Robert D. Kaplan Quotes

Travel is like a good challenging book: It demands presentness-the ability to live completely in the moment.

It is development, not poverty, that causes upheaval and terrorism.

It is time to understand the environment for what it is: the national security issue of the early twenty-first century.

A lot of the changes are so gradual that they don't even qualify as news, or even as interesting: they're so mundane that we just take them for granted. But history shows that it's the mundane changes that are more important than the dramatic 'newsworthy' events.

If you look at the history of the U.S., we were an empire long before we were a nation.

Wherever you have weakening states and turmoil, you will have a fertile petri dish for terrorism.

It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire - different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless.

The masses cannot ultimately be free: only the individual can be.

The first thing to recognize not just about Afghanistan but about any poor undeveloped country is that as big as it looks on the map, it's much bigger when you're there.

It is easy to be a moral perfectionist when one is politically unaccountable.

What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities? Is there a bad smell, a genius loci, something about the landscape that might incriminate?

While the foreign policy elite in Washington focuses on the 8,000 deaths in a conflict in Syria – half a world away from the United States – more than 47,000 people have died in drug-related violence since 2006 in Mexico. A deeply troubled state as well as a demographic and economic giant on the United States’ southern border, Mexico will affect America’s destiny in coming decades more than any state or combination of states in the Middle East.

The more dynamic the capitalistic expansion, the greater the disparity. It is from the disparity that we are going to get all the political upheaval for the next few years.

Bismarck's genius, as well as his great flaw, was the same as that of another outstanding nineteenth-century politician of the German-speaking world, Prince Clemens Metternich. Both men were artificers, able to hold off the future by building a fragile present out of pieces of the past.

We talk a lot about individual rights, but in fact Americans are very willing to give up our individual rights if it means our property values will be protected, and so on.

What happened on September 11th is at least, theoretically, small stuff compared to what can happen.

Terrorism can go anywhere where there is not strong government, or government that cannot control its hinterlands.