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"East Asia has prospered since the end of the Vietnam War, and Northeast Asia has prospered since the end of the Korean War in a way that seems unimaginable when you think of the history of the first half of the century."
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"Dr. Rex Curry, the professor and attorney from Florida, has debated and largely proven the unavoidable evidence that Hitler's National Socialism was significantly influenced by Bellamy's 'nationalistic' form of 'socialism.' Curry is famous for making the claim that Hitler adopted the 'stiff-arm salute' from Francis and Edward Bellamy."
"Nationalism leads to all sorts of nasty things (even Nazi things) like fascism and war."
"I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and toward the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go, too! I want to go, too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going."
"They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff."
"Mankind have a little corrupted nature, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves; God has given them neither cannon of four-and-twenty pounders, nor bayonets; and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another."
"According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future."
"When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of 'greatness.' 'Greatness,' it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the 'great' man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a 'great' man can be blamed."
"Humans are intelligent and resourceful. If we've been around a million or more years, why are we so disinclined to believe that we could have built cities 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 or even more years ago?"
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"I don't believe that economic and cultural interaction automatically brings greater peace and understanding, although it may help in that regard."
"A war in the Taiwan Strait would destroy China's international relations overnight. It would destroy Chinese - Japanese relations, not to mention Chinese - American relations."
"You could argue that war is always an irrational act, and yet many states enter into military conflict out of rational calculation or national interest or the stability or longevity of their regime."
"Now, I believe that war is never inevitable until it starts, but there has been a great proclivity in human history, and including in recent history, for war."
"The PRC is the big brother in this relationship, and it has the capacity to be generous to Taiwan on this issue in a manner that might do much to defuse that issue internally in Taiwan."
"The Chinese government since 1979 has been very successful in economic development, and successful enough, simply by surviving, in the realm of political development."
"Another goal is to look to the resources we have and to see how we could do better to plan, in a sense, for the faculty and infrastructure that we will need to study Asia well into the 21st century."
"So, anything that avoids a conflict that could draw in, unhappily again, outside powers such as the United States or revisit, for example, Japan's interests in the Taiwan area would be the last thing that anyone would want."
"The most important thing that certainly the United States and other Asian and Pacific actors have done is to urge that whatever happens, however the dispute is resolved, that it be resolved peacefully."
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