Top 620 Western Quotes

Haiti was founded by African slaves who rose against their European masters, had a revolution, and created a new state. There is no other such event in Western history.

The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man.

Eighty per cent of my output is ‘Mallory clowns on the Western canon,’ and I’m happy to be that person.

Margaret Thatcher’s government redistributed money from rich to poor. And that’s the nature of a modern western democracy.

To judge from all Communist papers, magazines and brochures, and from all public assemblies, one might even surmise that a revolt of the poor peasants in Western Europe might break out at any moment!

My grandfather was the king of a region in western Nigeria, where I had the privilege to live for seven years while growing up. But what we think of as royalty in the U.K. is very different to royalty in Nigeria: if you were to throw a stone there, you would hit about 30 princes.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

I thought Clint Eastwood was cool in all the western movies, but I’m not gonna drive somewhere he’s at and stand in line to see him. I told Missy, my wife, ‘The only person I’d stand in line for is God Almighty. You made the universe? All right, I’ll get in line!’

Palestine, as Icelanders see it, includes the Western Wall of the Second Temple, Judaism’s holiest site.

It’s great to see countries like China and India lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by essentially copying Western ways of doing things.

Because in Russia you were able to triumph with the help of a large class of poor peasants, you represent things in such a way, as if we in Western Europe are also going to have that help.

I figured if I write a modern thriller but spliced in the DNA of a classic western – the drifter who comes into town with secrets – I could do something interesting with both genres. Westerns are also an incarnation of the classic knight errant tale, the lone warrior with a moral code, and I love those types of stories.

Country and western is the music of the devil. That’s the real truth of the matter. My late Mother, bless her, loved country and western. God, I couldn’t handle it.

I think the western is about people in harsh places trying to tame an unfriendly wilderness. Because life is defined by struggle, it’s kind of the perfect microcosmic experience to explore that. ‘Here we are, struggling.’ It’s about people persevering and persevering and persevering.

Every western I did and will do; I will do it for the never ending young kid inside of me.

There’s still racism. Western Europe… has taken the native cultures of the Americas, the African cultures, the Asian civilization and lumped them together into The Others.

I think starting in anime, like I did, gave me a good idea of how to approach games that come from Japan. Japanese developers can be very different from companies here in the western market.

The People’s Republic of China has not yet reached the military might of the Soviet Empire. It requires a little more time and a little more infusion of Western aid, loans, technology and the hard currency of our tourists.

I’ve always loved a good Western.

If you’re writing a thriller, mystery, Western or adventure-driven book, you’d better keep things moving rapidly for the reader. Quick pacing is vital in certain genres. It hooks readers, creates tension, deepens the drama, and speeds things along.

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.

There’s inherent cultural imbalance whenever you’re translating from Chinese to English. Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about all the Chinese references – history, language, culture, all this stuff – but to be well-versed in Western references as well.

At the end of the 30 Years War then, Europe broadly decided to separate the sacred from the secular in its political culture. I know that is an oversimplification, but it is instructive, and it led to a growth in religious tolerance that has characterized the best of Western life since.

I would still describe China as a vast, invigorating puzzle that will never make sense to my western upbringing.

I think Buddhism should open the door of psychology and healing to penetrate more easily into the Western world.

It’s kinda me and Jon Stewart have a pact together – so he’s making me famous in the Western world and I’m making him famous in Egypt!

The concept of the strong linkage to the family is breaking down in Western nations.

Pretend you’re a southern sheriff. Or Mae West. Or Donald Duck. Buy a western hat and walk around the house like a cowboy. The point of all this, of course, is to draw yourself out of your accustomed groove.

I attended the University of Louisville my freshman year, transferred to what was then Western Kentucky State Teachers College for my sophomore and junior years, and then graduated from the University of Louisville in the summer of 1961.

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

Every time someone ends a prayer in the Western world they say Amen – that is the name of an Egyptian god associated with completion. So we’re still praying to their gods.

Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called the ‘cities of the world’, then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute ‘the rural areas of the world’.

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.

Virtually all modern forms of extremism accuse liberal Western democratic systems of being hypocritical and, ultimately, weak.

We’re the only western country that doesn’t have a national health care ID.

I used to listen to country and western and blues, John Lee Hooker, spirituals, the Bluegrass Boys, and Eddie Arnold. There was a radio station that come on everyday with country, spirituals, and the blues.

Yeah, there’s absolutely. I mean, remember when The Searchers came out, it was a relatively big hit for a Western, and I think it made 5 million bucks – I don’t even think it made that.

We copied laws and regulations from western countries, but enforcement remains weak, and environmental litigation is still quite near impossible.

What Western society teaches us is that if you get enough money, power, and beautiful people to have sex with, that’s going to bring you happiness. That’s what every commercial, every magazine, music, movie teaches us. That’s a fallacy.

A great deal of stupidity has chipped away at the massive advantages of Western civilization, which could terminally decline if it remains on the current path. But these problems can be solved – and swiftly – if the right leaders emerge.

I wanted to star in a western opposite Robert Redford. That was my plan for my life.

In 1935, Faber & Faber published an anthology entitled ‘My Best Western Story’ in which the genre’s leading practitioners contributed what they considered their finest. Alas, literature the stories ain’t; they appear more like fossils from a spent mine.

Even though Chinese society was really closed, there were two windows for me to explore the world. One was from my mother and grandmother, the unseen and invisible world. Another window was brought from my father’s side, those classic and Western books.

I don’t think it’s a Western thing to really talk about intrinsic motivation and the drive for autonomy, mastery and purpose. You have to not be struggling for survival. For people who don’t know where their next meal is coming, notions of finding inner motivation are comical.

The Western world loves liberalisation, provided it doesn’t affect them.

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.

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.

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.

I was a fighter pilot, flying Hurricanes all round the Mediterranean. I flew in the Western Desert of Libya, in Greece, in Syria, in Iraq and in Egypt.

Jews had an outsider’s eye on a lot of Western tradition.

They’re cheering a young lad, the champion playboy of the Western World.