Top 72 Robert D. Kaplan Quotes
#1. The revolution was a gift from God to the Romanian people. The Romanian people must now repay this gift by opening their hearts to people of all faiths, especially to those who suffered here in the past.
Robert D. Kaplan
#2. Even in the heart of America, if a small city is not connected in some demonstrable fashion to other continents, it is dead.
Robert D. Kaplan
#3. 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.
Robert D. Kaplan
#4. It is easy to be a moral perfectionist when one is politically unaccountable.
Robert D. Kaplan
#5. If you look at the history of the U.S., we were an empire long before we were a nation.
Robert D. Kaplan
#7. 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 physical conditions that resembled those in Africa.
Robert D. Kaplan
#8. it was the power of the military, and in particular that of the Air Force, which was the hidden hand that allowed universalist ideas to matter so much more than terrain and the historical experience of people living on it.
Robert D. Kaplan
#9. 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.
Robert D. Kaplan
#10. There are riches enough for all of us, no matter our abilities or circumstances. It is only the inspiration that requires summoning.
Robert D. Kaplan
#11. The United States was a great power less because of its ideas than because, with direct access to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it was "the most favored state in the world from the point of view of location.
Robert D. Kaplan
#12. Likewise, democracy in Saudi Arabia is potentially our enemy.
Robert D. Kaplan
#13. democracy that cannot control its own population may be worse for human rights than a dictatorship that can.
Robert D. Kaplan
#14. of ocean, around the North Pole there is an ocean surrounded by a near-unbroken
Robert D. Kaplan
#15. 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 take them for granted. But history shows that it's the mundane changes that are more important than the dramatic 'newsworthy' events.
Robert D. Kaplan
#16. 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. Both men were artificers, able to hold off the future by building a fragile present out of pieces of the past.
Robert D. Kaplan
#17. 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.
Robert D. Kaplan
#19. It was the union of Franks, Goths, and Roman provincials against these Asiatics that produced the basis for modern France.
Robert D. Kaplan
#20. China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) sees U.S. battle networks - "which rely heavily on satellites and the Internet to identify targets, coordinate attacks, guide 'smart bombs' and more" - as its "Achilles' heel.
Robert D. Kaplan
#21. When Erdogan assumed control, he gave power to a wave of Islamism, strengthened by Ozal, that had been creeping back into Turkish life under the radar screen of official Kemalism.
Robert D. Kaplan
#22. Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Robert D. Kaplan
#23. And believe me, there is nobody who hates Communism more than a former Communist.
Robert D. Kaplan
#24. It is the freedom to concentrate military equipment in key locations around the world that has preserved American military might.
Robert D. Kaplan
#25. You don't grow up gradually. You grow up in short bursts at pivotal moments, by suddenly realizing how ignorant and immature you are.
Robert D. Kaplan
#26. state's position on the map is the first thing that defines it, more than its governing philosophy even.
Robert D. Kaplan
#27. Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers "is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks today,
Robert D. Kaplan
#28. Wherever you have weakening states and turmoil, you will have a fertile petri dish for terrorism.
Robert D. Kaplan
#29. In Iraq, order, even of totalitarian dimensions, turned out to be more humane than the lack of order that followed.
Robert D. Kaplan
#30. Since then, as the Chinese navy becomes larger and more wide-ranging, the bent toward Mahan has only intensified in Beijing, especially with the rise of Indian sea power, which the Chinese fear; the Indians, for their part, view the Chinese in similar Mahanian terms.
Robert D. Kaplan
#31. 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.
Robert D. Kaplan
#32. The masses cannot ultimately be free: only the individual can be.
Robert D. Kaplan
#33. That technology has canceled geography contains just enough merit to be called a plausible fallacy,
Robert D. Kaplan
#34. 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.
Robert D. Kaplan
#35. liberalism and democracy, with all of their limitations, are what remains after every utopia and extremist scheme based on blood and territory has been exposed and shattered by reality.
Robert D. Kaplan
#36. It is time to understand the environment for what it is: the national security issue of the early twenty-first century.
Robert D. Kaplan
#37. Hungary shares more than it may like to admit with its former Warsaw Pact allies Romania and Bulgaria. Fischer explained that despite its economic progress, Hungary still cannot easily escape its past:
Robert D. Kaplan
#38. Since the security benefits of hegemony are enormous" in an anarchic system in which there is no world hegemon, "powerful states will invariably be tempted to emulate the United States and try to dominate their region of the world."15
Robert D. Kaplan
#39. Grand strategy is about marrying ends to means, about doing what you can, consistent with the nation's capabilities and resources.
