Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.
The Only cure for nihilism is for liberal democratic societies – their electorates, their judiciary, and their political leadership- to insist that force is legitimate only to the degree that it serves defensible poltical goals. Thus implies a constant exercise of due diligence...
There’s a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.
Those with a gift for action, for their part, often express contempt for those whose gifts are more reflective. Men of action like to say, Those who can, do, those who cant, teach, forgetting that those who teach get to write the history books.
Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill.
Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society.
Mr. Kaplan is the first traveler to take us on a journey to the jagged places where these tectonic plates meet, and his argument – that our future is being shaped far away ‘at the ends of the earth’ – makes his travelogue pertinent and compelling reading.
America’s entire war on terror is an exercise in imperialism. This may come as a shock to Americans, who don’t like to think of their country as an empire. But what else can you call America’s legions of soldiers, spooks and special forces straddling the globe?
Canadians want a country. They don’t want a community of communities. I’m committed to the national unity of the country.
Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.
There’s intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.
Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.
Cynics who say power is all that counts in politics forget that power without ideas is just improvisation.
The reason that the Croats want a state of their own is that they fear being cut into little pieces by the Serbs.
Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted.
How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?
To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war.
All war aims for impunity.
It’s good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.
There are lots of nations in the world or national peoples who don’t yet have states. They’re inside someone else’s state and they want a state of their own.
Living fearlessly is not the same as never being afraid. It’s good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.