Quotes from Stephen Kinzer

On December 4, 1972, President Salvador Allende of Chile told the United Nations General Assembly that his country would "no longer tolerate the subordination implied by having more than eighty percent of its exports in the hands of a small group of large foreign companies.

To kill weeds, you must pull them up at the roots

That substance was a paralytic poison called saxitoxin that can be extracted from infected shellfish. It is related to the algae that cause red tide and other waterborne infections. In a highly concentrated dose, like the one compounded at Fort Detrick, it can kill within seconds.

Life is not shaped by what happens to you but by how you react to what happens to you.

Until this episode, many Americans had believed that their soldiers were different from others, operating on a higher moral plane because their cause was good.

The day's most vivid exchanges were about a delicate but serious matter: the extreme foreignness of native Hawaiians. Both sides used racial arguments. Annexationists said the islanders' evident savagery made it urgent for a civilizing force to take their country and uplift them. Opponents countered that it would be madness to bring such savages into union with the United States, where they could corrupt white people.

In a ravenous fifty-five-day spasm during the summer of 1898, the United States asserted control over five far-flung lands with a total of 11 million inhabitants: Guam, Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Never in history has a nation leaped so suddenly to overseas empire. At

Countries that have the power to interfere in foreign lands almost always do so.

The main concern in Chile is that [Allende] can consolidate himself, and the picture projected to the world will be his success. . . . If we let the potential leaders in South America think they can move like Chile and have it both ways, we will be in trouble.

He was, as the novelist and muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair wrote, "willing by deliberate and shameful lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them to murderous war.

The revolution of 1893 and the annexation that followed undermined a culture and ended the life of a nation. Compared to what such operations have brought to other countries, though, this one ended well.

No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent.

Weyler, the brute, the devastator of haciendas, and the outrager of women . . . is pitiless, cold, an exterminator of men," ran one such account. "There is nothing to prevent his carnal, animal brain from running riot with itself in inventing tortures and infamies of bloody debauchery.

About 90 percent of the one billion Muslims in the world today identify with the Sunni tradition. Of the remainder, most are Shiites, the largest number of whom are in Iran.

It is cheering to find a newspaper of the great influence and circulation of the Journal that tells the facts as they exist, and ignores the suggestions of various kinds that emanate from sources that cannot be described as patriotic or loyal to the flag.

No offense to Iceland, but Latin America is where the fugitive leaker Edward Snowden should settle.

The fundamentals of what journalism is about don't necessarily change. What will change is the delivery of news.

It is never wise to discourage youthful idealism.

Many troubled Midwestern towns are grasping for ways to fend off decline and, in some cases, extinction.

From the 1920s into the 1940s, Britain's standard of living was supported by oil from Iran. British cars, trucks, and buses ran on cheap Iranian oil. Factories throughout Britain were fueled by oil from Iran. The Royal Navy, which projected British power all over the world, powered its ships with Iranian oil.

Castro has lived almost his entire life as a clandestine revolutionary. To such figures, truth is always malleable, always subservient to political goals.

Sultan Beyazid considered his father's art collection decadent and ordered it sold at auction.

Mexico needs schools, rural development, and an independent judiciary, not high-tech weaponry.

Canada, Australia and New Zealand have apologised for their treatment of native peoples.