A Quote by Susan Sontag

Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).

Susan Sontag

Quote Topics

America Conservative Currently Demoralized Europe Even Extremely Intellectuals Joined North North America Rise Shaken Some Tendency Western Western Europe Which

Quote Author

Susan Sontag
American - Author
January 16, 1933 - December 28, 2004

So-called Western Civilization, as practised in half of Europe, some of Asia and a few parts of North America, is better than anything else available. Western civilization not only provides a bit of life, a pinch of liberty and the occasional pursuance of happiness, it's also the only thing that's ever tried to. Our civilization is the first in history to show even the slightest concern for average, undistinguished, none-too-commendable people like us.

P. J. O'Rourke

Scientists have always thought that because mammoths roamed such a huge territory - from Western Europe to Central North America - that North American woolly mammoths were a sideshow of no particular significance to the evolution of the species.

Hendrik Poinar

America was founded by intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations We might even say that America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.

Neil Postman

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

Susan Sontag

Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called the 'cities of the world', then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute 'the rural areas of the world'.

Lin Biao

There was this famous clash of civilization thesis from Samuel Huntington, a political theorist. And the idea was that Western civilization is at war with Islam and maybe some of the other civilizations around the world. And I don't agree with that. But I do think there is such a thing as Western civilization. I think it starts with the Greeks and the Romans. Then it goes through the Enlightenment - or the Reformation, the Enlightenment. It goes through the scientific age. And it somewhat defines some of the cultures and mores of Europe and North America and some other countries.

David Brooks

Western intellectuals, and also Third World intellectuals, were attracted to the Bolshevik counter-revolution because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine which says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.

Noam Chomsky

In North America and Western Europe, ten percent of the population of the world consumes fifty percent of its energy.

Yehuda Levi

The largest source of greenhouse gases in the coming decades will not be the US, Western Europe and Japan, but the developing economies of East Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. The coming eruption of carbon emissions from the poor world will dwarf any reductions in the North.

Ross Gelbspan

In Western Europe and North America some things are better than they were - at least relative to their moral nadirs - such as labour legislation, the opening of the professions to women, intolerance for domestic violence, but so much is still morally unacceptable - the weapons trade, cruel and unusual punishment, economic parasitism.

Catherine Wilson

Industrialized countries have disproportionately more cancers than countries with little or no industry (after adjusting for age and population size). One half of all the world's cancers occur in people living in industrialized countries, even though we are only one-fifth of the world's population. Closely tracking industrialization are breast cancer rates, which are highest in North America and northern Europe, intermediate in southern Europe and Latin America, and lowest in Asia and Africa.

Sandra Steingraber

Historians don't really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low.

Aldrich Ames

Intellectuals love Jefferson and hate markets, and intellectuals write most of the books. Intellectuals often think that they should, for the benefit of mankind, act as fiduciaries for the clods who don't have to be intellectuals, and I suspect that has to do with [why historians love Jefferson and not Hamilton, even though Hamilton's vision of America's commercial future was vastly more accurate than Jefferson's].

John Steele Gordon

Well, I think he's right to notice that there is a difference in attitudes and even in the broadest sense of world view between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. Which is old and which is new is an interesting question, and I almost think that maybe he's got it backwards.

Robert Kagan

The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition.

Kenzaburo Oe

It is not the actual greatness of national wealth, but its continual increase, which occasions a rise in the wages of labour. It is not, accordingly, in the richest countries, but in the most thriving, or in those which are growing rich the fastest, that the wages of labour are highest. England is certainly, in the present times, a much richer country than any part of North America. The wages of labour, however, are much higher in North America than in any part of England.

Adam Smith

A Quote by Susan Sontag

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors