Kaplan Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Kaplan. Here they are! All 100 of them:

You don’t grow up gradually. You grow up in short bursts at pivotal moments, by suddenly realizing how ignorant and immature you are.
Robert D. Kaplan (In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond)
As Napoleon said, to know a nation's geography is to know its foreign policy
Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
zaman beni sürükleyen bir nehir, ama nehir benim; beni parçalayan bir kaplan, ama kaplan benim; beni tüketen bir ateş, ama ateş benim; evren, ne yazık ki gerçek; ben, ne yazık ki, borges'im
Jorge Luis Borges (The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory)
There are riches enough for all of us, no matter our abilities or circumstances. It is only the inspiration that requires summoning.
Robert D. Kaplan (Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia and the Peloponnese)
Night is mine, together with a substantial part of the future.
Nelly Kaplan
Music is about bringing light to others.
Avi Kaplan Pentatonix
Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Robert D. Kaplan (Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific)
Romania was an original mix: a population that looked Italian but wore the expressions of Russian peasants; an architectural backdrop that often evoked France and Central Europe; and service and physical conditions that resembled those in Africa.
Robert D. Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History)
As recently as 1975, a basic American psychiatry textbook estimated that the frequency of all forms of incest as one case per million. [James Henderson, "Incest", in A. M. Freedman, H.I. Kaplan and B.J. Sadock, eds., Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 2nd ed. 1975 p. 1532.]
Judith Lewis Herman (Father-Daughter Incest (with a new Afterword))
Haven’t you figured it out yet, Dr. Kaplan? You may think you have a demon in you…” I say as I step toward him. I place my hands on his chest and rise up on my tiptoes to whisper in his ear. “But I’m the devil he worships in the night.
Brynne Weaver (Black Sheep)
Our grandchildren will ask us one day: Where were you during the Holocaust of the animals? What did you do against these horrifying crimes? We won't be able to offer the same excuse for the second time, that we didn't know. —Helmut Kaplan
Melanie Joy (Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism)
Mothers...accept when they have to, let go when they must, but watch out; they'll also turn their back on whoever hurts their child so quickly you'll feel the wind cut your face.
Hester Kaplan
Denial is a useful defense mechanism until it's not.
Rosalind Kaplan
Mass education, because it produces hosts of badly educated people liberated from fatalism, will contribute to instability (p. 123).
Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
It was at this point, visualizing too vividly another Mr. Kaplan in the class, that anxious little lines had crept around Mr. Parkhill´s eyes.
Leo Rosten (The Education of Hyman Kaplan)
Teddy: Sorry, Kaplan. You're stuck with me. Till death do us part. Billy: Teddy Altman, did you just propose to me?
Allan Heinberg (Avengers: The Children's Crusade #7)
As someone who grew up in the Bronx, I certainly learned my share of four-letter words, but none are more powerful than nice.
Linda Kaplan Thaler
In autumn velvety shawls of maroon and sienna drape hillsides that fold down upon willow-braided streams.
Robert D. Kaplan
Let the pleasure of doodling led us to writing as decoration rather than to the peculiarly abstract sort of representation it inclines towards: the making of signs to look through rather than at.
Robert M. Kaplan (The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero)
The initial journey towards sobriety is a delicate balance between insight into one's desire for escape and abstinence from one's addiction.
Debra L. Kaplan (For Love and Money Exploring Sexual & Financial Betrayal in Relationships)
In a relationship there is the information that we need and do not ask for, and the information we have but choose to ignore.
Debra L. Kaplan (For Love and Money Exploring Sexual & Financial Betrayal in Relationships)
It’s a similarity I’ve noticed between little kids and old people—they’re both always so surprised when anyone actually treats them like humans.
Ariel Kaplan (Grendel's Guide to Love and War)
Just your friend?" "There's no just about being friends.
Ariel Kaplan (We Regret to Inform You)
When sex and money are fused in the service of exploitation, the two create an even more destructive form of rage of a type often exhibited in narcissistic and potentially psychopathic populations.
Debra L. Kaplan
Reaching your potential is not simply about dreaming or being idealistic, It is a process that involve specific actions, exercises, discipline and hard work. It is challenging, rewarding and unending.
