A Quote by Eric Hoffer

The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.
It's a warm wind, the west wind, full of birds' cries; I never hear the west wind but tears are in my eyes. For it comes from the west lands, the old brown hills, And April's in the West wind, and daffodils.
A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaningless of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring upon them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.
I think, Russia is pushing against the West in general, not just the United States but the institutions of the West, the key governments in the West using a variety of tools, as well as military assault on Ukraine.
Every step by which an individual substitutes concerted action for isolated action results in an immediate and recognizable improvement in his conditions. The advantages derived from peaceful cooperation and division of labor are universal.
We must stop posing as victims of the West and behaving negatively towards the West. We must participate with the West on an equal footing in the reconstruction of the world.
I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single State. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.
Maybe we need to start with the rethinking of what is "west" and what is "non-west." It seems to me that there are any number of populations who already cross that divide, and we could probably point to several existing states that belong exclusively neither to one category nor to the other. Do we use these terms to designate geographical realities, geopolitical ones, or perhaps sites of power, exploitation, orientalism that move through space and time in ways that have to be tracked historically.
Prior to the advent of the civilization of the Third Estate (mercantilism, capitalism), the social ethics that was religiously sanctioned in the West consisted in realizing one’s being and in achieving one’s own perfection within the fixed parameters that one’s individual nature and the group to which one belonged clearly defined. Economic activity, work, and profit were justified only in the measure in which they were necessary for sustenance and to ensure the dignity of an existence conformed to one’s own estate, without the lower instinct of self-interest or profit coming first.
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense, and 'cathedral-like' structure of the highly educated and articulate personality--a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) there placement of complex inner density with a new kind of self--evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the 'instantly available.'
The American West is just arriving at the threshold of its greatness and growth. Where the West of yesterday is glamorized in our fiction, the future of the American West now is both fabulous and factual.
The West has never been all of the world that matters. The West has not been the only actor on the stage of modern history even at the peak of the West's power (and this peak has perhaps now already been passed)... It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it has been the world that has been hit - and hit hard - by the West.
The West appears to have decided for the Ukrainian people what their choice is. The EU does not condemn violent actions in Ukraine which are punishable in the West.
It was because of my great interest in the West, and my belief that its development would be assisted by the interest I could awaken in others, that I decided to bring the West to the East through the medium of the Wild West Show.
White guilt morally and culturally disarms the West. It makes the First World apologetic. And this, of course, only inflames the narcissism of the ineffectual.
The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. When you reach the line which marks that drop - for convenience, the one hundredth meridian - you have reached the West.
Christianity brought something new and revolutionary: freedom and unconditional dignity for each individual, regardless of his religion, culture or nationality. But the East and the West have parted ways since the Crusades.
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