Occidental Quotes & Sayings

In politics, purity is the enemy of victory — Haley Barbour

In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes - the crime of not pretending it's for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy - the "as if." Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. — Eugene Thacker

But to interpret the Islamic waqf as an 'act' of citizenship is at best unconventional. This argument requires changing our modern understanding of citizenship as contractual status. It requires considering the ways in which the concept of citizenship has evolved through history and how it enabled a division between modern and traditional and occidental and oriental.2 Once we fulfill these requirements, new avenues of thought open up through which we can interpret Islamic waqfs as acts of citizenship. — Pascale Gazaleh

But I was too restless to watch long; I'm too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours
that's another matter. — H.G.Wells

It remains the professional Orientalist's job to piece together a portrait, a restored picture as it were, of the Orient or the Oriental; fragments, such as those unearthed by Sacy, supply the material, but the narrative shape, continuity, and figures are constructed by the scholar, for whom scholarship consists of circumventing the unruly (un-Occidental) nonhistory of the Orient with orderly chronicle, portraits, and plots. — Edward W. Said

Authoritarianism, an unrealistic occidental imagination - these issues will never be settled. Turkey will continue to take Europe as a model; it will continue to pursue its search for democracy. — Orhan Pamuk

You see how all occidental art loses by the fact that the magnificent expressions of love have been denied it. With us, eroticism is poor, stupid and frigid. It is always presented in ambiguous attitudes of sin, while here it preserves all its vital scope, all its passionate poetry and the stupendous pulse of all nature. But you are only a european lover ... a poor, timid, chilly little soul. — Octave Mirbeau

The Western World has been brainwashed by Aristotle for the last 2,500 years. The unconscious, not quite articulate, belief of most Occidentals is that there is one map which adequately
represents reality. By sheer good luck, every Occidental thinks he or she has the map that fits. Guerrilla ontology, to me, involves shaking up that certainty. — Robert Anton Wilson

...But I know as well as the next werewolf who's fallen that you don't get to choose who trips you. Once your soul recognises its other half, what follows is no longer within your control..."

~ Connor Larsen — J.A. Belfield

Sadism ... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination ... madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite. — Michel Foucault

The present is a battleground ... where rival what-ifs compete to become the future 'what-is.' How does one what-if prevail over its adversaries? The answer ... 'Military and political power, of course!' is a postponement, for what is it that directs the minds of the powerful? The answer is 'belief.' Beliefs that are ignoble or idealistic; democratic or Confucian; Occidental or Oriental; timid or bold; clearsighted or delusional. Power is informed by belief that this path, and not another, must be followed. — David Mitchell

I'd learned a long time ago that you can't prove a negative. You can prove that you did something, but it's the devil to prove you didn't do something. — Laurell K. Hamilton

A sort of halo, an occidental glow, came over life then. Troubles and other realities took on themselves a metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere mental phenomena for serene contemplation, and no longer stood as pressing concretions which chafed body and soul. — Thomas Hardy

I've given her signs! I've given her plenty of signs. What does she want me to do? Slap him across the face with my glove, and challenge him to pistols at dawn? — Molly Ringle

Here's my gut belief: Obama got a leg up by being admitted to both Occidental and Columbia as a foreign exchange student. He was raised as a young boy in Indonesia. But did his mother ever change him back to a U.S. citizen? When he returned to live with his grandparents in Hawaii or as he neared college-age preparing to apply to schools, did he ever change his citizenship back? I'm betting not. — Wayne Allyn Root

No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism. — Edward Sapir

attending USC or Occidental. — Lisa See

In Nietzsche's view nihilism is not a Weltanschauung that occurs at some time and place or another; it is rather the basic character of what happens in Occidental history. — Martin Heidegger

The immaterial told me that I was indeed an occidental, a right-thinking Christian who believes in the 'Resurrection of the flesh'. A whole phenomenology then appeared, but a phenomenology without ideas, or rather without any of the systems of official conventions. What appeared was distinct from form and became Immediacy. 'The mark of the immediate' - that was what I needed. — Yves Klein

Oriental marionette imitating an occidental gesture. — Joe Haldeman

Behold the difference between the Oriental and the Occidental. The former has nothing to do in this world; the latter is full of activity. The one looks in the sun until his eyes are put out; the other follows him prone in his westward course. — Henry David Thoreau

I part of this great nation because my grandfather was born here, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He took a horse, back in 1895, and ride it all the way down to Guanajuato, looking for his American dream. No penny in his pocket, only dreams in his head. And he was an immigrant coming from the States into Mexico. And he found his American dream in Mexico. — Vicente Fox

I wonder if Bettie Page original gay cult had something to do with the ironies inherent in her image, as well as her innate fabulousness as an image. — Mary Harron

Abraham Lincoln, a predecessor of Barack Obama in both the White House and the Illinois state legislature, had eighteen months of formal education and became a soldier, surveyor, postmaster, rail-splitter, tavern keeper, and self-taught prairie lawyer. Obama went to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, and became a "community organizer." I'm not sure that's progress--and it's certainly not "sustainable. — Mark Steyn

The Average Occidental- be he a democrat or a Fascist, a Capitalist or a Bolshevik, a manual worker or an intellectual- knows only one positive "religion", and that is the worship of material progress, the belief that there is no other goal in life than to make that very life continually easier or, as the current expression goes, "independent of nature". The temples of this "religion" are the gigantic factories, cinemas, chemical laboratories, dancing halls, hydro- electric works; and its priests are bankers, engineers,film stars, captains of industry, record-airmen. The unavoidable result of this craving after power and pleasure is the creation of hostile groups armed to the teeth and determined to destroy each other whenever their respective interests come to clash. And on the cultural side the result is the creation of a human type whose morality is confined to the question of practical utility alone, and whose highest criterion of good and evil is material progress. — Muhammad Asad

But how shall an Occidental mind ever understand the Orient? Eight
years of study and travel have only made this, too, more evident that not
even a lifetime of devoted scholarship would suffice to initiate a Western
student into the subtle character and secret lore of the East. Every chap-
ter, every paragraph in this book will offend or amuse some patriotic or
esoteric soul: the orthodox Jew will need all his ancient patience to forgive
the pages on Yahveh; the metaphysical Hindu will mourn this superficial
scratching of Indian philosophy; and the Chinese or Japanese sage will
smile indulgently at these brief and inadequate selections from the wealth
of Far Eastern literature and thought. Some of the errors in the chapter on
Judea have been corrected by Professor Harry Wolf son of Harvard; — Will Durant

In the late 60's I was enrolled at Occidental College majoring in philosophy and taking several studio art classes, but I dropped out. It was a very confusing time with the war in Vietnam and the social changes sweeping the nation. — Stephen Beal

Minor-are the only ones which Occidental music employs, — Paramahansa Yogananda

The Occidental snobbery which is invading us, the gunboats, rapid-fire guns, long-range rifles, explosives ... what else? Everything which makes death collective, administrative and bureaucratic - all the filth of your progress, in fact - is destroying, little by little, our beautiful traditions of the past. — Octave Mirbeau

for it is this modern Occidental civilization which, since about the middle of the thirteenth century, has been - quite literally - the only innovating civilization in the world. — Joseph Campbell