Quotes from Francis Fukuyama

If modern science made possible weapons of unprecedented destructiveness like the machine gun and the bomber, modern politics created a state of unprecedented power, for which a new word, totalitarianism, had to be coined.

A lot of historical writing has been characterized as ODTAA—"one damn thing after another"—without an effort to extract general rules or causal theories that can be applied in other circumstances.

Imagination is a very scarce resource, and also a highly imperfect one, because thinking about things that have not happened is inherently more difficult than thinking about things that have.

Fin de siècle Vienna was a melting pot that had produced Gustav Mahler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Sigmund Freud. But when the empire's narrower national identities—Serbs, Bulgarians, Czechs, and Austro-Germans—asserted themselves, the region descended into a paroxysm of violence and intolerance.

The desire to pass resources on to kin is one of the most enduring constants in human politics.

Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise.

The opinion that the survival of Islam itself depended on the use of military slavery was shared by the great Arab historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun, who lived in North Africa in the fourteenth century, contemporaneously with the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt.

Some people today argue that religion is primarily a source of violence, conflict, and social discord. Historically, however, religion has played the opposite role: it is a source of social cohesion that permits human beings to cooperate far more widely and securely than they would if they were the simple rational and self-interested agents posited by the economists.

By breaking the link between individual effort and reward, collectivization undermined incentives to work, leading to mass famines in Russia and China, and severely reducing agricultural productivity.

Societies are not trapped by their pasts and freely borrow ideas and institutions from each other.

To truly esteem oneself means that one must be capable of feeling shame or self-disgust when one does not live up to a certain standard

It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master

Perhaps when you're young you think that something must be profound just because it is difficult and you don't have the self-confidence to say 'this is just nonsense

Human beings are rule-following animals by nature; they are born to conform to the social norms they see around them, and they entrench those rules with often transcendent meaning and value. When the surrounding environment changes and new challenges arise, there is often a disjunction between existing institutions and present needs. Those institutions are supported by legions of entrenched stakeholders who oppose any fundamental change.

The nation will continue to be a central pole of identification, even if more and more nations come to share common economic and political forms of organization.

Most people living in rich, stable developed countries have no idea how Denmark itself got to be Denmark—something that is true for many Danes as well. The struggle to create modern political institutions was so long and so painful that people living in industrialized countries now suffer from a historical amnesia regarding how their societies came to that point in the first place.

For Hegel , by contrast, liberal society is a reciprocal and equal agreement among citizens to mutually recognize each other

National identity is frequently formed in deliberate opposition to other groups and therefore serves to perpetuate conflict.

In societies where incomes and educational levels are low, it is often far easier to get supporters to the polls based on a promise of an individual benefit rather than a broad programmatic agenda.

What Asia's postwar economic miracle demonstrates is that capitalism is a path toward economic development that is potentially available to all countries. No underdeveloped country in the Third World is disadvantaged simply because it began the growth process later than Europe, nor are the established industrial powers capable of blocking the development of a latecomer, provided that country plays by the rules of economic liberalism.

By contrast, people who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and regulations, which have to be negotiated, agreed to, litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive means. This legal apparatus, serving as a substitute for trust, entails what economists call "transaction costs." Widespread distrust in a society, in other words, imposes a kind of tax on all forms of economic activity, a tax that high-trust societies do not have to pay.

the struggle to replace "tribal" politics with a more impersonal form of political relationships continues in the twenty-first century.

The left continued to be defined by its passion for equality, but that agenda shifted from its earlier emphasis on the conditions of the working class to the often psychological demands of an ever-widening circle of marginalized groups.

In general, Americans are not very good at nation-building and not very good colonialists.