"For much (though certainly, as we shall see, not all) of its history, the British Empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a quarter of the world. The Empire also did a good deal to encourage those things in countries which were outside its formal imperial domain but under its economic influence through the ‘imperialism of fair trade’."

"Even small numbers of evangelical missionaries can achieve a good deal, furnished as they are with substantial funds from congregations at home."

"The First World War was at once piteous, in the poet's sense, and 'a pity'. It was something worse than a tragedy, which is ultimately something we are taught by the theatre to regard as unavoidable. It was nothing less than the greatest error of modern history."

"The world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a strange cocktail of continuity and change. Some aspects of international politics have not changed since Thucydides. There is a certain logic of hostility, a dilemma about security that goes with interstate politics. Alliances, balance of power, and choices in in policy between war and compromise have remained similar over the millennia."

"The bipolar world is over, but it not going to be replaced by a unipolar world empire that the United States controls alone. The world is already economically multipolar, and there will be a diffusion of power as the information revolution progresses, interdependence increases, and transnational actors become more important. The new world will not be neat, and you will have to live with that."

"If Thucydides were plopped down in the Middle East or East Asia, he would probably recognize ... the situation quite quickly."

"Just as gunpowder and infantry penetrated and destroyed the medieval castle, so have nuclear missiles and the internet made the nation-state obsolete."

"The territorial state has not always existed in the past, so it need not necessarily exist in the future."

"Attention rather than information becomes the scarce resource, and those who can distinguish valuable information from the background clutter gain power."

"Governments now have to share the stage with actors who can use information to enhance their soft power and press governments directly, or indirectly by mobilizing their publics."

"Some economists believe that the Great Depression of the 1930s was aggravated by bad monetary policy and lack of American leadership. Britain was too weak to maintain an open international economy, and the United States was not living up to its new responsibilities."

"When words are both descriptive and prescriptive, thyey become political words used in struggles for power."

"The best hope for the future is to ask what is being determined as well as who determines it."

"Some observers feel it is harder to change public opinion in democracies than it is to change policies in totalitarian countries."

"In foreign policy, as in medicine, leaders must “first do no harm.”"

"Chamberlain's sins were not his intentions, but rather his ignorance and arrogance in failing to appraise the situation properly. And in that failure he was not alone."

"Some say precipitating events are like buses - they come along every ten minutes."

"Power conversion is the capacity to convert potential power, as measured by resources, to realized power, as measured by the changed behavior of others."

"Power, like love, is easier to experience than to define or measure."

"Humans sometimes make surprising choices, and human history is full of uncertainties."

"Systems can create consequences not intended by any other of their constituent actors."

"The international system consists not only of states. The international political system is the pattern of relationships among the states."

"Anarchy means without government, but it does not necessarily mean chaos or total disorder."

"At some point, consequences matter."

"Effective foreign policymaking requires an understanding of not only international and transnational systems, but also the intricacies of domestic politics in multiple countries. It also demands recognition of just how little is known about “building nations,” particularly after revolutions – a process that should be viewed in terms of decades, not years."

"The cure to misunderstanding history is to read more, not less."

"No one can tell the whole story of anything."

"Cooperation is difficult in the absence of communication."

"Any sense of global community is weak."

"I have found in my experience in government that I could ignore neither the age-old nor the brand-new dimensions of world politics."

"The discussion of any society risks seduction by what is transient and tumultuous."

"“One of his greatest and most personal essays,” as his son, David Avrom Bell, regards it, “First Love and Early Sorrows,” appears in a 1981 issue of . It is an account of his “first love”—Marxism—joining the Yipsels, the Young People’s Socialist League, in 1932 at the age of 13, and of his “early sorrows” after learning The Truth About the Boylsheviki (sic), of The Russian Tragedy and The Kronstadt Rebellion. “My early sorrows,” wrote Bell, “fortuitous as these were, had come with the awareness of ‘Kronstadt.’ That knowledge, combined with my temperament, made me a lifelong Menshevik—the chooser, almost always, of the lesser evil.” It also led to three maxims that came to rule his intellectual life: the ethic of responsibility, the politics of civility, and the fear of the zealot and the fanatic."

"What makes the spectacle of Western bourgeois society so repulsive is the waste and squander of resources on needless products of status or display (e.g., the large, heavy automobile; the extravagant packaging of consumer items) for the sake of consumption."

"Gadgets can be engineered, programs can be designed, institutions can be built, but belief has an organic quality, and it cannot be called into being by fiat. Once a faith is shattered, it takes a long time to grow again - for its soil is experience - and to become effective again."

"No one "voted in" the market economy and the industrial revolution, but today issues of direction of the economy, costs, redress, priorities, and goals all have become matters of conscious and debated social policy."

"It is important to realize that the market economy, though it is associated historically with the rise of modern private capitalism, is as a mechanism not necessarily limited to that system."

"The demand for group rights will widen in the society, because social life increasingly becomes organized on a group basis."

"The virtue of the market is that it disperses responsibility."

"No one can buy his share of "clean air" in the market; one has to use communal mechanisms in order to deal with pollution."

"Crime is a form of "unorganized" class struggle, and the lowest groups in the society have always committed a disproportionate number of crimes."

"Where religions fail, cults appear."

"Every society seeks to establish a set of meanings through which people can relate themselves to the world."

"The democratization of genius is made possible by the fact while one can quarrel with judgments, one cannot quarrel with feelings."

"If the language of art is not accessible to ordinary language and ordinary experience, how can it be accessible to ordinary people?"

"Art is not life, but in a sense something contrary to life, since life is transient and changing, while art is permanent."

"Television, as the most "public" of media, has its limits."

"Today, the culture can hardly, if at all, reflect the society in which people live."

"When a person is confirmed by others, there has to be some sign of recognition."

"The one thing that would utterly destroy the new capitalism is the serious practice of deferred gratification."

"The relationship between a civilization's socio-economic structure and its culture is perhaps the most complicated of all problems for the sociologist."