274 Quotes by Madeleine Albright

I loved what I did. I could've been secretary of state for ever.

I never dreamed about one day becoming Secretary of State. It's not that I was modest; it's just that I had never seen a Secretary of State in a skirt.

I wasn't a normal professor. I had worked in government. I hadn't written nine zillion books. I was a hands-on professor.

The main thing is to remain oneself, under any circumstances; that was and is our common purpose.

My parents were of the generation who thought they were the children of a free Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in central Europe.

I went to a girls high school and I went to a women's college and when I first started teaching at Georgetown it had been a single sex school and so they wanted to have some women professors when they went co-ed, and so I originally was hired to start a program there, and really encourage women to go into foreign policy. I always have done that, and I really do think that things are better when women are involved.

To understand Europe, you have to be a genius - or French.

I had more problems with the men in our own government, and not because they were male chauvinistic pigs but because they had known me for so long. I might have been a carpool mother and a friend of their wife, and so they'd been to my house for dinner and things like and they thought 'how did she get to be secretary of state when I should be secretary of state?' So that was more of a problem.

I have been in meetings where a head of state will say, 'I like your tie,' to a man... or, 'I like your country because the weather's good,' or whatever. So for me, the pins in some ways were openers.