Guglielmo Ferrero Quotes

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

Things are so much global and Americanised.

The French view globalization as synonymous with Americanization, the cultural imperialism that has filled France with bad food, bad films, and English words.

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

Every citizen in every country in the world now grows up in two nations. Their own and Hollywood.

Cultural contamination that is directed outward is always seen as ‘enlightenment.'

One thing that is not to be underestimated is American culture's influence on the rest of the world.

In Canada you grow up - we're next to the United States. We're watching whatever you're watching. We're following your news. It's obvious that we are inundated with American cultural information and political information. Whereas the opposite is not true.

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

The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization.

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.

Even some of us who make movies underestimate their influence abroad. American movies sell American culture. Foreigners want to see American movies. But that's also why so many foreign governments and groups object to them.

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….

Can one name a single nation that has not turned to the West in its quest for civilization?

Europe, mourning the loss of its century-old supremacy, either resorts to insulation (by quotas and “cultural exception” clauses) or seeks solace in the disparagement of American culture as vulgar, inauthentic, or stolen.

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

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?

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.

If there is cultural imperialism, it is definitely American.

Seriously, American pop culture must be the most predominant force on the planet, next to pollution and poverty.

Youngsters in Punjab have a borrowed mindset, music and fashion sense from Canada and Hollywood because a large number of our relatives are settled abroad.

Modernization means Westernization.

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.

Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that.