Quotes from Robert D Kaplan

If the evidence did not exist right in front of him, it didn't exist, period. And following from that would come his belief in the essential wisdom of the common person, who also knew the world only from the grassroots level in the most immediate, concrete way.

He simply trusted people at the bottom, like the plant managers in the Midwest—for whom economics were never abstract—and distrusted people at the top.

To him, refugees were people at the end of the chain of events that had begun with decisions made by those at the top and the beginning of the chain.

Gersony was to become the ultimate fieldworker: in continuous, tactile contact with the evidence. And he would let the evidence—rather than theories, of which he knew nothing—always drive his conclusions.

Of course, there is often nothing worse than war and violent death. But a truism that bears repeating is that peace, as a primary goal, is dangerous because it implies that you will sacrifice any principle for the sake of it.