Waste Land Quotes

“Technology will increasingly deify the present by making it more vivid and overpowering, thus undermining our sense of history, which is an awareness of the past and future.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

“elites have an undeniable proclivity for groupthink and echo chambers, despite all their erudition”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

“This is certainly not a world governed by a rules-based order, as polite gatherings of the global elite like to define it, but rather a world of broad, overlapping areas of tension, raw intimidation, and military standoffs.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

“The very expansion of knowledge creates ever more intense and minute fields of specialization, which drives workers into little cubbyholes of experience, making everything beyond those cubbyholes, aside from immediate psychological and carnal needs, unreal and prone to manipulation by, for example, social-media demagogues. Such phenomena will help define city life of the future; or increasingly of the present, as both Ph.D.s and Internet influencers tell us what to think. This is how the most erudite and scientific minds can fall under the sway of a pop musician, sports figure, or politician. If a bit of nonsense is repeated enough times on a cable news channel, the most educated among us may start to believe it.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

“the U.N. has always been largely about performance politics.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

“our world is still one of pitiless power struggles that make a mockery of elite posturing.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis