Westernization Quotes

Westernization is an often-used word in Korea, and can be applied to something considered cold, lacking in jeong, and going against traditional Korean values. To suggest that Korean households are now "Westernized," whatever that may mean exactly, would be a gross oversimplification. ~ Daniel Tudor

The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation. ~ Orhan Pamuk

Decadence, decadence, he said to himself. They've lost everything and gained nothing. The French had merely daubed on the finishing touches at the end of a process which had begun five hundred years ago, at least. Their intuitive moral desires coincided with the ideals embodied in the formulas of their religion, yet they could live in accordance neither with those deepest impulses nor with the precepts of the religion, because society came in between with all the pressure of its tradition. No one could afford to be honest or generous or merciful because every one of them distrusted all the others; often they had more confidence in a Christian they were meeting for the first time than in a Moslem they had known for years. ~ Paul Bowles

Becoming a modern society is about industrialization, urbanization, and rising levels of literacy, education, and wealth. The qualities that make a society Western, in contrast, are special: the classical legacy, Christianity, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, civil society. ~ Samuel P. Huntington

The image Miisi had constructed in Britain of the noble African rooted in his cultural values shunning westernization was a myth. What he returned to were people struggling to survive, who in the process had lost the ability to discern the vivid colours of right and wrong. Anything that gave them a chance to survive was moral. ~ Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Modernization means Westernization. ~ Camille Paglia

Seen as a process of imitation, it becomes understandable why the Westernization of a backward country so often breeds a violent antagonism toward the West. People who become like us do not necessarily love us. The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate - to surpass it, leave it behind, or, better still, eliminate it completely. Now and then in history the last was done first: the imitators began by destroying the model and then proceeded to imitate it. We are apparently most at ease when we imitate a defeated or dead model. ~ Eric Hoffer

This was what he stood for: a world where there would be room enough even for such a mass of clumsy and cumbersome freedom. A margin of humanity, of tolerance, where some of life's beauty could take refuge. His eyes narrowed a little, and an ironic, bitter smile came to his lips. I know you all, he thought. Today you say that elephants are archaic and cumbersome, that they interfere with roads and
telegraph poles, and tomorrow you'll begin to say that human rights too are obsolete and cumbersome, that they interfere with progress, and the temptation will be so great to let them fall by the road and not to burden ourselves with that
extra load. And in the end man himself will become in your eyes a clumsy luxury, an archaic survival from the past, and you'll dispense with him too, and the only thing left will be total efficiency and universal slavery and man himself will disappear under the weight of his material achievement. He had learned that much behind the barbed wire of the forced labor camp: it was our education, a lesson be was not prepared to forget. ~ Romain Gary

Westernization, coupled with globalization, has created an affluent and leisured elite that now gravitates to universities, the media, bureaucracies, and world organizations, all places where wealth is not created, but analyzed, critiqued, and lavishly spent. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

It was Daisuke's conviction that all morality traced its origins to social realities. He believed there could be no greater confusion of cause and effect than to attempt to conform social reality to a rigidly predetermined notion of morality. Accordingly, he found the ethical education conducted by lecture in Japanese schools utterly meaningless. In the schools, students were either instructed in the old morality or crammed with a morality suited to the average European. For an unfortunate people beset by the fierce appetites of life, this amounted to nothing more than vain, empty talk. When the recipients of this education saw society before their eyes, they would recall those lectures and burst out laughing. Or else they would feel that they had been made fools of. In Daisuke's case it was not just school; he had received the most rigorous and least functional education from his father. Thanks to this, he had at one time experienced acute anguish stemming from contradictions. Daisuke even felt bitter over it. ~ Natsume Sōseki

For me, Westernization is not about consuming fanciful goods; it's about a system of free speech, democracy, egalitarianism and respect for the people's rights and dignity. ~ Orhan Pamuk

Tantric scholars and Kundalini gurus often draw a distinction between the chakras as witnessed through Kundalini experiences and the Westernized model of the chakras as a "personal growth system." Some claim that this distinction is so great that there is no meaningful relationship between the two...yet I do not see these experiences as unrelated, but existing on a continuum.

I firmly believe that clearing the chakras through understanding their nature, practicing related exercises and using visualization and meditation, prepares the way for a spiritual opening that is apt to be less tumultuous than is so often the case for Kundalini awakenings. I believe this Westernization is an important step for speaking to the Western mind in a way that is harmonious with the circumstances in which we live, rather than antithetical to it. It gives us a context in which these experiences can occur.

Likewise, there are many who say that the chakras, as vortices in the subtle body, have nothing whatsoever to do with the physical body or the central nerve ganglia emanating from teh spinal column, and that a spiritual awakening is not a somatic experience. Because an experience is not *entirely* somatic does not mean that its somatic aspect is negated.... I believe this view is just more evidence of the divorce between spirit and body that I find to be the primary illusion from which we must awaken. ~ Anodea Judith

Under the veneer of Westernization, the cultures of the Indian world - which have existed for 30,000 years! - continue to live. Sometimes in a magical way, sometimes in the shadows. ~ Carlos Fuentes

The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss