Westernization Quotes

“In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.”
― Samuel P Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

“Becoming a modern society is about industrialization, urbanization, and rising levels of literacy, education, and wealth. The qualities that make a society Western, in contrast, are special: the classical legacy, Christianity, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, civil society.”
― Samuel P. Huntington

“It was Daisuke's conviction that all morality traced its origins to social realities. He believed there could be no greater confusion of cause and effect than to attempt to conform social reality to a rigidly predetermined notion of morality. Accordingly, he found the ethical education conducted by lecture in Japanese schools utterly meaningless. In the schools, students were either instructed in the old morality or crammed with a morality suited to the average European. For an unfortunate people beset by the fierce appetites of life, this amounted to nothing more than vain, empty talk. When the recipients of this education saw society before their eyes, they would recall those lectures and burst out laughing. Or else they would feel that they had been made fools of. In Daisuke's case it was not just school; he had received the most rigorous and least functional education from his father. Thanks to this, he had at one time experienced acute anguish stemming from contradictions. Daisuke even felt bitter over it.”
― Natsume Sōseki, And Then

“By imitating the manners and the mode of life of the West,the Muslims are being gradually forced to adopt the Western moral outlook: for the imitation of outward appearance leads,by degrees, to a corresponding assimilation of the world-view responsible for that appearance.”
― Muhammad Asad, Islam at the Crossroads

“Decadence, decadence, he said to himself. They’ve lost everything and gained nothing. The French had merely daubed on the finishing touches at the end of a process which had begun five hundred years ago, at least. Their intuitive moral desires coincided with the ideals embodied in the formulas of their religion, yet they could live in accordance neither with those deepest impulses nor with the precepts of the religion, because society came in between with all the pressure of its tradition. No one could afford to be honest or generous or merciful because every one of them distrusted all the others; often they had more confidence in a Christian they were meeting for the first time than in a Moslem they had known for years.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“This was what he stood for: a world where there would be room enough even for such a mass of clumsy and cumbersome freedom. A margin of humanity, of tolerance, where some of life’s beauty could take refuge. His eyes narrowed a little, and an ironic, bitter smile came to his lips. I know you all, he thought. Today you say that elephants are archaic and cumbersome, that they interfere with roads and
telegraph poles, and tomorrow you’ll begin to say that human rights too are obsolete and cumbersome, that they interfere with progress, and the temptation will be so great to let them fall by the road and not to burden ourselves with that
extra load. And in the end man himself will become in your eyes a clumsy luxury, an archaic survival from the past, and you’ll dispense with him too, and the only thing left will be total efficiency and universal slavery and man himself will disappear under the weight of his material achievement. He had learned that much behind the barbed wire of the forced labor camp: it was our education, a lesson be was not prepared to forget.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven

“I had made it my chief aim in Africa to hinder the spreading of our poisons — of our absurd political notions of democracy, self-government, parliamentary institutions, political parties, and all that threatened the African way of life and the traditions of the African tribes. I was here to watch over a pastoral civilization, to prevent it from going our way, and I was ready to do anything to carry out my self-appointed task.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven

“The trouble with the nations of the West is that they are young, fickle, foolish and wealthy.”
― Swami Vivekananda, OUR WOMEN

“Las conclusiones más significativas se refieren a la necesidad de que cada individuo se forme por sí mismo su propia opinión de la realidad sin aceptar acríticamente la autoridad de los maestros occidentales, el deber moral de usar los propios dones o bienes (inteligencia, poder, dinero) teniendo siempre presente una proyección social, la obligación de respetar la libertad de los demás al tiempo que se defiende la propia o la posibilidad de cohonestar la (prioritaria) autoexigencia personal con otros valores respetables como el servicio a la nación. Al final, el discurso se transforma, a partir de una advertencia a los jóvenes japoneses de 1914, en un alegato a favor de la independencia personal, de la libertad y de la tolerancia, es decir, en una afirmación de valores humanistas de significado universal.”
― Natsume Sōseki, My Individualism & The Philosophical Foundations of Literature

“I have come to believe that the very modes of life and thinking that strike most people in the West as antiquated or 'limiting' can liberate us, while the Western dream of autonomy and choice without limits is, in fact, a prison; that the quest to define ourselves on our own is a kind of El Dorado, driving to madness the many who seek after it; that for our best, highest selves to soar, other parts of us must be tied down, enclosed, limited, bound.”
― Sohrab Ahmari, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos

“Either Western or Human
(Undoing Westwash Sonnet)

When the Brits invade a country,
It's called the march of civilization.
When refugees arrive in search of life,
It's dehumanized as illegal immigration.

When America recruits talents from abroad,
It is proudly boasted as headhunting.
When another nation does exactly the same,
It is hailed as espionage and IP stealing.

When America spies on everybody else,
It is sugarcoated as national security.
If someone so much as loses a weather balloon,
It is used to gaslight a nation into a frenzy.

