Tim Marshall > Quotes

“Sometimes you will hear leaders say, “I’m the only person who can hold this nation together.” If that’s true then that leader has truly failed to build their nation.’ That”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“There are fifty American states, but they add up to one nation in a way the twenty-eight sovereign states of the European Union never can. Most of the EU states have a national identity far stronger, more defined, than any American state. It is easy to find a French person who is French first, European second, or one who pays little allegiance to the idea of Europe, but an American identifies with their Union in a way few Europeans do theirs. This is explained by the geography, and the history of the unification of the United States.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World

“What is now the EU was set up so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly in a loving embrace that neither would be able to get an arm free with which to punch the other.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don’t understand?”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“All great nations spend peacetime preparing for the day war breaks out.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“THE MIDDLE OF WHAT? EAST OF WHERE? THE REGION’S VERY name is based on a European view of the world, and it is a European view of the region that shaped it. The Europeans used ink to draw lines on maps: they were lines that did not exist in reality and created some of the most artificial borders the world has seen. An attempt is now being made to redraw them in blood.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“Equally important, anyone stupid enough to contemplate invading America would soon reflect on the fact that it contains hundreds of millions of guns, which are available to a population that takes its life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness very seriously.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World

“Analysts often write about the need for certain cultures not to lose face, or ever be seen to back down, but this is not just a problem in the Arab or East Asian cultures—it is a human problem expressed in different ways.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World

“Look again at the standard Mercator map and you see that Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, and yet Africa is actually fourteen times the size of Greenland! You could fit the USA, Greenland, India, China, Spain, France, Germany and the UK into Africa and still have room for most of Eastern Europe. We know Africa is a massive land mass, but the maps rarely tell us how massive.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“The countries of northern Europe have been richer than those of the south for several centuries. The north industrialised earlier than the south and so has been more economically successful.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“India and Pakistan can agree on one thing: neither wants the other one around.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” but few go on to complete the sentence, which ends “but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World

“The routine expression of hatred for others is so common in the Arab world that it barely draws comment other than from the region’s often Western-educated liberal minority who have limited access to the platform of mass media.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“Technology may seem to overcome the distances between us in both mental and physical space, but it is easy to forget that the land where we live, work and raise our children is hugely important, and that the choices of those who lead the seven billion inhabitants of this planet will to some degree always be shaped by the rivers, mountains, deserts, lakes and seas that constrain us all – as they always have.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“Very little trade has moved between China and India over the centuries, and that is unlikely to change soon. Of course the border is really the Tibetan–Indian border – and that is precisely why China has always wanted to control it. This is the geopolitics of fear. If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so. This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China’s great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as ‘China’s Water Tower’. China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the USA, but with a population five times as large, will clearly not allow that. It matters not whether India wants to cut off China’s river supply, only that it would have the power to do so. For centuries China has tried to ensure that it could never happen.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“As we’ve seen, the Chinese are everywhere, they mean business and they are now every bit as involved across the continent as the Europeans and Americans. About a third of China’s oil imports come from Africa, which – along with the precious metals to be found in many African countries – means they have arrived, and will stay. European and American oil companies and big multinationals are still far more heavily involved in Africa, but China is quickly catching up.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“When we are reaching for the stars, the challenges ahead are such that we will perhaps have to come together to meet them: to travel the universe not as Russians, Americans, or Chinese but as representatives of humanity. But so far, although we have broken free from the shackles of gravity, we are still improsoned in our own minds, confined by our suspicion of the "other," and thus our primal competition for resources. There is a long way to go.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“The word ‘arctic’ comes from the Greek artikos, which means ‘near the bear’, and is a reference to the Ursa Major constellation whose last two stars point towards the North Star. The Arctic Ocean is 5.4 million square miles; this might make it the world’s smallest ocean but it is still almost as big as Russia, and one and a half times the size of the USA.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“In Russia we see the influence of the Arctic, and how its freezing climate limits Russia’s ability to be a truly global power. In China we see the limitations of power without a global navy, and now the speed at which China is seeking to change this is becoming apparent.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“In 1867 Alaska was bought from Russia. At the time it was known as ‘Seward’s folly’ after the Secretary of State, William Seward, who agreed the deal. He paid $7.2 million, or 2 cents an acre. The press accused him of purchasing snow, but minds were changed with the discovery of major gold deposits in 1896. Decades later huge reserves of oil were also found.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“In NATO terms, Turkey is a key country because it controls the entrance to and exit from the Black Sea through the narrow gap of the Bosporus Strait. If it closes the Strait, which is less than a mile across at its narrowest point, the Russian Black Sea Fleet cannot break out into the Mediterranean and then the Atlantic. Even getting through the Bosporus only takes you into the Sea of Marmara; you still have to navigate through the Dardanelles Straits to get to the Aegean Sea en route to the Mediterranean.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“Because it is located so far south, and the coastal plain quickly rises into high land, South Africa is one of the very few African countries that do not suffer from the curse of malaria, as mosquitoes find it difficult to breed there. This allowed the European colonialists to push into its interior much further and faster than in the malaria-riddled tropics, settle, and begin small-scale industrial activity which grew into what is now southern Africa’s biggest economy.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“All the sovereignty issues [in the Arctic region] stem from the same desires and fears -- the desire to safeguard routes for military and comercial shipping, the desire to own the natural riches of the region, and the fear that others may gain where you lose.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“Why would the Russians want Moldova? Because as the Carpathian Mountains curve round south-west to become the Transylvanian Alps, to the south-east is a plain leading down to the Black Sea. That plain can also be thought of as a flat corridor into Russia; and, just as the Russians would prefer to control the North European Plain at its narrow point in Poland, so they would like to control the plain by the Black Sea – also known as Moldova – in the region formerly known as Bessarabia.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“North Korea is a stain on the world’s conscience, and yet few people know the full scale of the horrors taking place there.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 per cent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s ‘treasure chest’, containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east – the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal–Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“For example, in Liberia it is seeking iron ore, in the DRC and Zambia it’s mining copper and, also in the DRC, cobalt. It has already helped to develop the Kenyan port of Mombasa and is now embarking on more huge projects just as Kenya’s oil assets are beginning to become commercially viable.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“Sykes-Picot is breaking; putting it back together, even in a different shape, will be a long and bloody affair.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World

“When writers seek to get to the heart of the bear they often use Winston Churchill’s famous observation of Russia, made in 1939: ‘It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, but few go on to complete the sentence, which ends, ‘but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.’ Seven years later he used that key to unlock his version of the answer to the riddle, asserting, ‘I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“China chose the same strategy as Russia: attack as defence, leading to power. As we shall see, there were natural barriers which – if the Han could reach them and establish control – would protect them. It was a struggle over millennia, only fully realised with the annexation of Tibet in 1951.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics