West Quotations

Poets are accepted in Canada as practically nowhere else in the West because of their place in an officially supported and popularly endorsed Canadian culture. Yet, they are still bitter and argumentative, as poets elsewhere are, because they have no audience as such, only a sanctioned role in the cultural scheme of things.

I wish that only three residents of Tel Aviv could see what conditions on the West Bank are like. Living in such proximity, most Israelis have no idea about the adversity on the West Bank.

Socialism is the gradual and less violent form of communism, and socialist is the project of the European Union, which was born in Maastricht in 1992. The intent was to save socialism in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the predictable bankruptcy of the welfare state in the West as well.

In Nigeria, along with its West African neighbor Ghana, women are now starting businesses in greater numbers than men.

Something often neglected in popular accounts of the Wild West is the extent to which its dramas were colored by the politics and personal resentments left by the Civil War.

The West remains obsessed by the caste system.

I have heard something said about allegiance to the South. I know no South, no North, no East, no West, to which I owe any allegiance.

There are alternate definitions of manhood in the West.

We face neither East nor West: we face forward.

Luckily, West End audiences seem to rather like very old people.

Deep down, I'm just a West Virginia hillbilly.

We in the West think of peace as society's default position. War is a temporary state of affairs that happens when peace fails. For us, war is something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. When it is over, win or lose, the warring factions lay down their arms and resume their normal lives.

I will always have a soft spot for 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon,' which I discovered just at the age when I was beginning to enjoy the darkness in fairy tales but still wanted a story where the good guys win.

Most actors here go to the West Coast; I ended up going to Ireland. My buddies who left drama school, they had this arrogance - 'We don't want to typecast ourselves.' But I said, 'I want to do Irish parts. That's the thing that's gonna give me the leg up.'

The only shibboleth the West has is science. It is the premise of modernity and it defines itself as a rationality capable of, indeed requiring separation from politics, religion and really, society. Modernisation is to work towards this.

I come from West London. I support a football team there called Queens Park Rangers, whom I'd like to give a shout-out to. I'm a die-hard Rangers fan. I think that I would always hopefully have a strong connection to and live in London, because it's a brilliant city.

We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.

I said the export benefit should go to all the farmers in the country through the mills spread across the country, in states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal. Now what happens? This benefit goes to those mills or export houses in Mumbai. Or in Chennai or in Bangalore.

At one point I would read nothing that was not by the great American Jews - Saul Bellow, Philip Roth - which had a disastrous effect of making me think I needed to write the next great Jewish American novel. As a ginger-haired child in the West of Ireland, that didn't work out very well, as you can imagine.

When fairy tales are written in the west, they're known as folklore. In the east, fairy tales are called religions.

Fat noses have no place in the Hindi film industry. But it is not so in the West - otherwise, Anthony Quinn would have never been an actor.

The nations of the West hope that by means of steam communication all the world will become as one family.

At least in the West, politicians, corporations and media moguls can no longer take for granted their power to control the public discourse - and have it go unchallenged.

Public protests against globalization - protests that occur by and large in the prosperous West - denounce free trade and the mobility of capital as instruments of exploitation and oppression.

Whenever I dream of playing a perfect round of golf, which I rarely do more than a dozen times a day, I picture myself on one of my favorite British Open-style links, and in particular the great courses of the west of Ireland, whose holes flow through naturally bunkered dunesland never far from the sight or sound of surf.

I lived in San Pedro, California, which is, you know, on the west side of California, and it's where many, many Japanese lived.

I think you could find some waves on the west side of Denmark, but I never tried it.

I think Gadhafi is on the mark. And up until this point in time, I think they truly want to turn this around and become a positive player with the West after years and years of terrorism and stagnation.

I grew up on the west side of Detroit - 6 mile and Wyoming - so I was really in the 'hood. And I would go to school at Detroit Waldorf, and that was not the 'hood. Growing up in Detroit was good. I had a good perspective, a well-rounded one, and not being one-sided.

The funny thing about war is that people feel you need to be morally outraged. I feel morally outraged about it, and I've been doing it for long enough to feel morally outraged, because I have been in massacre scenes in West Africa, and I've been doing this for a long time now.

My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late '50s and early '60s. As a result, he and my mother - both native southerners - were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.

Back in the 1500s, the culture that we had built in the West embraced multigenerational projects quite easily. Notre Dame. Massive cathedrals were not built over the course of a few years, they were built over a few generations. People who started building them knew they wouldn't be finished until their grandson was born.

I absolutely love Ireland. It's one of the most beautiful places on Earth, and I have strong ties here. Both my grandmothers are from Ireland, and I have spent every summer in Bantry since my father, who is an artist, had the romantic idea 20 years ago to buy an old farmhouse on the west coast and renovate it.

