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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.