Joni Mitchell Quotes

Look, the whole world wants to modernize, and when you look to what they mean by modernizing, they mean Americanize. Would a modern Greek prefer to live in Orange County than Piraeus? Yes. Absolutely.

It's a sad commentary on our time - to use a phrase much favored by my late father - that people increasingly celebrate Christmas Day by going to the movies.

Like Hollywood movies, MTV and blue jeans, fast food has become one of America's major cultural exports.

The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.

There is a certain sort of excess that is interesting, don't you think? And America is, of course, the most excessive place.

We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.

Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West.

We're very good in America at talking about stuff, often stuff to buy. We tend to talk about our iPods. We tend to talk about cars or new fads.

In the mid-1980s, there was a grassroots desire for American culture. Maybe it was not a definite harbinger to what was to come in terms of the fall of the Soviet Union, but it certainly gave a heads up to the global merging of the retail culture.

America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.

There are a lot of things to get seduced by in America.

I like England more than I did when I left. It's become a bit of a better country in the last ten years, in the attitude of it. A bit more Americanized, which is both good and bad. At least when you order a cup of coffee they don't give you a hard time.

This great, though disastrous, culture can only change as we begin to stand off and see... the inveterate materialism which has become the model for cultures around the world.

Finally, I have to say that the most surprising aspect has been the speed at which the folks in India adapt to Western practices. They learn fast, really, really fast.

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.

I have found that many other countries will buy off on anything American. As much as they hate us, they want to be us more than anything.

I was a big Jersey meat-and-potatoes kind of guy before I got here.

Skullcaps, fezes, turbans – it all costs money which goes to foreigners. We will become civilized…We will march forward…Civilization is a fearful fire which consumes those who ignore it.

Our brother (many of the Jews of the Middle East) has gone to Europe and to the West [and] come back a Russified Jew, a Polish Jew, a German Jew, an English Jew. He has come back with a totally different conception of things. Western and not Eastern…, coming back with imperialistic ideas, with reactionary or revolutionary ideas… he is not the old cousin, and we do not extend to him a very good welcome

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.

While modern changes were intrinsic to Western historical development, they were largely seen by Muslims as alien and enforced.

Don't fall into the trap of imagining that the West can remake societies

A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values sweep into every aspect of human endeavor. It is a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.

The Empress Dowager enjoins her people that only by adopting what is superior about the foreign countries can we rectify what is wanting in China.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, products and tastes developed in America have increasingly influenced lifestyles in Europe, whereas in previous centuries, it was generally the other way around.