The fascinating thing to a dispassionate observer about the structure of life in the Soviet Union is that in their efforts to prod...uce an unknown that we may let its ideologists call Socialism the Communist dictators have produced a brutal approximation of monopoly Capitalism, a system that has all the disadvantages of our own, with none of the palliatives which come to us from surviving competition and from the essential division of economic and political power which has so far made it possible for the humane traditions of the Western world to continue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwi...n and Freud; and Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like the...mselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now... a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind. We wallow in nostalgia but mana...ge to get it all wrong. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories ... but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted déjà vu.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the ...Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the place where all the aspirations of the Western World meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction... of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a word, the Roman lacked the humanitas (the sure sense of human values and of the part played by man in the universe) which mad...e the Greek civilization great. The Greek saw life steadily and saw it whole; the Roman saw it steadily, but his vision was strictly limited, and it did not occur to him to ask whether he saw life whole. He saw life in terms of action and action in terms of his own needs; he never attained by himself to con sciousness of the world of thought and to the vision of the ideals by which all right action must be governed. It is true and fortunate for posterity that he was inspired by Greek idealism to much of his greatest work, but in himself he remained the realist of the Western world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
trying to live in the terrible western world ... here where to love at all's to be a politician, as to love a poem is pretentious,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In everyone's youthful dreams, philosophy is still vaguely but inseparably, and with singular truth, associated with the East, nor... do after years discover its local habitation in the Western world. In comparison with the philosophers of the East, we may say that modern Europe has yet given birth to none.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »