A US stance in favor of democracy helps get the Congress, the bureaucracy, the media, the public, and elite opinion to back US policy. It helps ameliorate the domestic debate, disarms critics (who could be against democracy?), provides a basis for reconciliation between “realists” and “idealists”… The democracy agenda enables us, additionally, to merge and fudge over some issues that would otherwise be troublesome. It helps bridge the gap between our fundamental geopolitical and strategic interests… and our need to clothe those security concerns in moralistic language… The democracy agenda, in short, is a kind of legitimacy cover for our more basic strategic objectives.

Support for democracy… is becoming the new organizing principle for American foreign-policy.

Most people in the world put up with very great inequalities, but when these inequalities appear to be increasing without prospect of being reversed and when they mean famine, epidemic, and certain death for millions of people, they cease to be merely aesthetic problems and acquire the status of political crises.

The world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like “nation,” “society,” and “culture” name bits and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the field from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of understanding.

Mr. Minister, you come here speaking of Latin America, but this is not important. Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance. You're wasting your time.

The experience of Liberia and Haiti shows that the African race are [sic] devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government. Unquestionably there is in them an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are irksome to their physical nature. Of course there are many exceptions to this racial weakness, but it is true of the mass, as we know from experience in this country. It is that which makes the negro problem practically insolvable.

Cité Soleil (Sun City) is a name filled with bitter sarcasm. It refers to the vast shantytown slum just north of Port-au-Prince. Poverty here reaches absolute bottom, below which can only be death: Barefoot children play on banks of muddy streams of raw sewerage or amidst toxic waste spills. A crippled man hasn't been able to get enough to eat for two days. A mother can't treat her baby's serious injury because of the cost of medical care. Despite these conditions, the most striking thing about Cité Soleil is not its desperate poverty. Rather it is the hope that is surging here with the growth of the Lavalas mass movement and the election of radical priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Preventive diplomacy and preemptive reform can reduce the risks of extremist political infection and radical contamination. When confronted with such situations, the United States must define its interests early on and then develop strategies in cooperation with regional friends that will promote the likelihood of peaceful change and successor governments compatible with our own.

Washington believes that Nicaragua must serve as a warning to the rest of Central America to never again challenge US hegemony, because of the enormous economic and political costs. It's too bad that the [Nicaraguan] poor must suffer, but historically the poor have always suffered. Nicaragua must be a lesson to others.

I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way – I don't know how it was, but it came: (1) that we could not give them back to Spain – that would be cowardly and dishonorable; (2) that we could not turn them over to France and Germany – our commercial rivals in the Orient – that would be bad business and discreditable; (3) that we could not leave them to themselves – they were unfit for self-government – and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was; and (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace, do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.

In any society the dominant groups are the ones with the most to hide about the way society works. Very often therefore truthful analyses are bound to have a critical ring, to seem like exposures rather than objective statements… For all students of human society sympathy with the victims of historical processes and skepticism about the victors' claims provide essential safeguards against being taken in by the dominant mythology. A scholar who tries to be objective needs these feelings as part of his working equipment.

In all societies… two classes of people appear – a class that rules and a class that is ruled… The first class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolizes power and enjoys the advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first, in a manner that is now more or less legal, now more or less arbitrary and violent.

There has been an explosion of human interaction and correlatively a tremendous increase of social pressure. The social texture of human life has become more complex and its management more difficult. Dispersion, fragmentation, and simple ranking have been replaced by concentration, interdependence, and a complex texture… Because of the basic importance of the contemporary complex social texture, its management has a crucial importance, which raises the problem of social control over the individual… Because they (citizens) press for more action to meet the problems they have to face, they require more social control. At the same time they resist any kind of social control that is associated with the hierarchical values they have learned to discard and reject. The problem may be worldwide.