Quotes from Robert D. Kaplan

You will see, philosophical values will fade away in your country, too. To advance themselves, politicians will increasingly claim beliefs that they don't actually possess. Values are a reflection of the soul. And as souls fade, people no longer need values. Souls fade gradually because of the substitution of the inner imagination by technology: smartphones, intelligent toys, the array of electronics at malls, all make soulful intelligence less necessary.

Oman is an example of how globalization at its best is built on vigorous localisms that can survive the onslaught of destructive commercial forces.

The United States is not overdeployed or overextended with deployments in 150 countries on any given year. On any given week we have about 65 deployments.

Wherever you have weakening states and turmoil, you will have a fertile petri dish for terrorism.

If you travel around America you see different sections of highways donated by this or that person, and that's a slow beginning of what may end up being a situation common in the Third World: some sections of highways in wealthy areas are beautifully maintained and other parts are just dirt-strewn potholes.

The most important thing I learned as a foreign correspondent in about 80 countries is that it takes a very shallow knowledge of history to think that there are solutions to most problems.

You don't grow up gradually. You grow up in short bursts at pivotal moments, by suddenly realizing how ignorant and immature you are.

As Napoleon said, to know a nation's geography is to know its foreign policy

There are riches enough for all of us, no matter our abilities or circumstances. It is only the inspiration that requires summoning.

Romania was an original mix: a population that looked Italian but wore the expressions of Russian peasants; an architectural backdrop that often evoked France and Central Europe; and service and physical conditions that resembled those in Africa.

Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Mass education, because it produces hosts of badly educated people liberated from fatalism, will contribute to instability (p. 123).

Books that have been owned by someone for many years for a specific purpose carry not just memories, (that is obvious), they also reveal their owner's true values; for the books we own may indicate something about us very different from what we think.

Geography and history demonstrate that we can never discount Russia. Russia's partial resurgence in our own age following the dissolution of the Soviet Empire is part of an old story. Russia

Ivan showed that in his time and place the only antidote to chaos was absolutism.

The train passed through a series of tunnels. Because the overhead light fixtures had no bulbs in them, some people lit candles inside the tunnels, which dramatically illuminated their black, liquid eyes. There was a solemn, almost devotional cynicism to these eyes, reflecting, as though by a genetic process, all of the horrors witnessed by generation upon generation of forebears.

Macedonia, the inspiration for the French word for "mixed salad" (macedoine), defines the principle illness of the Balkans: conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that is borders revert to where they were at the exact time when its own empire had reached its zenith of ancient medieval expansion.

As Morgenthau points out, small- and medium-sized states like Israel, Great Britain, France, and Iran cannot absorb the same level of punishment as continental-sized states such as the United States, Russia, and China, so that they lack the requisite credibility in their nuclear threats.

Like serious reading itself, travel has now become an act of resistance against the distractions of the electronic age, and against all the worries that weigh us down, thanks to that age. A good book deserves to be finished, just as a haunting landscape tempts further experience of it, and further research into it. Travel and serious reading, because they demand sustained focus, stand athwart the nonexistent attention spans that deface our current time on Earth.

democracy that cannot control its own population may be worse for human rights than a dictatorship that can.

Realists value order above freedom: for them the latter becomes important only after the former has been established.

Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers "is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks today

The EU gave both political support and quotidian substance to the values inherent in NATO—those values being, generally, the rule of law over arbitrary fiat, legal states over ethnic nations, and the protection of the individual no matter his race or religion. Democracy, after all, is less about elections than about impartial institutions.

liberalism and democracy, with all of their limitations, are what remains after every utopia and extremist scheme based on blood and territory has been exposed and shattered by reality.