotee binds a woman to a cross, he has to realize, if he's a Christian--

DOOR: Uh, just how many Christian S&M devotees are there?
MANO: Even if he's not a Christian, he ought to realize that he is essentially binding Jesus again, because Jesus contains in him the female--very, very strongly- ~ D. Keith Mano

There's smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. It's a Western,
Henry. It's a downright shoot-em-up. We've made a graveyard
out of the bone white afternoon.
It's another wrong-man-dies scenario, and we keep doing it Henry,
keep saying until we get it right … but we always win and we never quit.
See, we've won again,
here we are at the place where I get to beg for it, where I get to say Please,
for just one night, will you lie down next to me, we can leave our clothes on,
we can stay all buttoned up …
But we both know how it goes - I say I want you inside me and you hold
my head underwater. I say I want you inside me and you split me open
with a knife. ~ Richard Siken

Athens, while remaining nominally independent, no longer commanded its lifelines or its fate. Just as it had invented many Western institutions and intellectual and artistic endeavors, so did it pioneer a less glorious tradition. In the centuries following the Peloponnesian war, Athens became the first in a long line of senescent Western empires to suffer the ignominious transformation from world power to open-air theme park, famous only for its arts, its architecture, its schools, and its past. ~ William J. Bernstein

Modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language. ~ Murray Gell-Mann

Great," mumbles Kelly. "Bat stew cooked on a bat shit fire by an old bat. ~ Philip Webb

And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Everything is melting in nature. We think we see objects, but our eyes are slow and partial. Nature is blooming and withering in long puffy respirations, rising and falling in oceanic wave-motion. A mind that opened itself fully to nature without sentimental preconception would be glutted by nature's coarse materialism, its relentless superfluity. An apple tree laden with fruit: how peaceful, how picturesque. But remove the rosy filter of humanism from our gaze and look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot, and carnage. From the jammed glassy cells of sea roe to the feathery spores poured into the air from bursting green pods, nature is a festering hornet's nest of aggression and overkill. This is the chthonian black magic with which we are infected as sexual beings; this is the daemonic identity that Christianity so inadequately defines as original sin and thinks it can cleanse us of. Procreative woman is the most troublesome obstacle to Christianity's claim to catholicity, testified by its wishful doctrines of Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth. The procreativeness of chthonian nature is an obstacle to all of western metaphysics and to each man in his quest for identity against his mother. Nature is the seething excess of being. ~ Camille Paglia

Women had no clerical role anywhere in the Western world, period. ~ Mitch Horowitz

I watched water dripping off the ferns and the needles of the Western Red Cedar next door. I watched it running in runnels down the bark of the Cherry tree, and I looked at the small droplets of misty water that were accumulating on the broad leaves of the Bigleaf Maple.I touched one of the accumulated droplets, and instantly it was gone. ~ Ned Hayes

the world and the people who inhabit it are not the same. The world lies between people, and this in-between – much more than (as is often thought) men or even man – is today the object of the greatest concern and the most obvious upheaval in almost all the countries of the globe. Even where the world is still halfway in order, or is kept halfway in order, the public realm has lost the power of illumination which was originally part of its very nature. More and more people in the countries of the Western world, which since the decline of the ancient world has regarded freedom from politics as one of the basic freedoms, make use of this freedom and have retreated from the world and their obligations within it. This withdrawal from the world need not harm an individual; he may even cultivate great talents to the point of genius and so by a detour be useful to the world again. But with each such retreat an almost demonstrable loss to the world takes place; what is lost is the specific and usually irreplaceable in-between which should have formed between this individual and his fellow men. ~ Hannah Arendt

By the middle twentieth century, few European nation-states had not at one time or another figured themselves as 'the outpost of Western Christian civilisation': France, imperial Germany, the Habsburg Reich, Poland with its self-image as przedmurze (bastion), even tsarist Russia. Each of these nation-state myths identified "barbarism" as the condition or ethic of their immediate eastward neighbour: for the French, the Germans were barbarous, for the Germans it was the Slavs, for the Poles the Russians, for the Russians the Mongol and Turkic peoples of Central Asia and eventually the Chinese. ~ Neal Ascherson

Psychological patriarchy is a "dance of contempt," a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation. It is the unacknowledged paradigm of relationships that has suffused Western civilization generation after generation, deforming both sexes, and destroying the passionate bond between them. ~ Bell Hooks

If you're not very busy, a grown man in the uniform of a Western Union boy should make you feel a little sick. ~ Nathanael West

I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

Before you leave, wouldn't you like the message Sarah's friend left for you?"
She had already started for the door and now turned. "By all means."
"He said he'd destroy your husband... after he killed you. ~ B. J. Daniels