Robert S. Kaplan (What You're Really Meant To Do: A Road Map for Reaching Your Unique Potential)
But maybe, that's the point. That there are no guarentees. There are no happy endings. But you show up anyway. You don't give up. You NEVER give up. Maybe that's what it takes to be a HERO. -Billy Kaplan
Allan Heinberg (Avengers: The Children's Crusade)
democracy that cannot control its own population may be worse for human rights than a dictatorship that can.
Robert D. Kaplan (Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power)
All people suffer,” said Judith. “But if you don’t know what you believe, you suffer alone.
Mitchell James Kaplan (By Fire, By Water)
Ivan showed that in his time and place the only antidote to chaos was absolutism.
Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
On the off-chance you won't live forever, maybe you should try being happy now.
Janice Kaplan (The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year Looking on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life)
We are sent into this world for some end. It is our duty to discover by close study what this end is and when we once discover it to pursue it
Fred Kaplan (John Quincy Adams: American Visionary)
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
Janice Kaplan (The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year Looking on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life)
Realists value order above freedom: for them the latter becomes important only after the former has been established.
Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
With that solitude came the greatest luxuries: the time to read, the opportunity to wander, and the chance to think new thoughts.
Alice Kaplan (Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis)
Adams had no doubt that education was as much a human birthright as freedom, for females as well as males, for slaves as well as free blacks. Freedom and education were inseparable.
Fred Kaplan (John Quincy Adams: American Visionary)
Books that have been owned by someone for many years for a specific purpose carry not just memories, (that is obvious), they also reveal their owner's true values; for the books we own may indicate something about us very different from what we think.
Robert D. Kaplan (In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond)
The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place. But the experience in the Balkans reinforced an idealist dictum that is equally true: One should always work near the limits of what is possible rather than cynically give up on any place. In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough.
Robert D. Kaplan
Geography and history demonstrate that we can never discount Russia. Russia’s partial resurgence in our own age following the dissolution of the Soviet Empire is part of an old story. Russia
Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
Understanding is the level immediately below Wisdom. It is on the level of Understanding that ideas exist separately, where they can be scrutinized and comprehended. While Wisdom is pure undifferentiated Mind, Understanding is the level where division exists, and where things are delineated and defined as separated objects.
Aryeh Kaplan (Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation in Theory and Practice)
I’m a Fool” may not be a great song, but Sinatra’s shattering performance of it transcends the material. His emotion is so naked that we’re at once embarrassed and compelled: we literally feel for him.
James Kaplan (Frank: The Voice)
This pretty much summed up how things worked in my family. I preferred talk to action. My sister preferred action to thinking. And my father preferred to admire some far-off spot on the horizon that no one else could see.
A.E. Kaplan
Alice Kaplan is a teacher of French language and literature, and she has done this kind of remembering in a book called French Lessons. “Why do people want to adopt another culture?” she asks as she summarizes her journey into teaching and into life. “Because there’s something in their own they don’t like, that doesn’t name them.”5
Parker J. Palmer (The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life)
And so this is where the post Cold War has brought us: to the recognition that the very totalitarism that we fought against in the decades following WWII might, in quite a few circumstances, be preferable to a situation where nobody is in charge. There are things worse than communism, it turned out, and in Iraq we brought them about ourselves.
Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
Today, despite the jet and information age, 90 percent of global commerce and two thirds of all petroleum supplies travel by sea.
Robert D. Kaplan (Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power)
A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.
Robert Steven Kaplan (What You Really Need to Lead: The Power of Thinking and Acting Like an Owner)
I have seen what working within the system gets you. It gets you trapped in a building that should be burned down.
Isabel Kaplan (NSFW)
It is the freedom to concentrate military equipment in key locations around the world that has preserved American military might.
Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
The threat to Europe comes not in the form of uniforms, but in the tattered garb of refugees,
Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. —Marcel Proust
Janice Kaplan (The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year Looking on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life)
Without adjustments to our economic system and regulatory policies, we may be in for an extended period of social turmoil.
