Great wars can only be fought by great powers.

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.

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

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 government can give citizens opportunity and it's their responsibility to take advantage of it.

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.

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.