Western Societies Quotes

If one wishes to forgo the protection afforded by secular pluralism, then perhaps Western liberal democracies is not the right place for you to freely exercise your religion.

Secularism and pluralism are two of the defining ethos of Western societies. The former decouples religion from governmental institutions whilst the latter seeks to protect the rights of all citizens to freely practice their creed.

James Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

It is obvious that the role of the father as the central authority in the family has been considerably challenged in Western societies. Parental responsibilities, and I knowingly use the term responsibility instead of the term authority still used in the French Civil code, are nowadays shared equally between both parents.

If you just compare South Africans to the rest of the world, I think that white South Africans, and especially English-speaking white South Africans, are exactly the same as Brits or Australians or New Zealanders or Canadians or Americans.

The rest of Europe tends to be very comfortable with sexuality. The British and the Americans are kind of hung up about it.

I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.

It has been true in Western societies and it seems to be true elsewhere that you do not find democratic systems apart from capitalism, or apart from a market economy, if you prefer that term.

Was the rise of democracy the main driving force behind the development of contemporary liberal Western societies, or were long gestating developments in Western societies that fixed concepts of liberties and individual rights instead the drivers of democracy?

Western societies will have to focus on the dangers of too rapid cultural change. That might involve some limits on the rate of immigration and on the kinds of immigrants who are permitted to enter.

America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.

Western countries in particular can today no longer be separated from Muslim societies, because they have them within themselves. They are themselves internally globalized.

Growing terrorism, permissive societies, democracy collapsing through lack of law and order. If things continue on their present track, the disintegration of Western societies will occur much sooner than you think under the hammer blows of fascism and communism. Freedom is not something that does not have a breaking point, and your enemies would like you to reach that point.

I think we can expect leaders of Muslim societies to cooperate with each other on many issues just as Western societies cooperate with each other.

Every educated and intelligent person glories in the freedom of women in Western societies to exercise their talents to the full and their freedom to walk safely in the streets of our great cities.

If we look at the complexity of the challenges facing western societies today, we see that the problems are not really about outsiders, but have their roots much closer to home.

As for tattoos, it does no good to remind curmudgeons that tattoos have been around for millennia. Yes, we will agree, tattoos have been common - first among savage tribes and then, more recently, among the lowest classes of Western societies.

Global warming people ignore nature; they ignore water vapor; they ignore sunspot cycles and sun activity. It's typical liberal guilt and politics wanting to blame western societies and lifestyles for causing all these problems because it leads to government and United Nations solutions, and that's where liberals like power vested. And of course when people come along and don't agree, they gotta be shut up.

Western societies in general and universities in particular have not always been immune from institutional sexism. This is incontestable.

That new technologies and techniques would be forthcoming was a fundamental article of Christian faith. Hence, no bishops or theologians denounced clocks or sailing ships-although both were condemned on religious grounds in various non-Western societies.

No kid graduating in a political science class in Canada should not understand what's happened to income inequality since the 1970s, period. And then, what do we do about it? It's the biggest problem out there, in all western liberal societies.