This self-defeating behavior, so the argument goes, must be the result of warped domestic politics.

In the anarchic world of international politics, it is better to be Godzilla than Bambi.

States care about relative wealth, because economic might is the foundation of military might.

The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way.

Simply put, the most powerful state is the one that prevails in a dispute.

A state's potential power is based on the size of its population and the level of its wealth.

Offensive realism predicts that the United States will send its army across the Atlantic when there is a potential hegemon in Europe that the local great powers cannot contain by themselves.

Decapitation is a fanciful strategy.

China, in short has the potential to be considerably more powerful than even the United States.

States have two kinds of power: latent power and military power.

Bandwagoning is a strategy for the weak.

Married life had taught him the futility of arguing with a female in a dark-brown mood.

I will always find a way and a way will always find me.

The world forgets easily, too easily, what it does not like to remember.

Ours must be the first age whose great goal on a nonmaterial plane is not fulfillment but adjustment.

Capital is dead labor that vampirelike lives only by sucking living labor and lives the more the more labor it suck.

To forgive is to abandon your right to pay back the predator in his own coin, but it is the loss that Liberates.

A man's opinions are generally of much more value than his arguments.

Until she met the exploding statue, Annabeth thought she was prepared for anything.

Poetry, like dreams, will eventually break through every person's consciousness, even the tightest iconoclast's.

Occasionally if I look back at something I've written I'll find one of those that I don't understand, but that's a bad thing - the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand.