Civilizational Conflict Quotes

Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world, which will shake off the domination of Europeans - still nominally Christian - and reappear as the prime enemy of our civilization? The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam.

It would be a disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the ancient states of Europe.

Throughout the Arab and Islamic world the feeling is that we are now in top gear for a war of civilizations, a clash of civilizations. Support for the United States is very low and there are no voices within the Muslim world, except for a very few.

Our leaders do us no service when they fail to recognize that the threat the so-called Islamic State and its allied terrorists represent is a civilizational, not a geopolitical, conflict and can only be understood through that lens.

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new [post-Cold-War] world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

I believe that what we are fighting here is not just a small group of people who have hijacked a religion, but it is a civilization bent on destroying ours.

Muslim consumers, … have a right to boycott whomever they want. Similarly, Western consumers have the right to support whomever they want, and privately owned newspapers have the right to publish cartoons without government interference. If there must be a clash of civilizations and cultures, let it be over these cartoons. The Danish cartoons are as important as fighting for Danzig once was. If the West is unwilling to fight this battle, slavery will inevitably come and slavery will be what it deserves.

As a cultural product of both 'East' and 'West', I do not believe there is a fundamental basis for a clash of civilisations, or that the West is the cause of all problems.

Here among the constant ruins and rebuilding of civilizations lies the coexistence of diversity and intolerance.