Jeane Kirkpatrick Quotes
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Cultural constraints condition and limit our choices, shaping our characters with their imperatives.
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No idea holds greater sway in the minds of educated Americans that the belief that it is possible to democratize governments anytime and anywhere under any circumstances.
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When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn't blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.
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Democracy not only requires equality but also an unshakable conviction in the value of each person, who is then equal. Cross cultural experience teaches us not simply that people have different beliefs, but that people seek meaning and understand themselves in some sense as members of a cosmos ruled by God.
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For all their faults, right-wing authoritarian regimes more easily accept democratic reforms than left-wing totalitarian states.
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A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created
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I think that there is absolutely no free market in modern industrial states.
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Society has never barred women from bread-winning roles, but only from economic roles that are profitable and respectable.
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History is a better guide than good intentions.
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A government is not legitimate merely because it exists.
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[The American position at the UN is] essentially impotent, without influence, heavily outvoted, and isolated.
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Straying off course is not recognized as a capital crime by civilized nations.
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I believe that detente was having almost the opposite effect of what was intended. What was intended was to sort of end the contest for power and to stop Soviet expansion, especially by military means and the military build-up, the military contest
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Truth, which is important to a scholar, has to be concrete. And there is nothing more concrete than dealing with babies, burps and bottles, frogs and mud.
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Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn't manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared.
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Solidarity was the movement that turned the direction of history, I think.
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When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States' policies of one hundred years ago, but then they always blame America first.
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Words can destroy. What we call each other ultimately becomes what we think of each other, and it matters.
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That is simply that Marxism has been tremendously fashionable in our time, so it has infected a very large number of major institutions in many countries of the world. So I suppose that we shouldn't be too surprised that it should infect the church as well.
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Democrats can't get elected unless things get worse-and things won't get worse unless they get elected.
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There is an absolutely fundamental hostility on the part of totalitarian regimes toward religion.
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And I have no doubt that the American people generally believe the world is safer, and that we are safer, when we are stronger
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In the years just before... during the Carter years, the Soviets regularly violated, if you will, both the spirit and theletter of arms control agreements, I think, that they had negotiated during the period of detente.
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All of us confront limits of body, talent, temperament. But that is not all. We are, all of us, also constrained by our time, our place, our civilization.
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I'm a political scientist and I study these things, and I know that economic problems, with the rising unemployment and inflation and low productivity and so forth, were a factor in that election, in that defeat of President Carter.
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Mr. President, we've taken off our "Kick Me" sign.
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Power ... is not an end in itself, but is an instrument that must be used toward an end.
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I was a woman in a man's world. I was a Democrat in a Republican administration. I was an intellectual in a world of bureaucrats. I talked differently. This may have made me a bit like an ink blot.
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Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.
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I think that it's always appropriate for Americans and for American foreign policy to make clear why we feel that self-government is most compatible with peace, the well-being of people, and human dignity
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Jeane Kirkpatrick
- Born: November 19, 1926
- Died: December 7, 2006
- Occupation: United States Ambassador to the United Nations
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