Robert Kagan Quotes

#1. So at a young age I learned that if I wanted to spend time with my dad, it was going to be under the hood or beneath a car, handing him greasy tools.

Jewel E. Ann

#2. Foreign policy is like hitting a baseball: if you fail 70 percent of the time, you go to the Hall of Fame.

Robert Kagan

#3. Is it any wonder that I absent-mindedly take the entrance marked Aliens Only whenever I enter?

Lawrence Durrell

#4. If you live your life scared of what other people think, then you will always be miserable.

John Goode

#5. Will we ever reach a point when it is no longer necessary to say Them and Us? I believe we must reach that point, or perish.

Margaret Laurence

#6. Well, I think he's right to notice that there is a difference in attitudes and even in the broadest sense of world view between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. Which is old and which is new is an interesting question, and I almost think that maybe he's got it backwards.

Robert Kagan

#7. I believe it is still true that conflicts among major powers usually stem from geopolitical rivalries but rarely from economic competition.

Robert Kagan

#8. The thing that I would say is that U.S. power is not eternal. I am not saying that it won't come to an end. Because it will.

Robert Kagan

#9. Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment.

Thomas Szasz

#10. When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails.

Robert Kagan

#11. If you're bored, you don't know the real God.

Karen Wheaton

#12. I left Russia in 1993 optimistic that democracy had taken hold despite the obstacles.

Robert Kagan

#13. Go your ways! and let the people and peoples go theirs!- gloomy ways, verily, on which not a single hope glints any more!

Friedrich Nietzsche

#14. I don't think I'd seen anything like 'The Killing.'

David Hewson

#15. If a caterpillar doesn't know its future has wings, it hardly experiences itself as land-bound.

Robert Kagan

#16. Britain has taken itself out as a major player in the international system, at least for a while, with the kind of cuts that they've made in their national security budget.

Robert Kagan

#17. I think most Americans believe that although it's better not to use military force if you can avoid it, that the world simply doesn't provide us the luxury of giving away military force as an important tool of foreign policy.

Robert Kagan

#18. I want to be your husband, Lucy. I want to be the guy who carries your bag, and holds your hand and sits next to you on planes. I want to be the one who supports you in your career and in your life. The man who loves you through thick and thin. And I'm hoping you'll say yes to being my wife.

Renee Rose

#19. It is true that I have known Straussians almost all my life. And the one thing I was taught about them from the earliest age is that they are wrong.

Robert Kagan

#20. In my view, America has never had the opportunity to enter paradise. Europe enjoys the paradise it enjoys, in part because the United States provides the overall security that allows Europe to live in a system where military power is not a major issue.

Robert Kagan

#21. I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing. There are others, which, one must suppose, opponents of birth control would prefer.

Bertrand Russell

#22. Obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find - and there will be plenty.

Robert Kagan

#23. In the end, I hope there's a little note somewhere that says I designed a good computer.

Steve Wozniak

#24. There are people who live their entire lives and never know this kind of love.

Kelly Braffet

#25. I wish there was some method to transform all the agony in my imprudent heart to an energy source. It would have lit up the world till eternity!!!

Alcatraz Dey

#26. The reason we think that computer graphics technology has succeeded in faking reality is that we, over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, have come to accept the image of photography and film as reality.

Lev Manovich

#27. Under our Constitution, military leaders have no choice but to endorse the president's decision after giving him their best advice.

Robert Kagan

#28. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways.

Robert Kagan

#29. Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus: they agree on little and understand each other less and less.

Robert Kagan

#30. She laughed so sweet and loud and long it sounded like a bell, a harp, a song.

Patrick Rothfuss

#31. Based on all criteria - military power, economic influence, cultural dominance - America remains number one, even though other, new players are increasingly challenging it in that role.

Robert Kagan