It is clear that international law must evolve, even if it will be difficult to find the new and appropriate notions that will allow it to. However, it is unlikely that we will ever be capable of building a world that is qualitatively better than we ourselves are.
~ Sam Nunberg
:::
It is clear that international law must evolve, even if it will be difficult to find the new and appropriate notions that will allow it to. However, it is unlikely that we will ever be capable of building a world that is qualitatively better than we ourselves are.
~ Jean-François Revel
:::
The idea that a culture can preserve its originality by barricading itself against foreign influences is an old illusion that has always produced the opposite of the desired result. Isolation breeds sterility. It is the free circulation of cultural products and talents that allows each society to perpetuate and renew itself.
~ Jean-François Revel
:::
The success and originality of American integration stem precisely from the fact that immigrants’ descendants can perpetuate their ancestral cultures while thinking of themselves as Americans in the fullest sense, sharing basic ideals across racial and ethnic barriers. In France, the characteristic attitude of newcomers from North Africa, Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa is predominantly one of alienation, confrontation, rejection, and hatred.
~ Jean-François Revel
:::
Since no example of Leninist socialism is other than totalitarian and bureaucratic, one wonders how the doctrinaire ideologists can dismiss so disdainfully those who point out that the promise of socialism in freedom, while surely praiseworthy, remains a promise only, not something experienced in reality.
~ Jean-François Revel
:::
There is a big difference between being anti-American and being critical of the United States. Once again: critiques are appropriate and necessary, provided that they rest on facts and address real abuses, real errors and real excesses — without deliberately losing sight of America’s wise decisions, beneficent interventions and salutary policies.
~ Jean-François Revel
:::
Today in America—the child of European imperialism—a new revolution is rising. It is the revolution of our time – and offers the only possible escape for mankind today.
~ Jean-François Revel
:::
Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.
~ Jean-François Revel
:::
The strange thing is that it’s always in Europe that dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up, yet it’s always America that is “fascist”.
~ Jean-François Revel
:::
The utopia of socialism with a human face has been crushed everywhere even before it could be born. How distressing that becoming humane, which should be the least we could expect from a regime dedicated to liberating humanity, should present for socialism a problem as impossible as squaring the circle.
~ Jean-François Revel
:::