Great powers must be forever vigilant and never subordinate survival to any other goal, including prosperity. - John Mearsheimer

The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way.

In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler believed that his great-power rivals would be easy to exploit and isolate because each had little interest in fighting Germany and instead was determined to get someone else to assume the burden. He guessed right.

I've been to China many times, I love going to China, I love the Chinese people and in fact I'm more at home intellectually in China than I am in the west, because the Chinese are basically realists, whereas in the west people are instinctively liberal and they instinctively don't like realism, because it's such a pessimistic way of thinking about the world in past years. [...] When I've gone to China I've often started my Talks by saying it's good to be back among my people, I don't speak a word of Chinese and I feel like I'm a fish out of water culturally, when I'm in China. But intellectually the Chinese are my kind of people, they're realists very interested in theory, I've never gone to any country where people are more interested in international relations theory and talking about the big issues.