Jerry Kaplan (Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth & Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
The Comedy Equation: An ordinary guy or gal struggling against insurmountable odds without many of the required skills and tools with which to win yet never giving up hope.
Steve Kaplan (The Hidden Tools of Comedy: The Serious Business of Being Funny)
The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
Jerry Kaplan (Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth & Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
And believe me, there is nobody who hates Communism more than a former Communist.
Robert D. Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History)
He thought she might understand that you couldn't cure the throbbing of loss with reunion--you might only make it beat harder and hotter.
Hester Kaplan (The Tell)
If you want to love, express hate. If you want to hate, express love.
Strephon Kaplan-Williams
Elaine's lows were low, but her highs were...well her highs were magic that transformed mere earth, air, and water into the breath of life.
Mark Adam Kaplan (A Thousand Beauties)
We realize that anything can be everything and each is also its opposite-then the image of zero's perfect ring shines before us.
Robert D. Kaplan
Admiral Stephen Decatur’s widely publicized toast in 1816, “our country, right or wrong,” struck Adams as not only discordant but immoral.
Fred Kaplan (John Quincy Adams: American Visionary)
If you can measure it, you can manage it.
Robert S. Kaplan (Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes)
Beauvoir was untouched by the criticisms; her diary was a record of one consciousness, her own: "This is what I saw and how I saw it. I have not tried to say more.
Alice Kaplan (Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis)
Saber qué hacer y tener el valor para hacerlo son dos cosas diferentes.
Steve Kaplan (Sea el elefante: Edifique una empresa más grande y mejor (Spanish Edition))
A central theme was recognizing what is in your control and what isn’t—and acting on the one and ignoring the other. It’s a philosophy that has resonated over the centuries. Reading
Janice Kaplan (The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year Looking on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life)
The Bouviers and the Lees alike operated within the great American tradition of immigrant ambition, which held that in making yourself anew, you had the right to embellish the past.
Alice Kaplan (Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis)
liberalism and democracy, with all of their limitations, are what remains after every utopia and extremist scheme based on blood and territory has been exposed and shattered by reality.
Robert D. Kaplan (In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond)
Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled.
Abraham Kaplan (The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioural Science)
Statesmen can strive for the universal values of justice, fairness, and tolerance, but only so far as they do not interfere with the quest for power, which to him is synonymous with survival.
Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
As Morgenthau points out, small- and medium-sized states like Israel, Great Britain, France, and Iran cannot absorb the same level of punishment as continental-sized states such as the United States, Russia, and China, so that they lack the requisite credibility in their nuclear threats.
Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
The second mistake is the tacit assumption that first you go to school, and when you are done, you go get a job. This made sense when jobs and skills changed on a generational timescale, but it does not in today’s fast-moving labor markets. These two phases of life need to be strongly interleaved, or at least the opportunity for new skill acquisition must be explicit and omnipresent.
Jerry Kaplan (Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth & Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers “is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks today,
Robert D. Kaplan (Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific)
The United States was a great power less because of its ideas than because, with direct access to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it was “the most favored state in the world from the point of view of location.
Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
Macedonia, the inspiration for the French word for "mixed salad" (macedoine), defines the principle illness of the Balkans: conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that is borders revert to where they were at the exact time when its own empire had reached its zenith of ancient medieval expansion.
Robert D. Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New Edition))
The New START accord cuts the strategic nuclear arsenals on each side to 1,550 warheads. Can any of its critics make a case that our security would be imperiled if, the very next day, Obama and Medvedev made moves to take the levels down to 1,000—then to 500? If so, come show us the math. If not, it may be time to stop making arms control so politically complicated—time to stop letting arms control get in the way of disarmament.
Fred Kaplan
The debacle of the early years in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history, and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place.
Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
In foreign policy, a modest acceptance of fate will often lead to discipline rather than indifference. The realization that we cannot always have our way is the basis of a mature outlook that rests on an ancient sensibility, for tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good so much as triumph of one good over another that causes suffering. Awareness of that fact leads to a sturdy morality grounded in fear as well as in hope. The moral benefits of fear bring us to two English philosophers who, like Machiavelli, have for centuries disturbed people of goodwill: Hobbes and Malthus.
