People From New York City

"Of God's love we can say two things: it is poured out universally for everyone from the Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet; and secondly, God's love doesn't seek value, it creates value. It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement."

"I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap and then you grow wings."

""God is love," as Scripture says, and that means the revelation is in the relationship. "God is love" means God is known devotionally, not dogmatically. "God is love" does not clear up old mysteries; it discloses new mystery. "God is love" is not a truth we can master; it is only one to which we can surrender. Faith is being grasped by the power of love."

"It is often said that the Church is a crutch. Of course it's a crutch. What makes you think you don't limp?"

"“Other political scientists work on capillaries. John goes for the jugular”"

"Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard have been listed by Ukraine among a number of American politicians, academics and activists Kyiv claims have promoted "Russian propaganda."... The list—which also includes retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, military strategist Edward Luttwak, political scientist John Mearsheimer and journalist Glenn Greenwald—does not explain what the consequences are for those who Ukraine clearly considers responsible for promoting the Kremlin's line.... Mearsheimer is on Ukraine's blacklist for having said NATO provoked Vladimir Putin into war... Mearsheimer... [said] he was disappointed with being listed as a Russian propagandist, while he defended his claim that the war was provoked by the U.S. wanting to accept Ukraine into NATO."

"The strategically wise strategy for Ukraine is to break off its close relations with the West, especially with the United States, and try to accommodate the Russians. If there had been no decision to move nato eastward to include Ukraine, Crimea and the Donbass would be part of Ukraine today, and there would be no war in Ukraine."

"People in the West don't want to hear it, but it is true that the Russians were desperate to avoid a conflict. The idea that Putin was chomping at the bit to invade Ukraine so he could make it part of Greater Russia, it's just not a serious argument. The Russians did not want a war, and they did, I believe, everything possible to avoid a war. They just couldn't get the Americans to play ball with them. The Americans were unwilling to negotiate in a serious way. Period. End of story."

"If Russia thinks that Ukraine presents an existential threat to Russia because it is aligning with the United States and its West European allies, this is going to cause an enormous amount of damage to Ukraine. That of course is exactly what’s happening now."

"The Russians are bent on keeping the territory that they have now conquered, and I believe the Russians are intent on conquering more country, more of Ukraine. The Russians want to make sure that Ukraine ends up as a dysfunctional rump state and cannot become a viable member of NATO at any time in the future. So, I think that what the Russians will end up doing is cleaving off a huge chunk of Ukrainian territory, and then going to great lengths to keep Ukraine in a terrible—both economic and political—situation. They'll do everything they can to continue strangling the Ukrainian economy, because they do not want Ukraine to be in a position where it becomes a viable member of the Western alliance."

"With Ukraine, it’s very important to understand that, up until 2014, we did not envision NATO expansion and E.U. expansion as a policy that was aimed at containing Russia. Nobody seriously thought that Russia was a threat before February 22, 2014."

"We invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe.... This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him (Vladimir Putin). My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument, and they will say that the Russians are responsible."

"I think that nuclear war is most likely if the Russians are losing. If the Russians are losing, if the Ukrainian military is rolling up Russian forces in eastern and southern Ukraine, and the sanctions are working and the Russians are on the verge of being knocked out of the ranks of the great powers, in that situation I think it's likely that the Russians would turn to nuclear weapons, and they would use those nuclear weapons in Ukraine. They would not dare use them against NATO, but they would turn to nuclear weapons. I think, given the fact that the Russians are not losing and, if anything, are winning, therefore the likelihood of nuclear war is greatly reduced. I don't want to say it's been taken off the table for one second, but I think as long as the Russians are on the upside of the battle, not on the downside, the likelihood of nuclear use is very low."

"My argument is that... {Vladimir Putin]... not going to re-create the Soviet Union or try to build a greater Russia, that he’s not interested in conquering and integrating Ukraine into Russia. It’s very important to understand that we invented this story that Putin is highly aggressive and he’s principally responsible for this crisis in Ukraine."

"Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Of course, this includes more than just NATO expansion. NATO expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat."

"If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of NATO, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable."

"I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO. The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand."

"When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate. States in the Western hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the United States."

"We overthrew democratically elected leaders in the Western hemisphere during the Cold War because we were unhappy with their policies. This is the way great powers behave... We went around the world trying to create liberal democracies. Our main focus, of course, was in the greater Middle East, and you know how well that worked out. Not very well."

