Realists value order above freedom: for them the latter becomes important only after the former has been established.
Morgenthau begins his argument by noting that the world is the result of forces inherent in human nature. And, human nature, as Thucydides pointed out, is motivated by fear ( phobos ), self-interest (...
Mass education, because it produces hosts of badly educated people liberated from fatalism, will contribute to instability (p. 123).
Lincoln had risen to this pinnacle through migration, self-education, and hard work.
If rationalism and secularism have taken us so far that we can no longer imagine what Phidippides saw, then we are incapable of understanding—and consequently defending ourselves against—religious mov...
For two thousand years, the closer to Carthage (roughly the site of modern-day Tunis) the greater the level of development. Because urbanization in Tunisia started two millennia ago, tribal identity b...
Check the list of the world’s most feeble economies and note the high proportion that are landlocked. 20 Note how tropical countries (those located between 23.45 degrees north and south latitudes) are...
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 so...
America is learning an ironic truth of empire: You endure by not fighting every battle. In the first century A.D., Tiberius preserved Rome by not interfering in bloody internecine conflicts beyond its...
The United States is virtually an island nation bordered by two oceans and the thinly peopled Canadian Arctic to the north. Only to its south is it threatened by the forces of Mexican demography.)
What destroyed the Indian was not primarily political greed, land hunger, or military power, not the white man’s germs or the white man’s rum. What destroyed him was the manufactured products of a cul...
Today, despite the jet and information age, 90 percent of global commerce and two thirds of all petroleum supplies travel by sea.
There is still the EU, but also individual states, regions, and city-states, with liberalism barely holding off the forces of populist nationalism. To say that this does not undermine the strength of...
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 e...
Suppose I am told that a certain sample of wheat comes from Lahore, and that I do not know where Lahore is. I look it out in the gazetteer and ascertain that it is the capital of the Punjab.… If I kno...
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 physi...
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...
Jews, Gypsies, Kurds, and other minorities were generally safe within autocratic regimes such as Habsburg Austria and Ottoman Turkey but were killed or oppressed when these autocracies began giving bi...
Ivan showed that in his time and place the only antidote to chaos was absolutism.
In 1945, there were 20,000 mosques in Turkey; in 1985, 72,000, and that number has since risen steadily, out of proportion to the population.