Robert D. Kaplan (Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos)
Research suggests that what has happened to people matters less than whether they’ve processed what happened to them. In a study of the characteristics of parents who raise securely attached children, researchers found that parents who created a secure attachment for their children were often characterized by a willingness to recall and talk about their own childhoods (Main, Kaplan, and Cassidy 1985). Even though some of these parents had lived through very difficult childhood experiences, their relationships with their own children were secure, since they had spent time thinking about and integrating their childhood experiences and were at ease with both the negative and positive aspects of their past.
Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
For a woman ... to explore and express the fullness of her sexuality, her ambitions, her emotional and intellectual capacities, her social duties, her tender virtues, would entail who knows what risks and who knows what truly revolutionary alteration to the social conditions that demean and constrain her. Or she may go on trying to fit herself into the order of the world and thereby consign herself forever to the bondage of some stereotype of normal femininity - a perversion, if you will.
Louise J. Kaplan
getting people to follow your lead is an outdated notion and that today, leadership is more about empowering and serving others. They believe that a leader creates the conditions and environment that enable people to be innovative and take action.
Robert Steven Kaplan (What You Really Need to Lead: The Power of Thinking and Acting Like an Owner)
The train passed through a series of tunnels. Because the overhead light fixtures had no bulbs in them, some people lit candles inside the tunnels, which dramatically illuminated their black, liquid eyes. There was a solemn, almost devotional cynicism to these eyes, reflecting, as though by a genetic process, all of the horrors witnessed by generation upon generation of forebears.
Robert D. Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New Edition))
give a noun.” “Door,” said Mr. Kaplan, smiling. It seemed to Mr. Parkhill that “door” had been given only a moment earlier, by Miss Mitnick. “Y-es,” said Mr. Parkhill. “Er—and another noun?” “Another door,” Mr. Kaplan replied promptly. Mr. Parkhill put him down as a doubtful “C.” Everything pointed to the fact that Mr. Kaplan might have to be kept on an extra three months before he was ready for promotion to Composition, Grammar, and Civics, with Miss Higby. One night Mrs. Moskowitz read a sentence, from “English for Beginners,
Leo Rosten (The Education of Hyman Kaplan)
As became a young sinner, Sam [Mark Twain] had a special interest in Satan. He asked his Sunday school teacher questions about Eve in the garden, wondering "if he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached by a serpent, would not excuse herself and break for the nearest timber." Twain recalled, "He did not answer my question, but rebuked me for inquiring into matters above my age and comprehension.
Fred Kaplan (The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography)
The eternal truths which are essential to human salvation, [Moses Mendelssohn] argues, must necessarily be accessible to all human beings, for it would be contrary to the goodness of God for him to reveal only to a portion of mankind such truth as is indispensable to all men.
Mordecai Menahem Kaplan (Judaism As a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life)
The United States fought against the prospect of a Vietnam unified by the communist North. But once that unification became fact, the new and enlarged Vietnamese state became a much greater threat to communist China than to the United States. Such can be the ironies of history. Champa,
Robert D. Kaplan (Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific)
A soldier: "I know where heaven is and it's Lithuania ... The women are beautiful, pagan, with a practical view towards sex. Who says communism was bad? You're working three levels of advantages: you're a foreign male, you're a rich, exotic American, and their men are a bunch of drunken, criminal slobs.
Robert D. Kaplan (Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground)
Like serious reading itself, travel has now become an act of resistance against the distractions of the electronic age, and against all the worries that weigh us down, thanks to that age. A good book deserves to be finished, just as a haunting landscape tempts further experience of it, and further research into it. Travel and serious reading, because they demand sustained focus, stand athwart the nonexistent attention spans that deface our current time on Earth.
Robert D. Kaplan (In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond)
you follow your own path, I don’t know how much money you will accumulate, how much stature you will achieve, or how many titles you will garner. But if you’re true to your convictions and principles, I know you’re far more likely to feel like a big success. In the end, that feeling will make all the difference.
