America doesn't border on Muslim countries. European countries do and that seems to be a fundamental difference.
Collective will supplants individual whim.
Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.
Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.
Democracy is premised, in some measure, on majority rule, and democracy is difficult in a situation of concentrated inequalities in which a large, impoverished majority confronts a small, wealthy oligarchy.
Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.
Expectations should not always be taken as reality; because you never know when you will be disappointed.
Global politics remains extremely complex and countries have different interests, which will also lead them to make what might seem as rather bizarre friends and allies.
I think clearly the United States, as well as other western nations, should stand by their commitments to human rights and democracy and should try to influence other countries to move in that direction.
If one of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence came back today, he would not be surprised about what Americans were saying and believing and articulating in their public statements. It would all sound rather familiar.
In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.
Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.
It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.
Many more people in the world are concerned with sports than with human rights.
Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations.
Nationalism is a central ideology for people who are trying to establish their own states in which they can play a dominant role.
Partial truths or half-truths are often more insidious than total falsehoods.
People have multiple identities.
Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.
Religiosity distinguishes America from most other Western societies. Americans are also overwhelmingly Christian, which distinguishes them from many non-Western peoples. Their religiosity leads Americans to see the world in terms of good and evil to a much greater extent than most other peoples.
The argument now that the spread of pop culture and consumer goods around the world represents the triumph of Western civilization trivializes Western culture. The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former.
The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.
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