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Defeat goes deeper into the human soul than victory. To be in someone else’s power is a conscious experience which induces doubts about the ordering of the universe, while those who have power can forget it, or can assume that it is part of the natural order of things and invent or adopt ideas which justify their possession of it.

— Albert Hourani A History of the Arab Peoples (1991)

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In the seventh century the Arabs created a new world into which other peoples were drawn. In the nineteenth and twentieth, they were themselves drawn into a new world created in western Europe. This of course is too simple a way of describing a very complicated process, and the explanations of it can be too simple too.

A History of the Arab Peoples (1991)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Albert Hourani (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.