"The Great Delusion is a provocative and timely work. But Mearsheimer’s account of the political theories that underpin liberal hegemony is confused and in some respects plainly wrong, while the prospect of American policymakers converging on a consistently realist approach to foreign relations seems remote. One difficulty is that Mearsheimer bases his argument for realism on a misconceived dichotomy. For him, liberalism comes in two versions: progressive liberalism, which favours active government intervention in order to promote positive rights to welfare alongside negative freedoms from censorship and the like, and modus vivendi liberalism, which focuses on the protection of these negative freedoms above all else. Progressive liberals to have come to prominence over the past fifty years ‘include Ronald Dworkin, Francis Fukuyama, Steven Pinker, and John Rawls’. Modus vivendi liberals of recent times, Mearsheimer tells us, include myself and the American political theorist Stephen Holmes. In a longer time frame, ‘John Locke is a quintessential modus vivendi liberal, as are Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek.’ It is flattering to be included in such distinguished company, but Mearsheimer’s analysis reflects a fundamental misunderstanding. No political theorist of whom I am aware would represent Locke, still less Hayek, as a theorist of modus vivendi liberalism. Both were classical liberals who prioritised negative freedom from coercion by the state over other freedoms and values. The progressive liberals Mearsheimer cites hold to a more positive conception of freedom that includes endowing people with the capacities needed for effective action. Such liberals recognise important rights to equality and welfare. Modus vivendi liberals do not fit into this dichotomy since they are ready to promote both positive and negative liberties if they can be shown to help individuals and communities with different beliefs and values to coexist productively in society. The canonical thinker of modus vivendi liberalism is not Locke but Hobbes, for whom all rights, other than the right to avoid a violent death, are subject to the overriding imperative of peace. Such a misunderstanding might not seem too damaging to Mearsheimer’s argument for realism, but it is not without consequences. Mearsheimer suggests that modus vivendi liberalism might offer a template for the kind of realist foreign policy he favours. Yet Lockean liberalism, which he invokes in support of his argument, sits uneasily with realism because Lockean rights are universal. For classical liberals as for progressive liberals, only one kind of regime can be fully legitimate: one that respects human rights, however defined. All other regimes are at best approximations of this ideal. Because its principles are supposed to be universally authoritative, Lockean theory has a built-in bias in favour of liberal hegemony. It is easy to move from the belief that liberal regimes are everywhere the best to the belief that existing liberal regimes have a duty to promote similar regimes throughout the world. (Modus vivendi liberals, by contrast, reject the idea that any regime could be the best for everyone.) Classical liberals have an inherent tendency to support what is now called liberal interventionism."

"China, in short has the potential to be considerably more powerful than even the United States."

"A potential hegemon, as emphasized throughout this book, must be wealthier than any of its regional rivals and must possess the most powerful army in the area."

"When World War II started on September 1, 1939, the German army contained 3.74 million soldiers and 103 divisions."

"When an aggressor comes on the scene, at least one other state will eventually take direct responsibility for checking it."

"In short, unbalanced bipolar systems are so unstable that they cannot last for any appreciable period of time."

"The Soviet Union and its empire disappeared in large part because its smokestack economy could no longer keep up with the technological progress of the world's major economic powers."

"This self-defeating behavior, so the argument goes, must be the result of warped domestic politics."

"The optimists' claim that security competition and war among the great powers has been burned out of the system is wrong. In fact all of the major states around the globe still care deeply about the balance of power among themselves for the foreseeable future."

"Offensive realism predicts that the United States will send its army across the Atlantic when there is a potential hegemon in Europe that the local great powers cannot contain by themselves."

"States care about relative wealth, because economic might is the foundation of military might."

"The ideal situation for any state is to experience sharp economic growth while its rivals' economies grow slowly or hardly at all."

"The most dangerous states in the international system are continental powers with large armies."

"Bandwagoning is a strategy for the weak."

"The German air offensives against British cities in World Wars I and II not only failed to coerce the United Kingdom to surrender, but Germany also lost both wars."

"Important benefits often accrue to states that behave in an unexpected way."

"Great powers must be forever vigilant and never subordinate survival to any other goal, including prosperity."

"Decapitation is a fanciful strategy."

"In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler believed that his great-power rivals would be easy to exploit and isolate because each had little interest in fighting Germany and instead was determined to get someone else to assume the burden. He guessed right."

"A state's potential power is based on the size of its population and the level of its wealth."

"Preserving power, rather than increasing it, is the main goal of states."

"States have two kinds of power: latent power and military power."

"The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way."

"The liberal tradition has its roots in the Enlightenment, that period in the eighteenth-century Europe when intellectuals and political leaders had a powerful sense that reason could be employed to make the world a better place."

"Simply put, the most powerful state is the one that prevails in a dispute."

"In an ideal world, where there are only good states, power would be largely irrelevant."

"The cycle of violence will continue far into the new millennium. Hopes for peace will probably not be realized, because the great that shape the international system fear each other and compete for power as a result. Indeed, their ultimate aim is to gain a position of dominant power over others, because having dominant power is the best means to ensure one's own survival."

"Specifically, the presence of oceans on much of the earth's surface makes it impossible for any state to achieve global hegemony."

"I believe that the existing power structures in Europe and Northeast Asia are not sustainable through 2020."

"We should never go to war unless we have been attacked or are under direct, immediate threat of attack. Never. And never again."

"George W. Bush will surely deserve that woolliest of all peace prizes, the Nobel."