Zbigniew Brzezinski Quotes
-
If we slide into a pattern of just thinking about today, we'll end up reacting to yesterday instead of shaping something more constructive in the world.
-
The potential for regional conflict in the absence of an internationally active America is real.
-
Waging a colonial war in the post-colonial age is self-defeating.
-
America's decline would set in motion tectonic shifts undermining the political stability of the entire Middle East.
-
It is axiomatic that the security of America and Europe are linked.
-
If the United States and China can accommodate each other on a broad range of issues, the prospects for stability in Asia will be greatly increased.
-
In Iraq we must succeed. Failure is not an option.
-
The difference between the Bush I war against Iraq and the Bush II war against Iraq is that in the first one, we appealed to the sentiments and interests of the different groupings in the region and had them with us. In the second one, we did it on our own, on the basis of false premises, with extremely brutality and lack of political skill.
-
During the twentieth century, men fought on behalf of nationalism. Yet the wars they fought were also engendered by dislocations in world markets and by social revolution stimulated by the coming of the industrial age.
-
Americans must place greater emphasis on the more subtle dimensions of national power, such as innovation, education, the balance of force and diplomacy, and the quality of political leadership.
-
I have been struck by the pervasive frequency of pompously patriotic ads for the defense industry, usually accompanied by deferential salutations to our men and women who are heroically sacrificing their lives in our defense. Do we really need all of that for our security?
-
I realise that in an electoral campaign, you don't want to antagonise large groups which are highly motivated.
-
Can we really mobilize support, even of friends, when we tell them that if you are not with us you are against us?
-
History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.
-
Not to mention the fact that of course terrorists hate freedom. I think they do hate. But believe me, I don't think they sit there abstractly hating freedom.
-
We cannot have that relationship if we only dictate or threaten and condemn those who disagree.
-
A Russia that gradually begins to gravitate toward the West will also be a Russia that ceases to disrupt the international system.
-
The external Soviet empire lasted 45 years. It is shattered, beyond redemption or repair.
-
Because America is a democracy, public support for presidential foreign-policy decisions is essential.
-
Peace between Israel and Palestine would be a giant step toward greater regional stability, and it would finally let both Israelis and Palestinians benefit from the Middle East's growing wealth.
-
There's no point considering something which is very unrealistic.
-
There's something troubling about a condition in which one country alone, which has roughly 5 percent of the world's population, spends more than 50 percent of the world's defense budgets. There's something weird about it.
-
You go to Paris, or you go to Portugal, you go to Poland, and you ask, 'Who are you people?' They'll tell you, we're Portuguese, we're Spanish, we're Polish. Who are the people that are really European? The people in Brussels, in the E.U. bureaucracy. Europe has not been able to move to the level of patriotic identification with the concept.
-
America has exercised its power to insist on elections in Palestine, which Hamas did win. Once they won, we then engaged in a policy not only of ostracism, but by financial boycott, in effect of undermining it, and creating more tension and radicalism and poverty in Gaza, which was susceptible to exploitation by Hamas.