Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel P. Huntington

The little word “also” is doing the heavy lifting here, smuggling a worldview into a sentence that sounds merely descriptive. Huntington isn’t just noting that Americans once carried ethnic identities; he’s insisting those identities sat comfortably alongside other forms of belonging, and he wants you to feel the loss of that arrangement. “Racial and largely ethnic” narrows the field of legitimate self-understanding to categories that can be policed: lineage, boundaries, insiders and outsiders. It’s an invitation to treat identity as inheritance rather than argument.

In context, this line reads like a keyhole into Huntington’s larger project: making cultural cohesion feel like a measurable national resource, and making demographic change feel like depletion. The verb “thought” matters too. It implies a shared mental habit, a collective common sense, not an ideology. That’s strategic. If racial and ethnic self-conception is framed as how “we” naturally operated, then anyone resisting it becomes the abnormal actor: naive, elitist, or dangerously utopian.

The subtext is less about nostalgia than about governance. If a society “thought of ourselves” in these terms, then institutions can be justified in organizing around them, even when the language stays politely sociological. Huntington’s style often works like this: clinical tone, charged implications. The sentence is short, almost banal, but it gestures toward a larger claim that identity categories are not just social facts; they’re stabilizers. That makes pluralism sound like experiment, and hierarchy sound like history.