Zbigniew Brzezinski Quotes

Rich countries can afford to overpay for things.

Wealthier countries have the luxury of entertaining fears the rest of the world cannot afford.

Why do some people have to go barefoot so that others can drive luxury cars? Why are some people able to live only 35 years in order that others can live 70 years? Why do some people have to be miserably poor in order that others can be extravagantly rich? I speak for all the children in the world who don't even have a piece of bread.

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.

We say it is idealistic to think we can continue to live the way we live - with 5% of the world using half the world's resources, with $20,000 a second being spent on war.

But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.

We must not only control the weapons that can kill us, we must bridge the great disparities of wealth and opportunity among the peoples of the world, the vast majority of whom live in poverty without hope, opportunity or choices in life. These conditions are a breeding ground for division that can cause a desperate people to resort to nuclear weapons as a last resort. Our only hope lies in the power of our love, generosity, tolerance and understanding and our commitment to making the world a better place.

How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak?

In the beginning war looks and feels like love. But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb.

Too much of the world's happiness depends on taking from one to satisfy another. To increase my standard of living, someone in another part of the world must lower his. The worldwide crisis of hunger that we face today is a result of that method of pursuing happiness. Industrialized nations acquire appetites for more and more luxuries and higher and higher standards of living, and increasing numbers of people are made poor and hungry. It doesn't have to be that way.

There can be no brotherhood when some nations indulge in previously unheard of luxuries, while others struggle to stave off famine.

And so class will some day supplant race in world affairs. Race war will then be merely a side-show to the gigantic class war which will be waged in the big tent we call the world.

May we look upon our treasure, the furniture of our houses, and our garments, and try to discover whether the seeds of war have nourishment in these our possessions.

In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic of self-interest that saw us through the Cold War would collapse if the leaders of one nuclear state came to welcome, or ceased to fear mass death.

The twentieth century had dispensed with the formal declaration of war and introduced the fifth column, sabotage, cold war, and war by proxy, but that was only the begining. Summit meetings for disarmament pursued mutual understanding and a balance of power but were also held to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. The world of the war-or-peace alternative became a world in which war was peace and peace war.

O America, how you've taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.

[Nuclear war]... may not be desirable.

The roots of war are in the way we live our daily lives -- the way we develop our industries, build up our society, and consume goods.

The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.

I wonder what I can do about war. Is it the destiny of human kind to eventually wipe ourselves out with these weapons of mass destruction? Are we stupid to think that we can control them?

Rich get richer. Everyone else gets poorer. And all these guys can talk about is war and defunding Planned Parenthood.

It's harder to end a war than begin one. Indeed, everything that American troops have done in Iraq -- all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering -- all of it has led to this moment of success. Now, Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we're leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people. We're building a new partnership between our nations.

Why are millions spent on the war each day, while not a penny is available for ... artists or the poor? Why do people have to starve when mountians of food are rotting away in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy?

It is perfectly consistent - and also true - to say that the world poverty problem today is smaller (relative to world population) than before and yet also a much graver injustice.

You cannot stop me; I spend thirty thousand men a month.