Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Samuel P. Huntington

Also, of course, for most of this time most Americans thought of America as a white country with, at best, only a very segregated and subordinate role for blacks.

Immigrants are people who leave one country, one society, and move to another society. But there has to be a recipient society to which the immigrants move.

Mexican immigration poses challenges to our policies and to our identity in a way nothing else has in the past.

It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.

And so in terms of territorial control, in terms of economic preeminence, the western share of the gross world product is declining as Asian societies in particular develop economically.

Total falsehoods can be easily exposed for what they are by citing exceptions to their claims. Hence, they are less likely to be accepted as the total truth.

I think clearly the United States, as well as other western nations, should stand by their commitments to human rights and democracy and should try to influence other countries to move in that direction.

They weren't immigrating to some existing society; indeed, they often did whatever they could do to destroy whatever existed here in the way of Indian society.

It was one thing to contain the Soviet Union in Europe because Britain, France, and Germany were all willing to join in. But will Japan and other Asian countries be willing to join in the containment of China?

Partial truths or half-truths are often more insidious than total falsehoods.

Much of what we now consider to be problems concerning immigration and assimilation really concern Mexican immigration and assimilation.

We really only came around to accepting and integrating the propositional dimension of identity into a concept of ourselves at the time of the American Revolution.

The West hasn't reached its universal state as yet, although its close to it, but it certainly has evolved out of its warring state phase, which it was in for a couple of centuries.

The British were white, English, and Protestant, just as we were. They had to have some other basis on which to justify independence, and happily they were able to formulate the inalienable truths set forth in the Declaration.

It was this society and culture that among other things - including economic opportunities here and repression in Europe - attracted subsequent generations of immigrants to this country.

First of all, we haven't always welcomed immigrants.

We also thought of ourselves in racial and largely ethnic terms.

In 1920, the West ruled huge amounts of the world.

Well, I think the United States first of all has to recognize the world for what it is.

The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth.

Thus, biologically speaking the American people are literally only half an immigrant people.

And the big question for the West, of course, and to the Europeans is, what other countries, which were formerly part of the Soviet bloc, should be incorporated into western institutions?

The great problem there is we have to have the cooperation of those other Asian countries.

Our relationship with Mexico in this regard is unique for us, and in many respects unique in the world.

Finally, in my critique of the immigration image of America, it is also important to know that we're not only a nation of immigrants, but we are in some part a nation of emigrants, which often gets neglected.

But then I came to the conclusion that no, while there may be an immigration problem, it isn't really a serious problem. The really serious problem is assimilation.

Collective will supplants individual whim

Two significant developments in the past several decades have been the collapse of communism as an ideology and the general acceptance, in rhetoric, if not practice, of liberal democracy.

Many more people in the world are concerned about sports than human rights.

Religiosity distinguishes America from most other Western societies. Americans are also overwhelmingly Christian, which distinguishes them from many non-Western peoples. Their religiosity leads Americans to see the world in terms of good and evil to a much greater extent than most other peoples.

In the 19th century it was basically nationality and people trying to define their nationalism and create states which would reflect their nationalism. In the 20th century, ideology came to the fore, largely, but not exclusively, as a result of the Russian Revolution and we have fascism, communism and liberal democracy competing with each other. Well that's pretty much over.

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new [post-Cold-War] world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

There will be associations and partnerships between some Muslim countries and some Christian countries. Those already exist. And they may shift as different regimes come and go and interests change.

Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.

These transnationalists have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations

The argument now that the spread of pop culture and consumer goods around the world represents the triumph of Western civilization trivializes Western culture. The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former.

Nationalism is a central ideology for people who are trying to establish their own states in which they can play a dominant role.

I am doubtful that there will be any sort of real coherence of Muslim societies into a single political system run by an elected or non-elected group of leaders.

The question really is what will be the central focus of global politics in the coming decades and my argument is that cultural identities and cultural antagonisms and affiliations will play not the only role but a major role.

In the coming decades, questions of identity, meaning cultural heritage, language, and religion will play a central role in politics.

Democracy is premised, in some measure, on majority rule, and democracy is difficult in a situation of concentrated inequalities in which a large, impoverished majority confronts a small, wealthy oligarchy.

Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.

Civilizations evolve over time, and most scholars of civilization, including people like Carol Quigley, argue that they go through periods of warring states, and eventually evolve into a universal state.

The relations between countries in the coming decade are most likely to reflect their cultural commitments, their cultural ties and antagonism with other countries.

Some Westerners […] have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.

Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.

Countries will cooperate with each other, and are more likely to cooperate with each other when they share a common culture, as is most dramatically illustrated in the European Union. But other groupings of countries are emerging in East Asia and in South America. Basically, as I said, these politics will be oriented around, in large part, cultural similarities and cultural antagonism.

Hispanics speak Spanish or Portuguese, which are languages we Americans are familiar with, so it doesn't seem to pose the same types of problems as Arabic-speaking Muslims do in Europe.

I think fundamentalism is this radical attitude toward one's own identity and civilization as compared to other people's identities and cultures.

I wouldn't rule out the possibility of Muslim or at least Arab countries developing some form of organization comparable to the European Union. I don't think that's very likely, but it conceivably could happen.

Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.

Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.

Expectations should not always be taken as reality; because you never know when you will be disappointed.

A lot of people tend to think I'm a dogmatic ideologue, which I'm not.

In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.

Turkey has its own interests and historically, Turkey conquered most of the Arab world, and the Arabs had to fight wars of liberation to free themselves from the Turks. That's in the past and that doesn't necessarily shape what is going on but it's there and it's there in people's memories.

The most widely discussed formulation of [the One World model] was the "end of history" thesis advanced by Francis Fukuyama. "We may be witnessing," Fukuyama argued, "the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." The future will be devoted not to great exhilarating struggles over ideas but rather to resolving mundane economic and technical problems. And, he concluded rather sadly, it will all be rather boring.

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

Global politics remains extremely complex and countries have different interests, which will also lead them to make what might seem as rather bizarre friends and allies.

The colonial experience all Muslim countrieswent through may be a factor in the fight against Western domination, British, French or whatever. They were until recently largely rural societies with land owning governing elites in most of them. I think they are certainly moving toward urbanization and much more pluralistic political systems. In almost every Muslim country, that is occurring. Obviously they are increasing their involvement with non-Muslim societies. One peak aspect of this, of course, is the migration of Muslims into Europe.