Age of Revolutions Quotes

“Change in society must take place organically; when forced too fast, the ensuing disruption, chaos, and backlash can often break civilization itself.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“For decades now, we have watched a world in overdrive, with accelerating technological and economic change, fluctuating conceptions of identity, and rapidly shifting geopolitics.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“Where politics was once overwhelmingly shaped by economics, politics today is being transformed by identity.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“But in the short term, the transformations may cause great chaos. Remember what followed the invention of the printing press in Europe: a century and a half of religious wars.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“Constructing one’s own meaning of life is not easy—much simpler to consult the Bible or the Quran.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“As for Trump, of course now people everywhere ask me about him—not because he is a symbol of America’s wealth but because he is a symbol of the country’s dysfunction.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“From 1792 to 1958, as I have noted, over a mere century and a half, France was governed by three monarchies, two empires, five republics, a socialist commune, and a quasi-fascist regime.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“Throughout this story, we will see two competing plotlines: liberalism, meaning progress, growth, disruption, revolution in the sense of radical advance, and illiberalism, standing for regression, restriction, nostalgia, revolution in the sense of returning to the past. That dual meaning of revolution endures to this day. Donald Trump sees himself as a revolutionary, but one who wants to bring back the world of the 1950s.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“While the Dutch harnessed the expertise of exiles fleeing the Inquisition, Louis created a humanitarian catastrophe by cracking down on his own religious minorities. His repression of French Protestants—Huguenots—grew increasingly harsh over the course of his seven-decade rule, eventually driving at least 150,000 to flee France. (This exodus so shocked the conscience of Europe that it gave us the word “refugee,” from réfugié.)”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“Above all, the French Revolution shows the danger of revolution imposed by political leaders, rather than growing naturally out of broad social, economic, and technological changes.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“Throughout this story, we will see two competing plotlines: liberalism, meaning progress, growth, disruption, revolution in the sense of radical advance, and illiberalism, standing for regression, restriction, nostalgia, revolution in the sense of returning to the past.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“Human beings can absorb only so much change so fast. The old politics, inherited from a prior era, often cannot keep pace.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“These three forces—technology, economics, identity—together almost always generate backlash that produces a new politics.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“Above all, America sapped its strength by deciding to occupy Afghanistan and then invade Iraq. The failure of those interventions broke the mystique of America’s military might. Worse, the invasion showed the US violating the rules-based order it had long championed. Next came the global financial crisis of 2008, which dispelled the aura of America’s economic might.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“Liberal democracy is about rules, not outcomes. We uphold freedom of speech, rather than favoring specific speech.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“Yet the easy and instantaneous nature of our online existence also increases angst and impatience with the complexities of civic life.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“Like many right-wing populist parties we know from history, today’s antiestablishment movements espouse an exclusionary vision of “the people,”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“This is not just the story of Donald Trump in 2016; it is also the story of William Jennings Bryan, whom we’ve already met, in 1896. During the Gilded Age, populists like Bryan surged to prominence. They challenged the laissez-faire orthodoxy and appealed to America’s working class, a segment of society that was reeling from seismic shocks produced by the Industrial Revolution and a fast-globalizing American economy.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“populists from the left and right would reemerge periodically in American politics, particularly during periods of profound economic and technological tumult”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“In the 2020s, with two centuries of hindsight, we can now say definitively: the Industrial Revolution changed American society more than the American Revolution did.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise, argues that the world has become so complex that the average person doesn’t understand how things work, feels helpless, and comes to resent experts. And with endless information just a click away, people think they can find out the truth for themselves and dispense with the experts. Never mind that it might take a true expert to successfully “navigate through a blizzard of useless or misleading garbage” that proliferates on the internet. So when it came to vaccines, though most people rejoiced at this marvel of human ingenuity, a significant part of the population rejected the advice of experts. They felt uncomfortable about a vaccine produced so quickly and with such a novel technique.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“And Engels happened to be writing about a period when technology was booming but real wages remained stubbornly stagnant.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“The main divide in Dutch politics is one that will sound familiar to our ears today. That republic was deeply split between those who viewed openness, tolerance, diversity, and freedom as unalloyed virtues—and those who did not.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“Britain was not magically blessed with more inventors than other countries. The Glorious Revolution had cemented two key pillars of English exceptionalism: parliamentary rule and market capitalism. Both were systems marked by continuous trial and error and both encouraged a culture of experimentation.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“crowning himself emperor, and doling out royal titles to family and friends—putting his brothers on the thrones of Holland and Spain and a trusted general on the throne of Sweden. (The descendants of a common French soldier still reign in Stockholm today.)”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“When American colonists demanded their “rights as Englishmen” in the years leading up to 1776, they were harkening back to the spirit of 1688 and the Bill of Rights it produced. Of course, dissent would turn into a fight for American independence—with a boost from Britain’s rival, France. But the costs of supporting the American Revolutionary War bankrupted the French monarchy and precipitated a crisis. In the final years of the eighteenth century, French leaders took inspiration from their American predecessors and overthrew their king. But they went far beyond reform and tried to create revolution from the top down, imposing modernization on a society unready for such dramatic change. It would prove to be a grisly failure, one that has echoed through the ages.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“In the Glorious Revolution, conservative Tories and liberal Whigs found a consensus to reject the extremes of Catholic absolutism and radical republicanism that had wracked England. In 1689, they passed the Bill of Rights, whereby William and Mary recognized certain prerogatives of Parliament and the people.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“James’s religion had already generated opposition before he became king. One faction in Parliament, the less radical descendants of the Roundheads, wanted to exclude him from the line of succession due to his religion. This caused Charles II’s biggest dispute with Parliament. The group that opposed James’s eventual succession became known as the Whigs, while those who supported the succession plan, the same faction once called Cavaliers, became known as the Tories.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“Constant feuding between Charles and Parliament ultimately erupted in bloodshed in 1642. The English Civil War, which involved one in eight English men and killed some 150,000 total, ended in victory for the parliamentary army. In 1649, Charles I was beheaded, the monarchy was abolished, and a republic was proclaimed (for the first and only time in British history).”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“England was successfully invaded in 1688, and by another William at that—William of Orange. The country has never been the same since that Dutch invasion almost 350 years ago. Although that event and its consequences came to be known as the Glorious Revolution,”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present