Robert D. Kaplan Quotes
Travel is like a good challenging book: It demands presentness-the ability to live completely in the moment.
What happened on September 11th is at least, theoretically, small stuff compared to what can happen.
If you look at the history of the U.S., we were an empire long before we were a nation.
It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire - different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless.
Prostitution, black marketeering, and informing on ones neighbors and friends all had such a deep-rooted tradition in Romania that there was a charming naturalness and innocence about it.
The more dynamic the capitalistic expansion, the greater the disparity. It is from the disparity that we are going to get all the political upheaval for the next few years.
Wherever you have weakening states and turmoil, you will have a fertile petri dish for terrorism.
It is time to understand the environment for what it is: the national security issue of the early twenty-first century.
What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities? Is there a bad smell, a genius loci, something about the landscape that might incriminate?
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.
The first thing to recognize not just about Afghanistan but about any poor undeveloped country is that as big as it looks on the map, it's much bigger when you're there.
We talk a lot about individual rights, but in fact Americans are very willing to give up our individual rights if it means our property values will be protected, and so on.
Terrorism can go anywhere where there is not strong government, or government that cannot control its hinterlands.
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.
The Cold War went on for so long that it bred a kind of worldwide military establishment. Even when budgets went down in the early and mid-nineties, it didn't really affect it.
Americans are opting out of public venues like the playground and the sidewalk for private venues like the healthclub and the mall. We're living our lives inside one form of corporation or another.
Media organizations are global. They may be based in the U.S., but they're essentially global.
Even in the heart of America, if a small city is not connected in some demonstrable fashion to other continents, it is dead.