My dad took me for an audition once, to show me, 'OK, you want to be a child actor, this is what it's like.' I sang a folk song about donkeys on this West End stage with this big director, and there was a queue of 200 girls all singing 'Memory.' I was terrible. Terrible.

I believe we don't need to widen the divide between the West and Islam. Rather, we need to build dialogue to encourage tolerance and respect.

I have therefore concluded to apply for the privilege of becoming a Cadet at West Point.

Tennis was more than a passing interest, but I found my ability didn't measure up to these West Coast kids who had played 12 months a year and taken it much more seriously than I.

He was definitely known as the foremost man killer in the West; however there's controversy about virtually every killing that he was known to have been involved in.

It affords me sincere pleasure to be able to apprise you of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi.

Look at the darkest hit musicals - Cabaret, West Side Story, Carousel - they are exuberant experiences. They send you out of the theater filled with music

I cook croquetas, and I eat jamon. I keep my diet 100% Mediterranean and drink my Rioja. In that sense, I have a piece of Spain in West Hollywood.

I've come to the conclusion that beautiful women in the West aren't comfortable finding strength in their femininity. They want to do masculine-oriented things to establish their femininity. It's a contradiction.

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

I was driven when I was younger. Driven at West Point where it was much more competitive in that women were competing with men on many levels, and I was driven in the military and at Harvard, both competitive environments.

I'm personally looking for artists that are along the lines of today's pop stars. Whether it be a Rihanna or a Justin Bieber or a Kanye West or a Beyonce or a Lady Gaga, I'm looking for talent that's like that, that's what I love.

In the 9th grade I began my first wage work for the West Side Drug store delivering prescriptions and sundries on my bicycle to customers who called in orders.

Culture is mix. Culture means a mix of things from other sources. And my town, Istanbul, was this kind of mix. Istanbul, in fact, and my work, is a testimony to the fact that East and West combine cultural gracefully, or sometimes in an anarchic way, came together, and that is what we should search for.

I do all my work by storyboard, so as I draw the storyboard, the world gets more and more complex, and as a result, my North, South, East, West directions kind of shift and go off base, but it seems like my staff as well as the audience, doesn't quite realize that this has happened. Don't tell them about it.

The Oslo Accords in 1993 determined that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are a single territorial entity which cannot be divided. Immediately, the United States and Israel set about separating the two and making sure that they would not be united.

Before the Great Chicago Fire, no one took notice of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, two Irish immigrants who lived with their five children on the city's West Side.

Do I think the West End relies too heavily on star names? Yes, I do, and it can result in miscasting and sub-standard stuff. Not always, but occasionally.

The creation of Physics is the shared heritage of all mankind. East and West, North and South have equally participated in it.

Those who say that the West and Islam are eternally irreconcilable have more in common with the Islam extremists than they might like to think, for it's the very same argument of course advanced by Al-Qaida. And they do have it wrong. We need to work with mainstream Islam.

In 2004, I was on the West End stage in The Woman In White, and for every show I had to climb into a fat suit to play the obese Count Fosco. It was hard work, and unbearably hot, but I sailed through because I'd always kept myself fit.

As I walk around, I have met 70-year-old women who live on the Upper West Side who love the show. And I met a couple in Kansas - a couple of truck drivers who drove around together - who loved it. It's popular all over the place and definitely in the gay community.

I think America is a new country. It is a young culture. The spirit of the opening of the West is still with the Americans. It's a very practical and individual-based kind of philosophy that had worked in America for a long time, had been very successful. And the spirit is very much there.

The thought for a long time was that banks needed to be too controlled, too regulated to be turned over to the Wild West of the Net. Then the credit meltdown hit, and we saw just how reckless these so-called safe and regulated institutions were.

A peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will likely depend to a great extent on the economic development of a future Palestinian state. As I have argued before, private sector investment - especially in the West Bank - is going to prove crucial in creating the right political and social context for peace.

When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco.

I've just come back from Mississippi and over there when you talk about the West Bank they think you mean Arkansas.

I have viewed the West as if it were not only the salvation of China but also the natural and ultimate destination of all humanity.

I've always been interested in the history of the West, our country and particularly as it relates to the Native Americans - the original Americans.

I'm a West Indian mum and West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children.

I've worked in the Inuit hamlets of the west coast of Hudson Bay since 1994. Over that time I've been very moved by both the pace of social change there - the loss of traditional ways of seeing the world, the affinity for and comfort with the land - and by the social disarray that change of this pace produces.

My flat in Ladbroke Grove, west London, is in the best building in the world. It's like a commune - everyone gets on - and on Friday evenings I often cook us all dinner.

