George F. Kennan Quotes

Secularism is the experience of the Western culture and thought. Insisting on spreading it to places where the underlying intellectual background, and the political and social reasons for its appearance are lacking, is clearly a mistake, regardless of being desirable or not.

In the past, the West had tried to export one formula of democracy which should fit to the rest of the world, and they discovered that this doesn't work.

The things and ways the West took to the rest have become the ways of the world.

It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?

The domination of western values, beliefs and way of life has angered many from the east and in developing countries.

At the heart of globalisation is a new kind of intolerance in the West towards other cultures, traditions and values, less brutal than in the era of colonialism, but more comprehensive and totalitarian.

When you start exporting ideas, philosophy, behavior, products, ways of living, it becomes an assault on the culture. Americans have to understand that.

The US became arrogant because of what it owns of weapons and technology. For that, it handles the world as it pleases, and changes the ideologies of people, their habits and ethics in order to spread Western culture at the expense of Islam.

We cannot sit in the West and prescribe for peoples in the East, whose societies and ways of life are being destabilized by Western and imperialistic religious, economic and technological initiatives -- without having walked in their shoes

Is it, perhaps, possible that there are two kinds of Civilization--one for home consumption and one for the heathen market?

Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.

It is through the European that civilization arrives ... precisely because of their superiority, the civilized people our responsible for an evolving world.

The idea of progress has a couple of contradictions … it leads to Eurocenterism….

You say, for example, “Why do the Indians till the ground and live as we do?” May we not ask with equal propriety, “Why do not the white people hunt and live as we do?”

It is culturally condescension to say that some countries are not ready for democracy.

We Indians only know that schools will make our children like white people, and some of us do not like white people and their ways.

Identity politics includes the assertion of difference from ‘the West’, and the defenses against cultural invasions and ‘pollution’ by Western styles. The insistent emphasis on this theme is accompanied by its flagrant but largely unacknowledged subversion in everyday activity and styles, from dress, to food to music and entertainment, to media consumptions, to public spaces and general consumption patterns. While McDonald’s is boycotted because it is American, native fast food chains emerge which are direct imitations; the boycott of Coca Cola spawns Mecca Cola.

The peace treaties of…Western nations…no more fit the Asian governments than a stove pipe hat would fit an African savage.

I am not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture - rule of law, universal suffrage - is preferable to Arab culture. That's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic.

The issue of American world cultural dominance is moot. All the international debates on the issue seem to be held in English.

Others think their American ways will work in other countries. That's not always accurate and can be disrespectful to the local culture.

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

In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernize, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things.

If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed.

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.