51 Quotes by Michael Mandelbaum

Football is controlled violence, but it is violence, which people have loved to watch since the gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome.

Societies raise their grandest monuments to what their cultures value most highly. As the tallest buildings in a city noted for tall buildings, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were certainly monumental.

While analogies are useful, however, they can also be misleading. They smuggle in assumptions that can be wrong.

Words matter, especially words defining complicated political arrangements, because they shape perceptions of the events of the past, attitudes toward policies being carried out in the present, and expectations about desirable directions for the future.

American foreign policy, for all its shortcomings, has underpinned political stability around the world.

The cardinal sin in sports, what could really wreck it, is not cheating to win, which has gone on forever, but cheating to lose. That threatens a fundamental aspect of sports' appeal, which is their spontaneity. If games are fixed, they're no different from movies; they're scripted.

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

The government can give citizens opportunity and it's their responsibility to take advantage of it.

The less oil the world uses, the less important the region that has so much of it becomes.