Western Politics Quotes

The Bolsheviks called their system socialist so as to exploit the moral prestige of socialism. The West adopted the same usage for the opposite reason: to defame the feared libertarian ideals by associating them with the Bolshevik dungeon

Putin and his advisers don't understand the power of public opinion in the West. They believe in conspiracy theories and that someone is orchestrating a malicious campaign against Russia. They don't realize that even conservative politicians have to react when newspapers and artists express their concern on such an issue.

The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.

Terrorism and the refugee crisis have changed the political mood in the West and brought the extreme right to prominence there.

Putin has had many positive experiences working with Western political leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia.

I lift my hand to fight Communism and I find the hand of the Western World is sticking knives into my back.

I think you will find scientists that think like you in Germany and Britain, and you will find politicians that think like Weinberger. I think the most bellicose ruling group in the Western world at the moment is the British.

Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office.

When Western politicians propose blanket discrimination against Islam, they bolster the terrorists' propaganda.

In the East [Russia] the state was everything. Civil society was primordial and gelatinous. In the West there was a proper relationship between the state and civil society.

The message, 'stop Islam, defend freedom,' is a message that's not only important for the Netherlands but for the whole free Western world.

My publication, 'The Post,' has taken the initiative to translate many of my pieces and publish them in Arabic. For that, I am grateful. Arabs need to read in their own language so they can understand and discuss the various aspects and complications of democracy in the United States and the West.

...the West has its share of liars and poseurs, the ablest of whom congregate in government.

Whenever the [Ottoman] Turks begin to be troublesome, send embassies to the West at once, offer to accept union, and protract negotiations to great length. The Turks so greatly fear such union that they will become reasonable. And still, the union will not be accomplished because of the enmity of the Latin nations.

What if democracy does not serve liberty? This question is seldom asked in the West, where democracy is often seen as synonymous with liberalism.

At any time the atmosphere in the West could change, for which determined political will I do not see at the moment is a necessary prerequisite. From the sidelines, it seems that he's caught up in his own exorbitant ambitions.

By the 1870s, ex-Confederates had taken their support for Western individualism a step further. They insisted the federal government was actively persecuting Western individuals.

History indicates that indiscriminately copying Western political systems is a blind alley for China.

Elites are inevitable in politics. That is how politics is going to work. The question is, are your elites responsible, public-spirited? Do they think about the interests of others, not just themselves? And the story of Western politics since the beginning of the century is that as elites become more separated, more selfish, as they leave behind their populations and don't think about them, they become discredited. And the people look for alternatives. But the alternative is worse. Those rules of the game protect us all. And they are more precious than almost any political outcome.

If you're not geographically diverse, it's hard to even speak a language that makes sense to folks in faraway places. That's especially a problem in the West, where voters have always mistrusted the federal government.

I don't think the British or American governments really want to fight the Islamic State. They just want to look as if they are doing so.

A relatively small and eternally quarrelsome country in Western Europe, fountainhead of rationalist political manias, militarily impotent, historically inglorious during the past century, democratically bankrupt, Communist-infiltrated from top to bottom.

My impression is that Putin feels that he can basically manipulate the West to do what he ultimately wants to achieve, and that he feels he's gotten away with it so far, and that all he has to do is basically play the same game.

The problem with the West is that they start with political reform going towards democracy.

The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free.