Edward Snowden Quotes

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

On my parents' scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.

Fact is, given a choice to erase or embrace Western popular culture, most Muslims would gleefully embrace it.

When you think after 25 years of Mao, Chinese people had no idea about western music or even western culture. They had no idea about James Dean or the Beatles or Charlie Chaplin, modern music or modern cinema.

For all the social changes in China can be traced to their early beginnings in the days when the new tools or vehicles of commerce and locomotion first brought the Chinese people into unavoidable contact with the strange ways and novel goods of the Western peoples.

Things are so much global and Americanised.

Some of my educated Filipino friends were aspiring poets, but their aspirations were all in the direction of the United States. They had no desire to learn from the bardic tradition that continued in the barrios. Their ideal would have been to write something that would get them to Iowa, where they would study creative writing.

I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I'd been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctuating between those identities.

In the latter half of the last century the impact of the expanding influence of Western culture and economic system brought about in China a severe conflict.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, every single leading Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France.

In Malaysia, where Western culture was extremely influential, I'd grown up listening to Elvis and the Beatles and watching American movies. People wanted to be like Americans. In contrast, when I got here, I saw prosperous middle-class American college students wanting to somehow join the Third World.

There has been, no doubt, a considerable and very rapid change, … as the result of the importation of Western ideas from without by Young Chinese who have been educated abroad and who have returned to their own country not only imbued with Western conceptions, but so greatly estranged from all the old Chinese conceptions that they almost as much lost contact with the Chinese point of view as if they themselves were foreigners by birth.

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is in the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

Someone else is going to read for me or go at my place to the mosque, and/or to tell me you shouldn't take anything from the West because the West is the enemy and so on. It is to me to decide. I am intelligent enough to be critical towards the West and take what I need and reject what is bad for me.

I love Europe, but I don't want America to become like Europe.

I think of Westernized culture as a good visual for my music.

Following the West is not surrendering. Following the West, the best of the West, is following originality.

I've never left China. My family's been there for 600 years. But my architecture is not consciously Chinese in any sense. I'm a western architect.

We cannot just ape the west. What may be good in an alien country may be unpalatable in India.

My only experience with American things is through movies.

It would be wrong to see the re-making of Asia, much less India, as a revolt against the West. Asia has indeed been re-built on the ruins of colonialism, but not on the ruins of all that the West has come to represent.

I don't think Islam has really been understood as a product of globalization. It might be one of these instances where globalism and tribalism ultimately go hand in hand.

The argument now that the spread of pop culture and consumer goods around the world represents the triumph of Western civilization trivializes Western culture. The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former.

Hardly anyone in the world is an American

American patriotism is now jingoism. American Greatness is made fun of. The concept of "Make America Great Again" or American exceptionalism is lampooned. It is impugned. It is attacked. The effort to globalize our society and make us feel, as many of us as possible, that there's nothing special about being an American, that we ought to think of ourselves as citizens of the world, and in that context America is a problem because we have too much, we've done too much, we owe too much, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.