Quotes from Samuel P. Huntington

The European powers make it clear that they do not want a Muslim state, Turkey, in the European Union and are not happy about having a second Muslim state, Bosnia, on the European continent.

Like the Chinese, the Japanese see international politics as hierarchical because their domestic politics are.

When asked in 1994, for instance, which nation would have the greatest influence in Asia in the twenty-first century, 44 percent of the Japanese public said China, 30 percent said the United States, and only 16 percent said Japan.42 Japan, as one high Japanese official predicted in 1995, will have the "discipline" to adapt to the rise of China. He then asked whether the United States would. His initial proposition is plausible; the answer to his subsequent question is uncertain.

In wars between cultures, culture loses.

Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.

We Americans" face a substantive problem of national identity epitomized by the subject of this sentence. Are we a "we," one people or several? If we are a "we," what distinguishes us from the "thems" who are not us? Race, religion, ethnicity, values, culture, wealth, politics, or what?

To describe America as a "nation of immigrants" is to stretch a partial truth into a misleading falsehood, and to ignore the central fact of America's beginning as a society of settlers.

Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilization.

In Xinjiang, Uighurs and other Muslim groups struggle against Sinification and are developing relations with their ethnic and religious kin in the former Soviet republics.

Rich, modern countries have common traits that make them different from poor, traditional countries, which also share common traits. Differences in wealth can lead to conflict between societies, but the evidence suggests that this mainly occurs when rich and powerful societies try to conquer and colonize poor and traditional societies.

America's core culture has been and, at the moment, is still primarily the culture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers who founded American society. The central elements of that culture can be defined in a variety of ways but include the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English language, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music.

A more persuasive factor possibly explaining both intra- and extra-Islamic conflict is the absence of one or more core states in Islam.

For the present, can Taiwan remain democratic without becoming formally independent? In the future could Taiwan be democratic without remaining actually independent?

At the micro level, the most violent fault lines are between Islam and its Orthodox, Hindu, African, and Western Christian neighbors. At the macro level, the dominant division is between "the West and the rest," with the most intense conflicts occurring between Muslim and Asian societies on the one hand, and the West on the other.

The collapse of this ideology in the Soviet Union and its substantial adaptation in China and Vietnam does not, however, necessarily mean that these societies will import the other Western ideology of liberal democracy. Westerners who assume that it does are likely to be surprised by the creativity, resilience, and individuality of non-Western cultures.

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

Some Westerners […] have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.

Expectations should not always be taken as reality; because you never know when you will be disappointed.

Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.

Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.

Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.

Arabs and other Muslims generally agreed that Saddam Hussein might be a bloody tyrant, but, paralleling FDR's thinking, "he is our bloody tyrant." In their view, the invasion was a family affair to be settled within the family and those who intervened in the name of some grand theory of international justice were doing so to protect their own selfish interests and to maintain Arab subordination to the west.

People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against.

Collective will supplants individual whim