Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I traveled with then-Senator Obama to Israel in 2008. I will never forget our time in the holy city of Jerusalem and following behind him as he approached the Western Wall - and even in the dark hours of that very early morning, it was a place bustling with energy afforded by one's faith.
When Nixon opened the door to China in the early 1970s, Chinese artists got their first view of the West. Suddenly five centuries of Western art lay before them as a stylistic smorgasbord. Chinese artists could reinterpret it out of admiration or try to replace it. They choose the former.
But look, I was born in 1956, the peak year for births in US history. I think I'm very representative of many of the thought processes my generation have been through and, by and large, people of my age have had their imprint planted on the consciousness of western society for a long time.
The Knesset is in Israel, and the Western Wall is in Israel, and the sooner the Obama administration realizes this, the closer it will be to a Middle East policy worthy of our country and its long alliance with our ally in Jerusalem - which is, actually, the capital of the state of Israel.
If you're thinking of coming to America, this is what it's like: you've got your Comfort Inn, you've got your Best Western, and you've got your Red Lobster where you eat. Everybody's very fat, everybody's very stupid and everybody's very rude - it's not a holiday programme, it's the truth.
The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.
In Western lands there is a distinct division between the religious and the secular life. There is one rule of conduct for laymen and another for clergymen. This distinction has never found its place in the life of the people of India. There, all of life is included in the word 'religion.'
I was born in Swindon... a place that always looked west. I found that wherever I go I love to have a room with a view of the western sky. My late brother and I, when we were small, had a room at the back of the house that overlooked the sunset; and both for he and I it was kind of magical.
Never underestimate the ability of political leaders to misread history on a monumental scale. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have both served to hasten western decline: they have both failed to achieve their objectives and in the process demonstrated an underlying western impotence.
The Western day is indeed nearing when the inner science of self-control will be found as necessary as the outer conquest of nature. This new Atomic Age will see men's minds sobered and broadened by the now scientifically indisputable truth that matter is in reality a concentrate of energy.
I call on the Western democracies and primarily on the leader of the free world, the United States: Do not repeat the dreadful mistake of 1938, when enlightened European democracies decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia for a convenient temporary solution... Israel will not be Czechoslovakia.
Well, one thing's very clear, that terrorism isn't just a threat which is external to Western countries. It's not simply a foreign menace that comes from overseas to strike our cities. It can and it does, as we now know, come from within our own countries and from inside our own populations.
I grew up in a town with just under three hundred people in Western Australia. When you think about being six hours outside the second most isolated city in the world, which is Perth, and then you think about the town that I'm from, which is called Southern Cross, acting is not a possibility.
It is no secret, of course, that people have strong feelings about fat - feelings that seem only to have been inflamed by the sense, in western countries, that there is an obesity crisis afoot. Concerns about health have mutated into a kind of panic attending any mention of fat people at all.
One of the most painful things in the Western States and Territories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children - only debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness, and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten years old.
Throughout the western world, new systems have risen up whose job is to constantly record and monitor the present - and then compare that to the recorded past. The aim is to discover patterns, coincidences and correlations, and from that, find ways of stopping change. Keeping things the same.
There are many reasons why vulnerable young people join militant groups, but among them are poverty and ignorance. Indeed Boko Haram - which translates in English, roughly, as 'Western Education Is Sinful' - preys on the perverted belief that the opportunities that education brings are sinful.
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.
Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith - even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity.
It's only Western civilization that, God forbid, you talk about dying, when it's the only thing we know for certain, right? Everyone's going to die, so what's the big problem? 'Oh, God. Don't talk about it. Don't think about it.' I mean, I'm one of them. I'm not a big fan of talking about dying.
We are either going to go down the socialist road and become like Western Europe and create, I guess really a godless society, an atheist society. Or we're going to continue down the other pathway, where we believe in freedom of speech, individual liberties, and that we remain a Christian nation.
Despite what one might gather from the shrill rantings of the leftist commentariat, for whom religion is a sort of disease, religious difference in the United States has rarely led to serious social strife. That is no small achievement, and one that virtually no other Western democracy can boast.
Shakespeare is, essentially, the emanation of the Renaissance. The overflow of his fame on the Continent in later years was but the sequel of the flood of the Renaissance in Western Europe. He was the child of that great movement, and marks its height as it penetrated the North with civilization.
Since I was a baby my goal was to be on TV because film was just impossible - you never got any Asian women in Western cinema. I grew up wanting to be in 'East-Enders' because film wasn't even a dream. The community were very much like, 'How can you want to act? It's such a low-class profession.'
When the Americans see someone like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, who made billions thanks to their talent and determination, the first thing they say to themselves is, 'I want to be like him.' This, in many ways, is the engine that drives Western society: The desire to make it like the winners.
