The Westerner Quotes & Sayings

The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process. — Wallace Stegner

Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological. Whenever the Westerner hears the word "psychological," it always sounds to him like "only psychological. — Carl Jung

A lot of the book [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] is about karma and rebirth. Things like that are very attuned to my life as an Indian, but when I approach it from a perspective of a Westerner, then I have a skeptical, yet kind of novice view on it. I think that choice really liberated the story to be its own story. A lot of the conclusions that Max reaches on his own are not mine at all. So, I think that allowed the story to take on its own momentum, to have its own propulsive force. — Karan Bajaj

Michelangelo was not only widely famous during his lifetime, but actually wealthy as a result of producing art (he was the first Westerner to have a biography of his life published while he was living). — David D. Peck

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. — Daniel Pipes

Istanbul, a universal beauty where poet and archeologist, diplomat and merchant, princess and sailor, northerner and westerner screams with same admiration. The whole world thinks that this city is the most beautiful place on earth. — Edmondo De Amicis

I created 'The Westerner' because of anger - anger at never-miss sheriffs, always-right marshalls, whitewashed gunfighters ... anger at TV's quick-draw tin gods who stand behind a tin star or ten cents' worth of righteous anger and justify their skill and slaughter with a self-conscious grin or a minute's worth of bad philosophy. — Sam Peckinpah

There is no greater example in apologetics than the apostle Paul speaking at Mars Hill. The irony of the talk Paul gave is in the difference in reaction the Easterner has when reading Paul's address to that of a Westerner. The Easterner is thrilled at how the apostle wove the message starting from where the listeners were to bring them to where he was in his thinking. The average Westerner is quick to point out that few of his hearers responded. Such an attitude says volumes about why the church in the West has been so intellectually weak. To those in the West, the bigger the number of respondents, the more replicated the technique. The bigger the statistic, the greater the success. Westerners are enamored by size, largesse, number of hands raised, and so on. When the sun has set on these reports, we seem rather dismayed when statistics show the quality of the life of the believer is no different from that of the unbeliever. — Ravi Zacharias

Gallimard: It's ... a pure sacrifice. He's unworthy, but what can she do? She loves him ... so much. It's a very beautiful story.
Song: Well, yes, to a Westerner.
Gallimard: Exuse me?
Song: It's one of your favotite fantasies, isn't it? The submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man. — David Henry Hwang

As she drove the Trace, each curve revealing a scene rich with life and as picturesque as illustrations from a children's book, Anna was struck again by the beauty of the state. Over her years as a Yankee and a Westerner, she'd heard Mississippi described many ways. Beautiful had never been one of them. — Nevada Barr

A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. — John Updike

What you have to understand, he says, is the mentality of the Iraqi versus the mentality of the average Westerner. — Richard House

Afghanistan doesn't have the oil of the Khazars, he said, and we're not ready to prostitute our women like the Thais. Unlike the Westerner's, ours is not a spiritual poverty but a material one. When our needs in that area are met, we will not have the dilemma or crisis of Western man. — Zia Haider Rahman

It is impossible for a Westerner to imagine the deadening torpor of a protected life under house arrest. Eventually, one is grateful for the smallest outing outdoors
a lovely picnic in a burqa, being allowed to watch the men and boys fly kites or swim. — Phyllis Chesler

I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn't even know anymore why I was living. — Marjane Satrapi

When judging modernity, it is all too tempting to take the viewpoint of a twenty-first-century middle-class Westerner. We must not forget the viewpoints of a nineteenth-century Welsh coal miner, Chinese opium addict or Tasmanian Aborigine. Truganini is no less important than Homer Simpson. — Yuval Noah Harari

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. — Neal Stephenson

I think in Baghdad, any westerner, journalist or not, has a big dollar sign on his or her forehead. So, first and foremost, you are a ticket to unimaginable wealth. And that makes any trips out of the safe zones very risky. — Yaroslav Trofimov

While I try to avoid it, I'm sure I've recently - perhaps even somewhere in this book - included myself as an American or a white man or a Westerner by using the word "we." It's a convenient shorthand. However, I have been careful about my use of collective speech, working through roughly the same thought process described above, for several years now. When I mean the American government, I say "the American government." I do this because I've come to the conclusion that the American government is a "them," not a "we." As the old saying goes: "say what you mean and mean what you say." So — Jack Donovan

Human beings by nature want happiness and do not want suffering. With that
feeling everyone tries to achieve happiness and tries to get rid of suffering, and everyone has the basic right to do this. In this way, all here are the same, whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated, Easterner or Westerner, believer or non-believer, and within believers whether Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and so on. Basically, from the viewpoint of real human value we are all the same. — Dalai Lama

To a Westerner the anomaly of this - a man under a life sentence for treason working in a prison on the most secret scientific developments - is almost too much to comprehend. In the Soviet Union it was an accepted practice. Korolev was immensely valuable, but because he was so valuable, he was also dangerous. He consented to work because this way, at least, he got some rations, he was with his colleagues, and he was doing what he loved most of all. — David Halberstam

Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being. No better instance exists today of what Anwar Abdel Malek calls "the hegemonism of possessing minorities" and anthropocentrism allied with Europocentrism: a white middle-class Westerner believes it his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition "it" is not quite as human as "we" are. There is no purer example than this of dehumanized thought. — Edward W. Said

The music of the westerner comes from Africa, whether they like it or not. The majority of the instruments of the music, of the pop music, rock and roll, or R&B, hip hop, whatever it is, their roots trace back to Africa. So if you are black, white, yellow, or red, whatever you do, it doesn't matter, because your DNA is back in Africa. — Angelique Kidjo

