Western Culture Quotes

Probably all cultures, certainly Western culture, always have been violent.

Sharing knowledge is not part of Western culture

It would be impossible to be a woman in Western culture and not have your own issues about your image and what you look like.

The most important word in American, in Western culture, is "I."

Being from a minority culture, I realised the importance of looking at non-Western cultures in a positive way.

The pressure to succeed has a lot to do with why people overstep the line. It is a peculiar weakness of western culture where we have made a fetish of success.

For a long time Christianity has sewn its teachings into the fabric of Western culture. That was a good thing …. But the season of sewing is ending. Now is a time for rending, not for the sake of disengaging from culture or retreating from the public square, but so that our salt does not lose its savor.

I realize that I've had a very idyllic vision of what spirituality looks like. Honestly, most of Western culture has an idyllic and simplified idea of what enlightenment entails.

Business is the economic engine of our Western culture, and if it could be transformed to truly serve nature as well as ourselves, it could become essential to our rescue.

Whether [new Protestant church movements] place their emphasis on new worship styles, expressions of the Holy Spirit’s power, evangelism to seekers, or Bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square, that is, at the heart of Western culture. And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting, all their reproduction will simply mirror this misapprehension.

The secularization of Western culture was accompanied by the elevation of art to the position of a substitute religion to replace Christianity.

In Eastern culture, people see ghosts, people talk about ghosts... it's just accepted. And in Western culture it's just not.

I love the whole futuristic landscape of dark, rainy neon, the mix of Eastern and Western cultures and the beautiful shots of the flying cars.

Where it is the majority religion, Islam does not recognize religious freedom, at least not as we understand it. Islam is a different culture. This doesn't mean that it's an inferior culture, but it is a culture that has yet to connect with the positive sides of our modern Western culture: religious freedom, human rights and equal rights for women.

Radical feminism is the most destructive and fanatical movement to come down to us from the Sixties. This is a revolutionary, not a reformist, movement, and it is meeting with considerable success. Totalitarian in spirit, it is deeply antagonistic to traditional Western culture and proposes the complete restructuring of society, morality, and human nature.

Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature. Many women give up in despair: if that's how deep it goes they don't want to know.

Especially for those of us living in the Western culture, death to a large extent is still a taboo subject. It's considered something dreadful that shouldn't be happening. It's usually denied. The fact of death is not faced. What we don't realize in Western culture is that death has a redemptive dimension.

I had to confront my fears and master my every demonic thought about inferiority, insecurity, or the fear of being black, young, and gifted in this Western culture.

In most of the world, poetry has such a different reputation than it does in Western culture.

In Western culture, there's a dichotomy between the easy narratives of God and the Devil. I now believe in this greater overarching spiritual thing. We are the light and the dark, and have to own the darkness. It's part of us. It's not evil. It's needed. You need to own both of them to be whole. Absorb it, and live it as part of your life.

The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.

One cannot fail to observe a crushing irony: the gospel of relativistic tolerance is perhaps the most “evangelistic” movement in Western culture at the moment, demanding assent and brooking no rivals.

So he [Shoko Asahara] was insane but managed to convince a couple thousand people that he was enlightened. Western culture, which Japan is now definitely a part of, doesn't have an understanding of what Enlightenment is.

Istanbul is a vast place. There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture.

The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends - gay and straight, male and female - had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy.

We must see ourselves in community with all other people at local, national and global levels. While this may seem superficially easy, it is actually not. Western culture, now globally dominant, has systematically trained us to think and act as though we are separate individuals, often in competition with each other for scarce resources of one sort or another, primarily money, which has be-come the perceived means to all we want and need in life.

Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.

The separation of sex from emotion is at the very foundations of Western culture and civilization.

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.'

Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of western culture for almost twenty centuries... It is from his birth that most of the human race dates its calendars, it is by his name that millions curse and in his name that millions pray.

I see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture.

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.

Male domination, and the low and stigmatised status of women, cause teenage girls to engage in punishment of their bodies through eating disorders and self-mutilation. There is increasing evidence that woman-hating Western cultures are toxic to girls and very harmful to their mental health. It is, perhaps, not surprising, therefore, that there seem to be some girls baling out and seeking to upgrade their status.

Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed "the claims of the ideal." These are the three stages, profoundly interrelated, through which Western consciousness is forced to experience the blackmail of transcendence.

The indigenous peoples understand that they have to recover their cultural identity, or to live it if they have already recovered it. They also understand that this is not a favor or a concession, but simply their natural right to be recognized as belonging to a culture that is distinct from the Western culture, a culture in which they have to live their own faith.

In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.

I want to look my best for God. So many people have the attitude that if you're a Christian you've got to dress bad, wear an old color, not do anything to your hair, have nothing. It's no wonder that Christianity is not very attractive. I mean, how many people do you know in a Western culture that's going to go, 'Yeah, give me some of that?'

Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its positive aspects — as the wonderful new heaven and earth which love with its miracle and mystery has suddenly produced. Love is the answer, we sing. Our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic - albeit desperate - conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to eros.

My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws of Western culture.

The university is the archive of the Western mind, it's the keeper of the Western culture, ... the guardian of our heritage, the teacher of our teachers, ... the dwelling place of the free mind.

Information and inspiration are everywhere... history, art, architecture, everything an illustrator needs. Europe is, after all, the land that has generated most of the enduring myths and legends of Western culture.

I think angels definitely offer all the imaginative possibilities that vampires do, and I think they've actually been popular in Western culture for longer than vampires have been. I hope they become a part of the culture again in a new way.

In Malaysia, where Western culture was extremely influential, I'd grown up listening to Elvis and the Beatles and watching American movies. People wanted to be like Americans. In contrast, when I got here, I saw prosperous middle-class American college students wanting to somehow join the Third World.

The American culture especially, and Western culture in general, urges us to not only become the best that we can be, but also win against the competition.

With few exceptions, democracy has not brought good government to new developing countries. What Asians value may not necessarily be what Americans or Europeans value. Westerners value the freedoms and liberties of the individual. As an Asian of Chinese cultural backround, my values are for a government which is honest, effective and efficient.

We, including many Christians, read the Bible through "eyes" conditioned by, and even accommodated to, modern Western culture plus the influences of messages and ideas from other cultures that are alien to the worldview of the biblical writers. Therefore, in order fully to understand the Bible and allow the Bible to absorb the world (rather than the world - culture - absorb the Bible) we must practice an "archaeology" of the biblical writers' implicit, assumed view of reality.

For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.

...There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful.

There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.