Robert D. Kaplan Quotes

26 quotes in 507 categories

• It is development, not poverty, that causes upheaval and terrorism.
• 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…
• 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…
• What Americans cant face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War…
• Wherever you have weakening states and turmoil, you will have a fertile petri dish for terrorism.
• 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…
• Bismarck's genius, as well as his great flaw, was the same as that of another outstanding nineteenth-century politician of the German-speaking world, Prince Clemens Metternich.…
• While the foreign policy elite in Washington focuses on the 8,000 deaths in a conflict in Syria – half a world away from the United…
• 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…
• 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…
• Travel is like a good challenging book: It demands presentness-the ability to live completely in the moment.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• A lot of the changes are so gradual that they don't even qualify as news, or even as interesting: they're so mundane that we just…
• Given the level of anti-Americanism in the world, given the level of frustration with the United States throughout the Muslim world, you've got a homegrown…
• If you look at the history of the U.S., we were an empire long before we were a nation.
• Media organizations are global. They may be based in the U.S., but they're essentially global.
• Terrorism can go anywhere where there is not strong government, or government that cannot control its hinterlands.
• 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,…

Browse Robert D. Kaplan Quotes by Category