Michael Mandelbaum Quotes

One thing worse than an America that is too strong, the world will learn, is an America that is too weak.

People do not change when you tell them they should; they change when they tell themselves they must.

Let me remind you all that the first task of American foreign policy is to reduce threats to the United States.

The real threat to world stability is not too much American power. It is too little American power.

While analogies are useful, however, they can also be misleading. They smuggle in assumptions that can be wrong.

Certainly, protecting oppressed people, stopping ethnic conflict and promoting responsible governance are worthy goals. But none is as important for American security and prosperity as keeping the peace in the Middle East, Europe and East Asia.

The United States doesn't do what it does in the world for altruistic reasons. Nobody set out to be the world's government.

First of all, the world criticizes American foreign policy because Americans criticize American foreign policy. We shouldn't be surprised about that. Criticizing government is a God-given right - at least in democracies.

American power confers benefits on most inhabitants of the planet, even on many who dislike it and some who actively oppose it, because the United States plays a major, constructive, and historically unprecedented role in the world.

In my experience, it's not just that serious books get a hearing on comedy shows. But serious books get a serious hearing, as well as a funny one, on comedy shows.

The American empire will not disappear... because America does not have an empire.

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

The government can give citizens opportunity and it's their responsibility to take advantage of it.

All policy is a matter of gains and losses, upsides and downsides.

The values, the programs, the formula, the determination, and the patriotism responsible for America's past success are still here to be tapped.

The main division in the world is between democratic and undemocratic countries.

The less oil the world uses, the less important the region that has so much of it becomes.

The American political system is so porous, it's so open, it's so frustrating for those who are trying to make policy.

If architecture is, as is sometimes said, music set in concrete, then football and basketball may be said to be creativity embodied in team sports.

Football is controlled violence, but it is violence, which people have loved to watch since the gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome.

Great wars can only be fought by great powers.

The windfall of great riches can, if mismanaged, make things worse, not better, for the recipients.

Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.

To call the American role in the world imperial was, for many who did so, a way of asserting that the United States was misusing its power beyond its borders and, in so doing, subverting its founding political principles within them.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, were spectacular, riveting, grim, costly and searing. The shock that they caused reverberated throughout the world. What happened in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania ended the lives of thousands of people and changed the lives of many more. But they did not change the world.