The train passed through a series of tunnels. Because the overhead light fixtures had no bulbs in them, some people lit candles inside the tunnels, which dramatically illuminated their black, liquid eyes. There was a solemn, almost devotional cynicism to these eyes, reflecting, as though by a genetic process, all of the horrors witnessed by generation upon generation of forebears.
Robert D. KaplanThere are riches enough for all of us, no matter our abilities or circumstances. It is only the inspiration that requires summoning.
Robert D. KaplanTags: inspirational
The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place. But the experience in the Balkans reinforced an idealist dictum that is equally true: One should always work near the limits of what is possible rather than cynically give up on any place. In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough.
Robert D. KaplanTags: war idealism iraq noninterventionism bosnia interventionism realpolitik humanitarian-intervention
Just as the rag doll wanted to be an eagle, the donkey a lion and the monkey a queen, the zero put on airs and pretended to be a digit.
Robert D. KaplanWe realize that anything can be everything and each is also its opposite-then the image of zero's perfect ring shines before us.
Robert D. KaplanWill it be the idea of absence of any number-or the idea of a number for such absence? Is it to be the mark of the empty, or the empty mark?
Robert D. KaplanThose wonderful coincidences of sound and sense between one language and another were also at work, giving each new term an alluring resonance.
Robert D. KaplanBeyond it is the incalculable. In other words, numbers cannot exceed the number of things there are: so that for the teller and the audience of this tale, numbers still are attached to objects.
Robert D. KaplanTrue, they (numbers) are our invention and we have free will: but only to act compatibly with the world we've made.
Robert D. KaplanFor anything with a name(and zero had so many) surely existed......Yet how could what doesn't exist, exist?
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