Quotes from Amy Chua

And that's how I outsmarted myself, changing our lives forever.

The great Enlightenment principles of modernity—liberalism, secularism, rationality, equality, free markets—do not provide the kind of tribal group identity that human beings crave and have always craved. They have strengthened individual rights and individual liberty, created unprecedented opportunity and prosperity, transformed human consciousness, but they speak to people as individuals and as members of the human race, whereas the tribal instinct occupies the realm in between.

at different times in the past, both the American Left and the American Right have stood for group-transcending values. Neither does today.

As a Coptic priest in New York put it, "[H]umility is a mediator. It will always be the shortest distance between you and another person.

The United States spent over $1 trillion on the war in Iraq; some 4,500 American lives were lost. Yet fourteen years after the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, Iran's power is ascendant, with Tehran now wielding more influence over Baghdad than Washington.

Page 210 Indeed, precisely because American society is so wealthy overall, America has come to occupy the role of a starkly market-dominant minority vis-à-vis the rest of world. We are now the object of intense resentment, even hatred, spurred by globalization.

It creates within America a virtuous Us and a demonized Them.

But in recent years, whether because of growing strength or growing frustration with the lack of progress, the Left has upped the ante. A shift in tone, rhetoric, and logic has moved identity politics away from inclusion—which had always been the Left's watchword—toward exclusion and division.

Humans aren't just a little tribal. We're very tribal, and it distorts the way we think and feel. But not all group identities are equally potent. Some have a much stronger grip than others and are more politically galvanizing. Very few people have ever given their lives for the American Podiatry Association. One of the most powerful forms of group identity—and the focal point of political tribalism and violence all over the world today—is ethnicity.

When free market democracy is pursued in the presence of a market-dominant minority, the almost invariable result is backlash. This backlash typically takes on of three forms. The first is a backlash against markets, targeting the market-dominant minority's wealth. The second is a backlash against democracy by forces favorable to the market-dominant minority. The third is violence, sometimes genocidal, directed against the market-dominant minority itself

It's not enough that we view one another as fellow human beings; we need to view on another as fellow Americans. And for that we need to collectively find a national identity capacious enough to resonate with, and hold together as one people, Americans of all sorts - old and young, immigrant and native born, urban and rural, descendants of slaves as well as descendants of slave owners.

I think I can do it," Lulu said. She had a lot of confidence, and, as long as it wasn't me forcing it on her, she loved a challenge.

Against a backdrop of stark group inequality, the most successful extremist groups offer their members precisely what existing societal institutions do not: a tribe, a sense of belonging and purpose, an enemy to hate and kill, and a chance to reverse the group polarity, turning humiliation into superiority and triumph. This is the formula that al-Qaeda and ISIS have exploited.

Many lower class Americans view protesters as disreputable and unhelpful, as 'professional activists' who are entirely disconnected from the working class because they've never experienced struggle in their own personal lives, and who protest mainly to find personal validation.

Page 120: The only point I wish to highlight here is that there are important links between colonialism and the phenomenon of market-dominant minorities. Not only were the colonialists themselves market-dominant minorities, but colonial divide-and-conquer policies favored certain groups over others, exacerbating ethnic wealth imbalances and fomenting group tensions

But American group blindness abroad is also rooted in some of our noblest ideals: tolerance, equality, individualism, the power of reason to triumph over irrational hatred, and the conviction that all men are united by their common humanity and love of liberty.

Page 147: When a poor democratic majority collides with a market-dominant minority, the majority does not always prevail. Instead of a backlash against the market, there is a backlash against democracy. Often, this antidemocracy backlash takes the form of "crony capitalism": corrupt, symbiotic alliances between indigenous leaders and a market-dominant minority

Without taking anything away from their important contributions across the globe, U.S. elites often seem to have more compassion for the world's poor than America's poor, perhaps because the former are easier to romanticize.

America's elites today, especially progressive ones, often don't realize how judgmental they are.

If we want to get our foreign policy right - if we don't want to be perpetually caught off guard, fighting unwinnable wars, and stuck having to choose between third- and fourth-best options - the United States has to come to grips with political tribalism abroad. And if we want to save our nation, we need to come to grips with its growing power at home.

America's elites miscalled the 2016 election in part because they don't understand—even look down on—what matters most to America's nonelites.

The Kenyan Cowboys strive to carry on this [Happy Valley] tradition, mainly through drinking and such activities as putting "butter pats on the carnations on the dinner table and throwing them up at the ceiling to see if they will stick".

For Chinese people, when it comes to parents, nothing is negotiable. Your parents are your parents, you owe everything to them (even if you don't), and you have to do everything for them (even if it destroys your life).

This what's so peculiar about America. We have been both exceptionally racist and exceptionally inclusive.