Top 35 Samuel P. Huntington Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Many more people in the world are concerned about sports than human rights.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

2. “Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

3. “Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

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4. “Expectations should not always be taken as reality; because you never know when you will be disappointed.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

5. “Partial truths or half-truths are often more insidious than total falsehoods.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

6. “Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

7. “It was one thing to contain the Soviet Union in Europe because Britain, France, and Germany were all willing to join in. But will Japan and other Asian countries be willing to join in the containment of China?”

— Samuel P. Huntington

8. “In the post-Cold War world flags count and so do other symbols of cultural identity, including crosses, crescents, and even head coverings, because culture counts, and cultural identity is what is most meaningful to most people.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

9. “The dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

10. “Civilizations evolve over time, and most scholars of civilization, including people like Carol Quigley, argue that they go through periods of warring states, and eventually evolve into a universal state.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

11. “These transnationalists have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

12. “People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

13. “If you tell people the world is complicated, you’re not doing your job as a social scientist. They already know it’s complicated. Your job is to distill it, simplify it.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

14. “We have to know who we are before we can know what our interests are.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

15. “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

16. “Collective will supplants individual whim.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

17. “There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

18. “God and Caesar, church and state, spiritual authority and temporal authority, have been a prevailing dualism in Western culture. Only in Hindu civilization were religion and politics also so distinctly separated. In Islam, God is Caesar; in China and Japan, Caesar is God; in Orthodoxy, God is Caesar’s junior partner.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

19. “Democracy is premised, in some measure, on majority rule, and democracy is difficult in a situation of concentrated inequalities in which a large, impoverished majority confronts a small, wealthy oligarchy.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

20. “Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilization. It is basically an anti-Western ideology.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

21. “Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

22. “In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

23. “Cultural assertion follows material success; hard power generates soft power.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

24. “But then I came to the conclusion that no, while there may be an immigration problem, it isn’t really a serious problem. The really serious problem is assimilation.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

25. “The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

26. “We really only came around to accepting and integrating the propositional dimension of identity into a concept of ourselves at the time of the American Revolution.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

27. “It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

28. “Religiosity distinguishes America from most other Western societies. Americans are also overwhelmingly Christian, which distinguishes them from many non-Western peoples. Their religiosity leads Americans to see the world in terms of good and evil to a much greater extent than most other peoples.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

29. “Thus, biologically speaking the American people are literally only half an immigrant people.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

30. “I think clearly the United States, as well as other western nations, should stand by their commitments to human rights and democracy and should try to influence other countries to move in that direction.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

31. “Also, of course, for most of this time most Americans thought of America as a white country with, at best, only a very segregated and subordinate role for blacks.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

32. “And the big question for the West, of course, and to the Europeans is, what other countries, which were formerly part of the Soviet bloc, should be incorporated into western institutions?”

— Samuel P. Huntington

33. “The attribution of value to a traditional religion,” Ronald Dore noted, “is a claim to parity of respect asserted against ‘dominant other’ nations, and often, simultaneously and more proximately, against a local ruling class which has embraced the values and life-styles of those dominant other nations.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

34. “Well, I think the United States first of all has to recognize the world for what it is.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

35. “Again and again both Westerners and non-Westerners point to individualism as the central distinguishing mark of the West.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

36. “It is absurd to assume that the new political societies emerging in the East will be copies of the societies we know in the West.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

37. “One grim Weltanschauung for this new era was well expressed by the Venetian nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin’s novel, Dead Lagoon: “There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

38. “In 1920, the West ruled huge amounts of the world.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

39. “The central theme of this book is that culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world.”

— Samuel P. Huntington