Our world is made up of lines, from comet tails to DNA. Every thing is connected. Every thing is sequential. Every thing that moves, from a snail to a lava flow leaves a line, a trace of passing. A line can be fate, a commitment, a fact, a relationship, a place. Some lines are well trodden paths, some intersect, some pass at a distance, some return to their origins. We all walk the line. We have an end and a beginning which is joined to a much longer invisible line in the past and in the future. —Anne Seymour in Richard Long’s book Walking the Line , 2009, p. 9
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51