Valerie Morse Quotes

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

Neoliberalism is hard to define. It could refer to intensified resource extraction, financialization, austerity, or something more ephemeral - a way of life - in which collective ideals of citizenship give way to marketized individualism and consumerism.

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

Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism.

Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.

If it is, in reality, capitalism that is the motor force behind the destructive forms of globalization, then it must be in their capacity to neutralize or transform this particular mode of exploitation that one can best test these various forms of resistance to the West.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

The main reason western culture has been dominant is because Europeans have controlled political, economic and social power including educational policy for the last several centuries.

There's an undeniable tradition of sexism in this country that ties into the move westward by people of European descent and different ways of looking at Manifest Destiny on the west side of the Mississippi River.

In an age robbed of religious symbols, going to the shops replaces going to the church. We have a free choice, but at a price. We can win experience, but never achieve innocence. Marx knew that the epic activities of the modern world involve not lance and sword but dry goods.

Capitalism is not an economic system, but a world-outlook, or rather, a part of a whole world-outlook.

The American model was celebrated by Thatcherites and New Labour alike, California worshipped as the model of the future, 'Anglo-Saxon' embalmed as the fitting metaphor for the shared Anglo-American legacy, Europe denigrated and the rest of the world ignored.

It is urgently necessary that we recognize our own limitations as a moral and ideological force among the Asiatic peoples. Our political philosophy and our patterns for living have very little applicability to masses of people in Asia. They may be all right for us, with our highly developed political traditions running back into the centuries and with our peculiarly favorable geographic position; but they are simply not practical or helpful, today, for most of the people in Asia.

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

The civilized world is far ahead of us. We have no choice but to catch up.

Third World countries feel that the liberal view of the world and way of life is at odds with their deepest aspirations and self-conceptions. As they understand it, liberalism breaks up the community, undermines the shared body of ideas and values, places the isolated individual above the community, encourages the ethos and ethic of aggressive self-assertion, rejects traditional wisdom and common sense in the name of scientific reason, and weakens the spirit of mutual accommodation and adjustment.

Modernization is found in markets.

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

Capitalism in one century of growth has enormously increased its power, not only through expansion over the entire earth, but also through development into new forms

Although the market and opportunities for consumption seem to offer a counterbalance to the government's authoritarian powers, many Chinese are ambivalent about the forces of Westernization and marketization and the rapidly growing gap between rich and poor

It is a leftist myth that European conquerors and settlers encountered only peaceful, virtuous tribes and subdued them murderously in the name of Christianity and Capitalism.

The capitalist model, the developed model, the consumer model which comes from the North, which it has forced on the world, is falling apart on Earth, and there is no planet nearby that we can emigrate to.

I think there is some kind of disillusionment in the West about the gains of modernity and of economic growth and it takes a form of skepticism about the gains of prosperity generally.

Modernity is a deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

Capitalism can never pursue deterritorialization to the absolute. What deterritorialization there is within capitalism is always balanced by a compensatory lockdown onto nation, culture, and race. Hence the 'Steampunk' quality of capitalism, where the most ancient traditions can co-exist with the ultramodern.