Samuel P. Huntington

“The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.”

“It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic.”

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion... but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

“In the new world, the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conflicts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically defined groups, but between peoples belonging to different cultural entities.”

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

“What is universalism to the West is imperialism to the rest.”

“For peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential.”

“Modernization does not necessarily mean Westernization.”

“The most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural.”

“Power remains the central phenomenon of politics.”

“Hypocrisy, double standards, and 'but nots' are the price of universalist pretensions.”

“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.”

“Democracy is one of the West's key values, and a democracy is seldom a threat to other democracies. But democracy is not a universal value.”

“The single most important and all-pervasive reality of politics in the modernizing countries is the gap between the aspiration for political participation and the institution of political participation.”

“A world without the primacy of the West will be a world with more violence and disorder and less democracy and economic growth than a world where the United States continues to have more influence than any other country in shaping global affairs.”