“...foreign policy is a matter of costs and benefits, not theology.”

“We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one.”

“It all looks American because America, the country that invented mass capitalism and consumerism, got there first. the impact of mass capitalism is now universal.”

“Religions are vague, of course. This means that they are easy to follow -you can interpret their prescriptions as you like. but it also means that it is easy to slip up -there is always some injunction you are violating. But Islam has no religious establishment - no popes, no bishops - that can declare by fiat which is the correct interpretation. As a result, the decision to oppose the state on the grounds that is insufficiently Islamic belongs to anyone who wishes to exercise it.”

“In thirty years Iraq too has gone from being among the most modern and secular of Arab countries -with women working, artists thriving, journalists writing- into a squalid playpen for a megalomaniac.”

“Suppose the elections are free and fair and those elected are racists, fascists, separatists", said the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke about Yugoslavia in 1990s. "that is the dilemma”

“Democracy is also a single ideology, and, like all such templates, it has its limits. what works in a legislature might not work in a corporation”