When a Westerner meets someone from a poor country, he feels deep contempt. He assumes that the poor man's head must be full of all the nonsense that plunged his country into poverty and despair. — Orhan Pamuk

Pres. Lyndon Johnson was a middle-aged man of smalltown America, both a Westerner and a Southerner, and except where politics had demonstrably forced his growth-as on the question of civil rights-he functioned like most men, as a product of his background. — Tom Wicker

We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce, then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light - his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow. — Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

In its report issued that year, 1991, Amnesty International recorded protests against human rights abuses in over fifty countries, the protest to thirteen countries making specific reference to torture. These are the kinds of thing many of us have a vague background awareness of, without there being much publicity unless the perpetrators are some currently loathed regime, or unless some highly visible Westerner is among the victims. — Jonathan Glover

Sejal had not thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts - the sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to put in their dish. — Adam Rex

For a Westerner, it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature. — Lin Yutang

Muslims, who have a completely different value system, come to the West, then they should accept that there are certain basic values in the West intrinsic to our culture. Just as I wouldn't suggest that any Westerner walk down the streets of Saudi Arabia in a bikini. — John Cleese

Every Westerner is jubilating that the Berlin Wall has fallen. Something worst than the Berlin Wall is in Palestine; and nobody is talking about it. — Yahya Jammeh

It is a relatively small number of people who want to impose their will by the use of terror on the rest of civilization, who have got a program. It's not blind violence. It's with a purpose. They want to destroy the state of Israel. They want every westerner out of the Arab countries, Middle East and elsewhere. — John Reid

Look at all the Eastern writers who've written great Western literature. Kazuo Ishiguro. You'd never guess that The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go were written by a Japanese guy. But I can't think of anyone who's ever done the reverse
any Westerner who's written great Eastern literature. Well, maybe if we count Lawrence Durrell - does the Alexandria Quartet qualify as Eastern literature?"
"There is a very simple test," said Vikram. "Is it about bored, tired people having sex?"
"Yes," said the convert, surprised.
"Then it's western. — G. Willow Wilson

The typical Westerner wishes to be the cause of as many changes as possible in his environment; the typical Chinaman wishes to enjoy as much and as delicately as possible. — Bertrand Russell

The modern Westerner, persuaded that he has a right to "think for himself" and imagining that he exercises this right, is unwilling to acknowledge that his every thought has been shaped by cultural and historical influences and that his opinions fit, like pieces of jigsaw puzzle, into a pattern which has nothing random about it. — Charles Le Gai Eaton

I was the only westerner to succeed in a place that's like a toilet, and you always come out of a toilet with a smell. — David Reuben

As of Election Day, Lincoln had successfully avoided not only his three opponents, but also his own running mate, Hannibal Hamlin. Republicans had nominated the Maine senator for vice president without Lincoln's knowledge, much less his consent - true to another prevailing political custom that left such choices exclusively to the delegates - in an attempt to balance the Chicago convention's choice of a Westerner for the presidency. — Harold Holzer

If Slumdog Millionaire projects India as a Third World, dirty-underbelly, developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations. It's just that the Slumdog Millionaire idea authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a Westerner, gets creative Golden Globe recognition. The other would perhaps not. — Amitabh Bachchan

She's a slinky sort of person, no angles at all; and magnetic - you can't take your eyes off her. She's dressed like a Westerner, but her eyes have a slant to them. They are the eyes of an Easterner. She doesn't walk like our women do, she seems to writhe all in one piece - undulates is the word. ("Kiss Of The Cobra") — Cornell Woolrich

Little in his brief life was lost on him; there are premonitions of Nineteen Eighty-Four even in his memoir of schooldays 'Such, Such Were the Joys'. Experiences in the colonies and the BBC can be seen to have furnished raw materials; so indeed can his reading of Evgeny Zamyatin's We and other dystopian literature from the early days of Stalinism. But the transcendent or crystallising moment undoubtedly occurred in Spain, or at any rate in Catalonia. This was where Orwell suffered the premonitory pangs of a man living under a police regime: a police regime ruling in the name of socialism and the people. For a Westerner, at least, this epiphany was a relatively novel thing; it brushed the sleeves of many thoughtful and humane people, who barely allowed it to interrupt their preoccupation with the 'main enemy', fascism. But on Orwell it made a permanent impression. — Christopher Hitchens

I lived in Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s. It was, for a Westerner, pretty idyllic. There were the religious police; there were the rules; there were the prayer times. But it was as if we were existing in two separate universes. The Westerners were just allowed to get on with their way of life. — Robert Lacey

[...] So large was the universe of things called Oriental: roots, rugs, religions, noodles, hairstyles, hordes, healing arts, herbs and spices, fabrics, medicines, modes of war, types of astronomy, spheres of the globe, schools of philosophical thought, and salads. It applied to me, women, gum, dances, eyes, body types, chicken dishes, societies, civilizations, styles of diplomacy, codes of behaviour, fighting arts, sexual proclivities, and a particular kind of mind.
Apparently, the Orient produced people with a singular way of thinking. There was no way, wrote Jack London, for a Westerner to plumb the Oriental mind - it was cut from different cloth, functioned in an alien way. — Alex Tizon

I s'pose you know - though I can see you're a Westerner by your talk - what a lot our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with 'em. You've probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there's still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod. — H.P. Lovecraft

In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God's voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while educated Westerner's access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book. — Wm. Paul Young

I am a Westerner. We're not going to change the West by going East. The East has a lot to teach us, but essentially it's like a mirror, saying, hey, can't you see what's here in your own religion, what are you, stupid? — Matthew Fox