Robert D. Kaplan
#40. The search for power is not made for the achievement of moral values; moral values are used to facilitate the attainment of power.
Robert D. Kaplan
#41. 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.
Robert D. Kaplan
#42. Ivan showed that in his time and place the only antidote to chaos was absolutism.
Robert D. Kaplan
#43. What happened on September 11th is at least, theoretically, small stuff compared to what can happen.
Robert D. Kaplan
#44. Media organizations are global. They may be based in the U.S., but they're essentially global.
Robert D. Kaplan
#45. 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.
Robert D. Kaplan
#46. Here is America Now: smoke, greasy fumes, the friction of tire rubber, the memory of terrifying refineries with their rubbery rotten-egg smells.
Robert D. Kaplan
#47. Realists value order above freedom: for them the latter becomes important only after the former has been established.
Robert D. Kaplan
#48. China is able to feed 23 percent of the world's population from 7 percent of the arable land - "by crowding some 2,000 human beings onto each square mile of cultivated earth in the valleys and flood plains," as Fairbank points out.
Robert D. Kaplan
#49. Mass education, because it produces hosts of badly educated people liberated from fatalism, will contribute to instability (p. 123).
Robert D. Kaplan
#50. Travel is like a good challenging book: It demands presentness-the ability to live completely in the moment.
Robert D. Kaplan
#51. It is development, not poverty, that causes upheaval and terrorism.
Robert D. Kaplan
#52. 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.
Robert D. Kaplan
#53. The threat to Europe comes not in the form of uniforms, but in the tattered garb of refugees,
Robert D. Kaplan
#54. The United States fought against the prospect of a Vietnam unified by the communist North. But once that unification became fact, the new and enlarged Vietnamese state became a much greater threat to communist China than to the United States. Such can be the ironies of history. Champa,
Robert D. Kaplan
#55. Geography and history demonstrate that we can never discount Russia. Russia's partial resurgence in our own age following the dissolution of the Soviet Empire is part of an old story. Russia
Robert D. Kaplan
#56. 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.
Robert D. Kaplan
#58. Without the Indian Subcontinent, in other words, there could not have been a Vietnam in any cultural or aesthetic sense.
Robert D. Kaplan
#59. The historian John Keegan explains that America and Britain could champion freedom only because the sea protected them "from the landbound enemies of liberty.
Robert D. Kaplan
#60. When you talk about aiding this country against that country or about fighting terrorism, when you actually take that decision and strip it down, it always comes down to one person in the field giving specialized training to somebody else in the field.
Robert D. Kaplan
#61. Statesmen can strive for the universal values of justice, fairness, and tolerance, but only so far as they do not interfere with the quest for power, which to him is synonymous with survival.
Robert D. Kaplan
#62. 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 something about us very different from what we think.
Robert D. Kaplan
#63. 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.
Robert D. Kaplan
#64. Whereas devotees of globalization stress what unifies humankind, traditional realists stress what divides us.
Robert D. Kaplan
#65. The closer one gets to either the eastern or the southern fringe of the German-speaking world-the closer one gets, in other words, to the threatening and more numerous Slavs-the more insecure and dangerous nationalism becomes.
Robert D. Kaplan
#66. 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 attack or you have a nuclear explosion in the air that is not a test somewhere. Those are still the biggest threats out there.
Robert D. Kaplan
#67. 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?
Robert D. Kaplan
#68. What Americans can't face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War was the fact that Nixon and Kissinger went on bombing despite public reaction.
Robert D. Kaplan
#69. Huntington argues that it is a partial truth, not a total truth, that America is a nation of immigrants; America is a nation of Anglo-Protestant settlers and immigrants both, with the former providing the philosophical and cultural backbone of the society.
Robert D. Kaplan
#70. As Napoleon said, to know a nation's geography is to know its foreign policy
Robert D. Kaplan
#71. As Morgenthau points out, small- and medium-sized states like Israel, Great Britain, France, and Iran cannot absorb the same level of punishment as continental-sized states such as the United States, Russia, and China, so that they lack the requisite credibility in their nuclear threats.
Robert D. Kaplan
#72. Terrorism can go anywhere where there is not strong government, or government that cannot control its hinterlands.
Robert D. Kaplan
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