To see the world as it is, first
we gotta take off our western glasses.
Look at the human world with human eyes,
only then you'll fathom justice and progress.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“You know why? Because I thought you were different from us. Yes, I thought you were something special, something different on this sad earth of ours. I wanted to escape with you from the white man’s hollow materialism, from his lack of faith, his humble and frustrated sexuality, from his lack of joy, of laughter, of magic, of faith in the richness of after-life. In fact, I wanted to escape from everything you’re learning from us so quickly, from all the things people like you, Monsieur le depute, are daily injecting into the black man’s soul. Soon there’ll be no Africa left: people like you, Monsieur le depute, for all their talk of national independence, will deliver Africa to the West forever. You’ll, accomplish that final conquest for us. Of course, to achieve that, people like you will have to exercise
a tyranny and a cruelty compared to which colonialism will soon appear as child’s play — and in the name of Marx and Stalin, you'll accomplish that conquest for us. For it is our fetishes, our pagan gods, our prejudices, our racism, our nationalism, our poisons that you dream of injecting into the African blood. . . . We’ve never yet dared to do it, but under the name of progress and nationalism, you’ll do the job for us. You’re our most rewarding fifth column. Naturally, we don’t understand this: we’re too stupid. We’re trying to fight you, to destroy you, to prevent you from delivering Africa to us forever.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven

“The idea that a professional tracker like Idriss could suddenly start suffering from a sort of poetic remorse, soulfulness, regret at the memory of the animals he had tracked down— such an idea could only come to birth in decadent brains and exquisite sensitivities freshly arrived from Europe — which were the beginning of all our troubles in Africa and elsewhere, be it said in passing.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven

“To the white man the elephant had long meant merely ivory, and to the black man it always meant merely meat — the most abundant quantity of meat that a lucky hit with the assagai could procure for him. The idea of the 'beauty' of the elephant, of the 'nobility' of the elephant, was the idea of a man who had had enough to eat, a man of restaurants and of two meals a day and of museums of abstract art — an idea typical of a decadent society that takes refuge in abstractions from the ugly social realities it is incapable of facing, and makes itself drunk on vague and twilight notions of the beautiful, of the noble, of the fraternal, simply because the purely poetic attitude is the only one which history allows it to adopt. Bourgeois intellectuals insisted that a society on the march and in full spate should encumber itself with elephants simply because in that way they themselves hoped to escape destruction. They knew that they were just as anachronistic and cumbersome as these prehistoric animals; it was just a way of claiming mercy for themselves, of asking to be spared. Morel was typical of them.
But to human beings in Africa, the elephant’s only beauty was the weight of his meat, and as for human dignity, that was first and foremost a full belly. Perhaps, when the African does have his belly full, perhaps then he too will take an interest in the beauty of the elephant and will in general give himself up to agreeable meditations on the splendors of nature. For the moment, nature spoke to him of splitting the elephant’s belly open and plunging his teeth into it and eating, eating till he dropped, because he did not know where the next morsel would come from.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven

“Colonialists respect nothing. They would take creatures royal in their primitive beauty, serene in their ignorance, and noble in their qaked simplicity, and would twist them out of shape, distort their minds, contaminate them with their own ideologies and abstractions.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven

“There was no culture shock—though I may have gawked a little at the first short skirt I saw…and maybe the second one too—because even though I’d never stepped foot on U.S. soil, I knew this place. I’d seen it on screens my entire life.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Adaptation on the individual scale, with one patient at a time, . . . create[s] lasting positive cultural change without stripping the culture of its original roots.”
― Snigdha Nandipati, A Case of Culture: How Cultural Brokers Bridge Divides in Healthcare

“Still, the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to westernize and modernize may have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire, rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved's clothes, possessions, and photographs. But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

“To see the world as it is, first we gotta take off our western glasses. Look at the human world with human eyes, only then you'll fathom justice and progress.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“The world doesn't have history,
what we have is whitewashed history.
The world doesn't have progress,
what we have is westwashed progress.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“The Westerner has been able move forward in ordered steps, while we have met superior civilization and have had to surrender to it, and we have had to leave a road we have followed for thousands of years. The missteps and inconveniences this has caused have, I think, been many. If we had been left alone we might not be much further now in a material way than we were five hundred years ago. Even now in the Indian and Chinese countryside life no doubt goes on much as it did when Buddha and Confucius were alive. But we would have gone only in a direction that suited us. We would have gone ahead very slowly, and yet it is not impossible that we would one day have discovered our own substitute for the trolley, the radio, the airplane of today. They would have been no borrowed gadgets, they would have been the tools of our culture, suited to us.”
― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

“Western definitions of happiness--and Western maps of how you get there--may even lead you away from well-being.”
― Randy Woodley, Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Lead Us to Harmony and Well-Being