Sublime

American culture is both disruptive and irreverent. It does not respect precedent or tradition. Yet it is also profoundly attractive to others.

That the vast majority of alleged threats to humanity are, in fact, dwarfed by the magnitude of opportunities that exist in the twenty-first century.

Evgeny Morozov,

In our view, the key to understanding how societies evolve is to understand factors that determine the costs and rewards of employing violence.

a historic transition of intellectual and economic leadership from the old American elites to a prophetic new generation in what is often termed the Third World but is rapidly eclipsing America in free zones of the mind, from Guatemala City to Shanghai.

We live in an era of wealth and overabundance, but how bleak it is. There is “neither art nor philosophy,” Fukuyama says. All that’s left is the “perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”

History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses.