Quotes from Immanuel Wallerstein

We can tentatively credit capitalist civilization with a positive, if very geographically uneven, record in the struggle against disease.

The real threat to U.S. military power is nuclear proliferation, because if every little country has nuclear weapons it becomes very tricky for the United States to engage in military action.

The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thiswordliness.

I am suggesting that there is, and always has been, a rather high correlation between ethnicity and occupation/economic role throughout the various time-space zones of historical capitalism.

This argument has been codified in the twentieth century as meritocracy, in which those on top in the process of capitalist accumulation have merited their position.

Uncertainty is wondrous, and.. certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death.

People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must.

The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thiswordliness.

La science sociale di XIXe siecle nous a legue un terrible heritage, l'idee que els processus se divisent en trois champs separes: le politique, l'economique et le socioculturel.

Far from being Eurocentric, my analysis "exoticizes" Europe. Europe is historically aberrant. In some ways this was a historical accident, not entirely Europe's fault. But, in any case, it is nothing about which Europe should boast. Perhaps Europe and the world will one day be cured of this terrible malady with which Europe (and through Europe the world) has been afflicted.

Imagination is usually nothing but the search for middle run profits by those to whom short run channels are blocked. When

Estar en la cumbre es estar seguro de que el futuro no será nuestro por mucho que el presente lo sea, pero no deja de ser bello.

I rather wish to rest my case on material considerations, not those of the social future but those of the actual historical period of the capitalist world-economy.