Robert D. Kaplan > Quotes

“You don’t grow up gradually. You grow up in short bursts at pivotal moments, by suddenly realizing how ignorant and immature you are.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond

“As Napoleon said, to know a nation's geography is to know its foreign policy”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

“There are riches enough for all of us, no matter our abilities or circumstances. It is only the inspiration that requires summoning.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia and the Peloponnese

“Romania was an original mix: a population that looked Italian but wore the expressions of Russian peasants; an architectural backdrop that often evoked France and Central Europe; and service and physical conditions that resembled those in Africa.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History

“The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place. But the experience in the Balkans reinforced an idealist dictum that is equally true: One should always work near the limits of what is possible rather than cynically give up on any place. In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough.”
― Robert D. Kaplan

“Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific

“Mass education, because it produces hosts of badly educated people liberated from fatalism, will contribute to instability (p. 123).”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

“In foreign policy, a modest acceptance of fate will often lead to discipline rather than indifference. The realization that we cannot always have our way is the basis of a mature outlook that rests on an ancient sensibility, for tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good so much as triumph of one good over another that causes suffering. Awareness of that fact leads to a sturdy morality grounded in fear as well as in hope. The moral benefits of fear bring us to two English philosophers who, like Machiavelli, have for centuries disturbed people of goodwill: Hobbes and Malthus.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos

“In autumn velvety shawls of maroon and sienna drape hillsides that fold down upon willow-braided streams.”
― Robert Kaplan

“Geography and history demonstrate that we can never discount Russia. Russia’s partial resurgence in our own age following the dissolution of the Soviet Empire is part of an old story. Russia”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

“Books that have been owned by someone for many years for a specific purpose carry not just memories, (that is obvious), they also reveal their owner's true values; for the books we own may indicate something about us very different from what we think.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond

“And so this is where the post Cold War has brought us: to the recognition that the very totalitarism that we fought against in the decades following WWII might, in quite a few circumstances, be preferable to a situation where nobody is in charge. There are things worse than communism, it turned out, and in Iraq we brought them about ourselves.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

“Macedonia, the inspiration for the French word for "mixed salad" (macedoine), defines the principle illness of the Balkans: conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that is borders revert to where they were at the exact time when its own empire had reached its zenith of ancient medieval expansion.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts

“Like serious reading itself, travel has now become an act of resistance against the distractions of the electronic age, and against all the worries that weigh us down, thanks to that age. A good book deserves to be finished, just as a haunting landscape tempts further experience of it, and further research into it. Travel and serious reading, because they demand sustained focus, stand athwart the nonexistent attention spans that deface our current time on Earth.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond

“As Morgenthau points out, small- and medium-sized states like Israel, Great Britain, France, and Iran cannot absorb the same level of punishment as continental-sized states such as the United States, Russia, and China, so that they lack the requisite credibility in their nuclear threats.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

“Realists value order above freedom: for them the latter becomes important only after the former has been established.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

“The United States was a great power less because of its ideas than because, with direct access to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it was “the most favored state in the world from the point of view of location.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

“Ivan showed that in his time and place the only antidote to chaos was absolutism.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

“The train passed through a series of tunnels. Because the overhead light fixtures had no bulbs in them, some people lit candles inside the tunnels, which dramatically illuminated their black, liquid eyes. There was a solemn, almost devotional cynicism to these eyes, reflecting, as though by a genetic process, all of the horrors witnessed by generation upon generation of forebears.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts

“As the Arab proverb says, “People resemble their times more than they resemble their fathers.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond

“Russia does not require an invasion, only a zone of influence in the Intermarium that it can achieve by gradually compromising the democratic vitality of rimland states. (Hungary, in particular, is well on its way in this regard.)”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

“national navies tend to cooperate better than national armies, partly because sailors are united by a kind of fellowship-of-the-sea born of their shared experience facing violent natural forces.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

“With the Athenians, as with Darius, one is astonished by how the obsession with honor and reputation can lead a great power toward a bad fate. The image of Darius’s army marching into nowhere on an inhospitable steppe, in search of an enemy that never quite appears, is so powerful that it goes beyond mere symbolism.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

“Related lessons: Don’t go hunting ghosts, and don’t get too deep into a situation where your civilizational advantage is of little help.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

“Simply put, there are actions of state that are the right things to do, even if they cannot be defined in terms of conventional morality.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

“A soldier: "I know where heaven is and it's Lithuania ... The women are beautiful, pagan, with a practical view towards sex. Who says communism was bad? You're working three levels of advantages: you're a foreign male, you're a rich, exotic American, and their men are a bunch of drunken, criminal slobs.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground

“Statesmen can strive for the universal values of justice, fairness, and tolerance, but only so far as they do not interfere with the quest for power, which to him is synonymous with survival.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

“America is learning an ironic truth of empire: You endure by not fighting every battle. In the first century A.D., Tiberius preserved Rome by not interfering in bloody internecine conflicts beyond its northern frontier. Instead, he practiced strategic patience as he watched the carnage. He understood the limits of Roman power.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

“Today, despite the jet and information age, 90 percent of global commerce and two thirds of all petroleum supplies travel by sea.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

“Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers “is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks today,”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific