My arguments for liberal empire or whatever you want to call it - hegemony, primacy, you name it - are really activated by a sense that the alternatives involve more violence, more repression, more hardship.

The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.

I think the condition of imperial denial is a handicap because if you do not recognize that you are essentially performing the functions of an empire, you are incapable of learning from the mistakes of past empires.

In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of forced resettlement.

American Empire- it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions which need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security. It is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial.

I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.

A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.