Robert S. Kaplan (What You're Really Meant to Do: A Road Map for Reaching Your Unique Potential)
By all accounts, John Frankenheimer was singularly obsessed with The Manchurian Candidate, a film that, according to Daniel O’Brien, the director regarded “as his first truly personal project, feeling that the story made an all too valid point regarding the political manipulation and conditioning of American society.
James Kaplan (Sinatra: The Chairman)
When a director at Pacific Gas & Electric, one of the nation’s largest utilities, testified that all of its control systems were getting hooked up to the Internet, to save money and speed up the transmission of energy, Lacombe asked what the company was doing about security. He didn’t know what Lacombe was talking about.
Fred Kaplan (Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War)
America is learning an ironic truth of empire: You endure by not fighting every battle. In the first century A.D., Tiberius preserved Rome by not interfering in bloody internecine conflicts beyond its northern frontier. Instead, he practiced strategic patience as he watched the carnage. He understood the limits of Roman power.
Robert D. Kaplan (The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century)
Vun ting more I should say, so de cless shouldn´t fill too bed about Jake Popper. It´s awreddy nine yiss since he pest avay!” “And I didn´t go to de funeral!” On this strange note, Mr. Kaplan took his seat. The class hummed, protesting against this anticlimax which left so much to the imagination. “Why you didn´t?” cried Mr. Bloom, with a knowing nod to the Misses Mitnick and Caravello. Mr. Kaplan´s face was a study in sufferance. “Becawss de funeral vas in de meedle of the veek,” he sighed. “An´ I said to minesalf, “Keplen, you in America, so tink like de Americans tink!´ So I tought, an´ I didn´t go. Becawss I tought of dat dip American idea, ´Business before pleasure!
Leo Rosten (The Education of Hyman Kaplan)
The EU gave both political support and quotidian substance to the values inherent in NATO—those values being, generally, the rule of law over arbitrary fiat, legal states over ethnic nations, and the protection of the individual no matter his race or religion. Democracy, after all, is less about elections than about impartial institutions.
Robert D. Kaplan (The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century)
People have always looked to the horizon and feared that which they did not understand. Initially, this horizon was the edge of the forest. Then, when forests became better explored and their dangers were realized as not actually being that serious, human attention turned toward the darkness of the sea. Then the sea became better explored, and the new horizon became the vastness of space. And now, with space getting ever better explored, a new horizon appears. . . in the form of the horrors humanity is about to unleash on itself.
Matt Kaplan
It should be obvious that technologies are capable of replacing teachers and professors in a wide variety of settings. The current buzzword for this is the flipped classroom—students watch lectures and learn the material online at home, then do their homework at school with the help of teachers and teaching assistants. Teachers may no longer need to prepare or deliver lectures, reducing them to what could be called “learning coaches.” The diminished skill set required is sure to transform the profession and create yet more challenges for our already beleaguered teachers.
Jerry Kaplan (Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth & Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
Psychotropic drugs have also been organized according to structure (e.g., tricyclic), mechanism (e.g., monoamine, oxidase inhibitor [MAOI]), history (first generation, traditional), uniqueness (e.g., atypical), or indication (e.g., antidepressant). A further problem is that many drugs used to treat medical and neurological conditions are routinely used to treat psychiatric disorders.
Benjamin James Sadock (Kaplan and Sadock's Synopsis of Psychiatry: Behavioral Sciences/Clinical Psychiatry)
You’d be surprised at the edge you can develop by applying yourself for an extra half hour on something—a goal, a skill, a job. Pick the time of day when you are most productive (early morning, after a jog, or in the quiet of a Sunday evening) and instead of watching a sitcom, devote yourself to whatever “it” might be. A half hour each day adds up to 180 hours of extra practice a year!
Linda Kaplan Thaler (Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary)
The South China Sea functions as the throat of the Western Pacific and Indian oceans—the mass of connective economic tissue where global sea routes coalesce. Here is the heart of Eurasia’s navigable rimland, punctuated by the Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, and Makassar straits. More than half of the world’s annual merchant fleet tonnage passes through these choke points, and a third of all maritime traffic worldwide.2
Robert D. Kaplan (Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific)
Or take the opportunity offered to the United States following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when both Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mohammed Khatami condemned the Sunni al Qaeda terrorism in no uncertain terms and Iranians held vigils for the victims in the streets of Tehran...or the help Iran gave to the US-led coalition against the Taliban later that year; or the Iranian offer for substantial talks following the fall of Baghdad in the Spring of 2003.
Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
Discovering the inapplicability of Judeo-Christian morality in certain circumstances involving affairs of state can be searing. The rare individuals who have recognized the necessity of violating such morality, acted accordingly, and taken responsibility for their actions are among the most necessary leaders for their countries, even as they have caused great unease .. - In Defense of Henry Kissinger, The Atlantic 2013 May http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/p...
Robert D. Kaplan
In December, Angela Lansbury had been signed to play Raymond’s mother, the arch-villainess Eleanor Shaw Iselin. Apparently, Sinatra originally wanted Lucille Ball for the role, a fascinating casting notion, as Tom Santopietro points out: “As Ball aged, she grew into an increasingly hardened performer, losing all traces of the vulnerability that so informed her brilliant multiyear run on television’s I Love Lucy. The resulting quality of toughness would have suited the role of [Eleanor] very well, although it is anyone’s guess whether or not Ball would have felt comfortable delving into the dark recesses of [her] warped character.
James Kaplan (Sinatra: The Chairman)
One cool morning—a rainstorm had swept through the night before; now the City of Angels sparkled like Eden itself—he was walking between soundstages in Culver City, carrying a cardboard cup of coffee, nodding to this glorious creature (dressed as a harem girl), then that glorious creature (a cowgirl), then that glorious creature (a secretary?)—they all smiled at him—when he ran into, of all people, an old pal of his from the Major Bowes days, a red-haired pianist who’d bounced around the Midwest in the 1930s, Lyle Henderson (Crosby would soon nickname him Skitch). Henderson was strolling with a creature much more glorious, if possible, than the three Sinatra had just encountered. She was tall, dark haired, with sleepy green eyes, killer cheekbones, and absurdly lush lips, lips he couldn’t stop staring at. Frankie! Henderson said, as they shook hands. His old chum was doing all right these days. Sinatra smiled, not at Henderson. The glorious creature smiled back bashfully, but with a teasing hint of directness in her dark eyes. The pianist—he was doing rehearsal duty at the studio—then got to say the six words that someone had to say, sometime, but that he and he alone got to say for the first time in history on this sparkling morning: Frank Sinatra, this is Ava Gardner.
James Kaplan (Frank: The Voice)
A Puritan twist in our nature makes us think that anything good for us must be twice as good if it's hard to swallow. Learning Greek and Latin used to play the role of character builder, since they were considered to be as exhausting and unrewarding as digging a trench in the morning and filling it up in the afternoon. It was what made a man, or a woman -- or more likely a robot -- of you. Now math serves that purpose in many schools: your task is to try to follow rules that make sense, perhaps, to some higher beings; and in the end to accept your failure with humbled pride. As you limp off with your aching mind and bruised soul, you know that nothing in later life will ever be as difficult. What a perverse fate for one of our kind's greatest triumphs! Think how absurd it would be were music treated this way (for math and music are both excursions into sensuous structure): suffer through playing your scales, and when you're an adult you'll never have to listen to music again. And this is mathematics we're talking about, the language in which, Galileo said, the Book of the World is written. This is mathematics, which reaches down into our deepest intuitions and outward toward the nature of the universe -- mathematics, which explains the atoms as well as the stars in their courses, and lets us see into the ways that rivers and arteries branch. For mathematics itself is the study of connections: how things ideally must and, in fact, do sort together -- beyond, around, and within us. It doesn't just help us to balance our checkbooks; it leads us to see the balances hidden in the tumble of events, and the shapes of those quiet symmetries behind the random clatter of things. At the same time, we come to savor it, like music, wholly for itself. Applied or pure, mathematics gives whoever enjoys it a matchless self-confidence, along with a sense of partaking in truths that follow neither from persuasion nor faith but stand foursquare on their own. This is why it appeals to what we will come back to again and again: our **architectural instinct** -- as deep in us as any of our urges.
Ellen Kaplan (Out of the Labyrinth: Setting Mathematics Free)