Yakima Canutt was famously John Wayne's stunt double, and in the Western movie 'Stagecoach,' there is a fantastic scene where there are some horses thundering along, pulling a carriage. He climbs out onto the horses and drops down underneath them, so he's being dragged along, and then he lets go.
Heinrich Heine once imagined the exiled Israelite as a dog who regains his stolen manhood only when he embraces the Sabbath bride. I see western swing performing a similar function in hardscrabble Texas, turning dirt-poor hired hands into Dapper Dans with magic feet at the Saturday night hoe-down.
We were all blocked from western media, outside information. We were captured in a virtual prison cell. People would disappear in the middle of the night - not every day, but sometimes. We hear about it, and we never knew what happened inside the prison camps. I learned about them after I escaped.
Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.
We're so terrified of death in Western culture that we have to make up a myth of an afterlife. I think there's something to be said for living your life very mindful of the fact that you're going to die because I think you carry yourself differently. It doesn't have to be this big, negative bummer.
We are a mixed up people. We have mixed up ways of naming, too... When my father's brothers and sisters first went to colonial schools, they had to produce a surname. They also had to show they were good Christians by adopting a western name. They adopted my grandfather's name as surname. Wainaina.
What links Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Andrej Babis, Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Marine Le Pen is one simple character trait: hypocrisy. These politicians aren't tribunes of the people, they are hucksters. They aren't bitter enemies of the Western system; they are con artists who seek to profit from it.
The U.S.-led western alliance, while acting as an advocate of democracy, rule of law and human rights, is acting from the opposite position, rejecting the democratic principle of the sovereign right of states enshrined in the U.N. Charter and trying to decide for others what is good and what is bad.
Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame are not normal, everyday malware, of course. All three of them were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations that weren't meant to be discovered. The fact that the malware evaded detection proves how well the attackers did their job.
I essentially started out with a Western series for WildStorm/DC but didn't want to be perceived as a 'Western artist.' I did a couple of super-hero things at Marvel but didn't want to be one of those guys, either. I loved all these genres and wanted to play in a very big toy box. Enter 'Planetary.'
The fact that Western Muslims are free means that they can have enormous impact. But it would be wrong to claim that we are imposing our ways on the West. New ideas are now coming from the West. To be traditional is not so much a question of protecting ourselves as to be traditionalist in principle.
I propose to construct a new chart for navigating, on which I shall delineate all the sea and lands of the Ocean in their proper positions under their bearings; and further, I propose to prepare a book, and to put down all as it were in a picture, by latitude from the equator, and western longitude.
There are people in our world today and unfortunately in our political system, they do not believe in evil. They have the modern, western, secular mind set. They don't believe evil exists. They are exactly the ones who are in danger of getting blindsided by evil. Because they're not prepared for it.
When WWII ended, the Cold War started, and the interest of the Western world was not to completely break Germany. So all those Nazis who had been controlling the country now had the power to rebuild it. I think there were many of them who just continued their life in society; it's a very known fact.
I am pretty sure central banks will continue to print money, and the standards of living for people in the western world, not just in America, will continue to decline because the cost of living increases will exceed income. The cost of living will also go up because all kinds of taxes will increase.
Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.
Following the end of the Cold War, there was much discussion concerning the point of NATO. In the event, it was reinvented as a means of reducing Russia's reach on its western frontiers and seeking to isolate it. Its former East European client states were admitted to NATO, as were the Baltic states.
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.
I didn't take theater or anything. We didn't have a very good theater program. It was in western Utah - was a really small school. It wasn't developed. We didn't have the funds to do anything like that, but I did act all through high school in films because Disney Channel would shoot movies out there.
A lot of people in the western world don't realize how much taxes limit their options. You can end up paying almost half your income in taxes, which basically means you're working for the government for 180 days a year. I think I can find better ways to use the money I make for the benefit of society.
Medicine has changed greatly in the last decades. Widespread vaccinations have practically eradicated many illnesses, at least in western Europe and the United States. The use of chemotherapy, especially the antibiotics, has contributed to an ever decreasing number of fatalities in infectious diseases.
Any Westerner can now buy a Koran for a dollar and burn it, while any Muslim with a platform can transform that act into a fighting offense. As passions rise on both sides of the divide, Western provocateurs and Islamist hotheads have found each other, as confrontations occur with increasing frequency.
China is attempting the death-defying feat, which no one has attempted in the history of the world, which is to move a billion people out of poverty. When I speak to Chinese policy-makers, the thing that annoys them the most about Western policy-makers is that they're not given any credit for anything.
You ask what my conclusions are, rereading my journals and looking back on World War II from the vantage point of quarter century in time? We won the war in a military sense; but in a broader sense, it seems to me we lost it, for our Western civilization is less respected and secure than it was before.
Judaism and Christianity in themselves are distinctly separate entities, to be sure; but when considering their influence on Western thought, we must bear in mind that Christianity alone, or almost alone, transmitted the Jewish share, simply by what it contained of it in its own, original constitution.