Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

My boat goes west, your's east. Heaven's a wind for both journeys.

You shall go with me, newly-married bride,And gaze upon a merrier multitude.White-armed Nuala, Aengus of the Birds,Feachra of the hurtling form, and himWho is the ruler of the Western Host,Finvara, and their Land of Heart's Desire.Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

The little dictator who went to Moscow in his green fatigues to receive a bear hug did not forsake the doctrine of Lenin when he returned to the West and appeared in a two-piece suit. (On Daniel Ortega Saavedra)

The most important principle of divine philosophy is the oneness of the world of humanity, the unity of mankind, the bond conjoining East and West, the tie of love which blends human hearts.

Who could tell what forms, what visions, what faces, what forgiveness he could see in the glow of the west!

Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.

All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.

Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.

Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.

She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.

The main difference between men and woman is that men are lunatics and woman are idiots.

It's the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.

Save a boyfriend for a rainy day – and another, in case it doesn’t rain. -Mae West

Send danger from the east unto the west, so honor cross it from the north to south.

Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

One boat sails east and one boat sails west both by same breeze that blow. Tis the set of the sail and not the gale the governs the way you go." Dennis Rolleston

One of the stupidest theories of Western life.

NEWS FLASH!! Today the East German pole-vault champion became the West German pole-vault champion.

One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fiber of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardily.

It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent ''celibacy,'' by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity ''backward.''

Having Scott in the top five made me very happy. We would like to have beaten Western, but we were two points short;-Bob Swank

Westheimer's Discovery: A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library.

The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.

Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union.

The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.

The secret of success is to realize that the crisis on our planet is much larger than just deciding what to do with your own life, and if the system under which we live the structure of western civilization begins to collapse because of our selfishness and greed, then it will make no difference whether you have $1 million dollars when the crash comes or just $1.00. The only work that will ultimately bring any good to any of us is the work of contributing to the healing of the world.

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

I'd give half my life for just one kiss. Mae West: Then kiss me twice.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

Ah, I fancy it is just the same with most of what you call your ''emancipation.'' You have read yourself into a number of new ideas and opinions. You have got a sort of smattering of recent discoveries in various fields -- discoveries that seem to overthrow certain principles which have hitherto been held impregnable and unassailable. But all this has only been a matter of intellect, Miss West -- superficial acquisition. It has not passed into your blood.

The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years.

A group touring Westminster Abbey in London heard the guide list the famous people buried within its walls. During a momentary silence a little old lady's voice blurted out loud and clear, ''Anybody been saved here lately?''

Now is the season for sailing; for already the chattering swallow is come and the pleasant west wind; the meadows bloom and the sea, tossed up with waves and rough blasts, has sunk to silence. Weigh thine anchors and unloose thy hawsers, O Mariner, and sail with all thy canvas set.

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

One ship drives east and other drives west by the same winds that blow. It's the set of the sails and not the gales that determines the way they go.

In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile; on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.

All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

In the democratic western countries so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of ''freedom,'' like a bastard brother of reform.

We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.

Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straight-shooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.

For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.

Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ''retro'' clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works.

Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.