Zbigniew Brzezinski Quotes
-
An arc of crisis stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries.
-
Without Ukraine, Russia's imperial aspirations are essentially nostalgia, but it's not a real policy.
-
Persisting social crisis, the emergence of a charismatic personality, and the exploitation of mass media to obtain public confidence would be the steppingstones in the piecemeal transformation of the United States into a highly controlled society.
-
The scope of America's global hegemony is admittedly great, but its depth is shallow, limited by both domestic and external restraints.
-
The Eastern Europeans invested too many of their hopes in the notion that somehow or other the missile shield, even if directed at Iran, would reinforce their security links with the U.S. vis-à-vis Russia.
-
The United States is prepared really to be engaged in the quest to get people in the world the dignities that they seek today, the social justice that they feel they're deprived of, and the common solution to global problems.
-
...'world peace' imposed by a dominant power assisted by a few partners is unlikely... only world peace driven by a recognition of the threat to everyone's survival is the most likely source of salvation...
-
We have a large public that is very ignorant about world affairs and very susceptible to simplistic slogans by candidates who appear out of nowhere, have no track record, but mouth appealing slogans.
-
Benchmarks are targets that have to be fulfilled. They cannot be fulfilled in an indefinite period of time, so there are timetables in benchmarks.
-
The American people have to think hard about their definition of the meaning of the good life, that hedonistic, materialistic society of high levels of consumption, increasing social inequality is not a society that can be part of the solution of the world's problems.
-
Sometimes in international politics, the better part of wisdom is to defer dangers rather than try to eliminate them altogether instantly.
-
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.
-
In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.
-
However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.
-
As in all things, it is terribly important to have a sense of priorities in what you do. And to make certain that priorities do not clash.
-
The momentum of Asia's economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.
-
The Israelis have a lot of influence with Congress, and in some cases they are able to buy influence.
-
Iraq may have been a preview of that, but it's still redeemable if we get out fast. In a war with Iran, we'll get dragged down for 20 or 30 years. The world will condemn us. We will lose our position in the world.
-
I have no patience for those in the American Jewish community who just go around slandering people as anti-Semites without realizing that what they're doing is really trivializing anti-Semitism.
-
If a new president personalizes a rather different concept of America and a different sense of America's mission in the world than has been the case with president George W. Bush, then that almost automatically will help to improve America's global image. But the tangibles involving the war and the economy are not going to be easy to fix.
-
Our world is integrated to an unprecedented degree, while the global political awakening is injecting into interstate relations an intense amount of tension, emotion, even irrationality, which could cumulatively produce circumstances that preclude an effective and genuinely shared universal response to new global problems.
-
The Israelis have taken a lot of security measures which reduce significantly the ability of Iran to inflict truly severe pain in Israel. But America is vulnerable with 100,000 troops in Iraq and more than half of that in Afghanistan, and we depend heavily on access to Middle Eastern oil. We're sitting targets for debilitating Iranian retaliation.
-
In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last.
-
The Israelis are becoming increasingly like the white supremacist South Africans, viewing the Palestinians as a lower form of life, not hesitating to kill a great many of them and justifying this on the grounds that they are being the objects of terrorism, which is true.