We must take positions. Our weakness in the West is born of the fact of so-called 'objectivity.' Objectivity does not exist - it cannot exist!... The word is a hypocrisy which is sustained by the lie that the truth stays in the middle. No, sir: Sometimes truth stays on one side only.

I was so afraid to go out west to my aunt's ranch. But the only choice my mother gave me was to go for two weeks or all summer. I wound up staying all summer. And that's where I learned about cattle. I could relate to their behavior, their fears.

I grew up in Vancouver, which is a pretty liberal, gay Mecca of the West coast. There's San Francisco, and then there's Vancouver.

Life is funny, and a lot of times, the people that I've met have really gone past anything that I've ever dreamed of, so I'm really grateful. My friendships really go from the West to the East. You'd be amazed at some of the people I call friends.

The prevailing ideology of the modern west - which is political economy - is in the doghouse. Having failed to notice atmospheric pollution, the economists then frightened themselves with the sort of financial crisis they said they had abolished.

Nigeria is a West African nation of over 100 million energetic people. It is endowed with lots of natural resources but lacks human resources.

Our law is a Jordanian law that we inherited, which applies to both the West Bank and Gaza, and sets the death penalty for those who sell land to Israelis.

I find that the hardest work in the world... is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.

There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.

In the States, it takes you a lifetime just to get from Chicago's South Side to the West Side.

Oh, my only - if I had one frustration in being on 'West Wing' is I wasn't on it enough, because I was in and out.

The grass is always greener on the other side. We are busy applying fairness creams while people in the West go bare-bodied on the beach to get a tan. Indian girls have ruled the roost when it comes to beauty pageants. I flaunt my complexion, and I am proud to be noticed as an Indian wherever I go.

It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam.

My mother and I were part of a deal in the mid-'60s between Romania and Israel. Israel bought freedom for Romanian Jews for $2,000 a head. Ceausescu made a bundle in hard currency. He also 'sold' ethnic Germans to West Germany. Instead of going to Israel, my mother and I came to the United States.

I'd never really experienced the West before moving to Colorado. The East Coast, where I grew up, has a lot of big cities, like Boston and New York, and is more densely populated, and I instantly fell in love with the big open spaces of the West, where you can see not just for a few miles but for a few hundred miles.

Slavery in West Africa, and in Rome and in the Mediterranean, was something different than slavery in America.

I live in a neighborhood where there's a lot of West Indian culture, so it's nice.

I met my wife in Bombay at an official function. And then we courted for three years. That's a great old term, 'courting.' And we had to do it quietly, of course, because you would know the difficulties one might have with Indian parents. She was advised by her father that people in the West don't take marriage seriously.

The crisis of democracy in the West is not the result of falling in love with another system. In Europe and America people who are disillusioned with democracy do not dream about the Chinese model or any other form of authoritarian rule. They do not dream about government that controls Internet and puts in prison those daring to disagree.

Please, all you MCs out there, all you fans out there, don't think Big gonna make a record dissing 2Pac or the West Coast because it's not going down like that. I cant even see me wasting my time or my talent to disrespect another black man.

I was dissatisfied with the status quo back in the 80's, particularly how the West was represented in federation. I wanted to try to change it.

Even at Westchester High in West LA, I was class clown.

Suckle was the first West Indian DJ and he had this fantastic source of music.

The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.

It is only in the shadows, when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.

The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ.

Amin knew that neither West nor East would criticize him for fear that he would support the other side. He felt he was untouchable and he said so openly.

We in the west are seen as godless, as greedy and as uncaring about the suffering of those in the developing world.

The word we have in Korea for K-Pop is 'Gaio.' And I guess it's a huge umbrella term. Basically it's like saying Coldplay and Kanye West, or Eminem and Celine Dion, are the same genre.

The Internet has been seen in the West as the quintessential expression of the free exchange of ideas and information, untrammeled by government interference and increasingly global in reach. But the Chinese government has shown that the Internet can be successfully filtered and controlled.

I've lived out West some... I've always liked the High Plains areas - eastern Colorado, eastern Wyoming, western Nebraska.

We in the West walked away from Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War and left it as a country devastated socially and armed to the teeth. If we do that again, there will be consequences.

It would be nice if we didn't have to drill for oil in the gulf. We have this shallow continental shelf on the west coast of Florida, and it would be a real disaster if we had a major oil spill there. It would be wonderful if we could find some other source of energy.

I can't say for sure where I was headed the first time my mom put a blue blazer on me. Church, probably. West Side Presbyterian in Ridgewood, New Jersey, specifically, where my blazer was paired with a clip-on tie and a pair of khakis for a Sunday morning with my fellow congregants.

I've thought about doing other dramatic roles besides westerns, but I grew up in the West and I know the West.