Michael Mandelbaum Quotes

Societies raise their grandest monuments to what their cultures value most highly. As the tallest buildings in a city noted for tall buildings, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were certainly monumental.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The world needs a strong America.

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

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.

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

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.

In the past when a country became as powerful as the United States, other countries would band together to clip its wings. But that isn't happening now and I don't think it's not going to happen, because other countries are not threatened by us, and they secretly appreciate the services that we provide, even if they don't usually say so.

The United States contributes to peace in both by serving as a buffer between and among regional powers that, while not preparing for armed conflict, do not fully trust one another.

The war on terror, I believe, will be waged by effective intelligence and police work and cruise missiles.

Economic growth is necessary to keep the promise - enormously important to individual Americans - that each generation will have the opportunity to become more prosperous than the preceding one, the popular term for which is 'the American dream.

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

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.

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

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

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

American influence in the world is certainly considerable, but the United States does not control, directly or indirectly, the politics and economics of other societies, as empires have always done, save for a few special cases that turn out to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

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.

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.

American foreign policy, for all its shortcomings, has underpinned political stability around the world.

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