89 Quotes by Madeleine K. Albright

The EU’s advantage is that disentangling Europe from the single currency and a shared regulatory structure would be extraordinarily disruptive and expensive.

Since early 2017, surveys show a marked decline in respect for the United States. In Germany, belief that the American president can be counted on to do the right thing shrank from 86 percent under his predecessor to 11 percent under Trump. In France, the fall was from 84 percent to 14; in Japan, 74 to 24; in South Korea, 84 to 17.

He is president because he convinced enough voters in the right states that he was a teller of blunt truths, a masterful negotiator, and an effective champion of American interests. That he is none of those things should put us on edge, but there is a larger cause for unease.

The ability of a free and independent press to hold political leaders accountable is what makes open government possible – it is the heartbeat of democracy. Trump is intent on stilling, or slowing down, that heartbeat. This is a gift to dictators, and coming from a chief executive of the United States, cause for shame.

To reduce the sum of our existence to a competitive struggle for advantage among more than two hundred nations is not clear-eyed but myopic. People and nations compete, but that is not all that they do.

He used simple words and did not hesitate to tell what he later described as “colossal untruths.” He sought to incite hatred toward those he considered traitors – the “November criminals” whose treachery had cost Germany the war – and he returned each day to what Nietzsche had called the ideology “of those who feel cheated”: anti-Semitism.

Thus was conceived a phenomenon that would split America from right to left and raise ominous questions – of a type we still face – about whether a democratic citizenry can be talked into betraying its own values.

Historian Robert Paxton begins one of his books by asserting: “Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain.

There are two kinds of Fascists: those who give orders and those who take them. A popular base gives Fascism the legs it needs to march, the lungs it uses to proclaim, and the muscle it relies on to menace – but that’s Fascism from the neck down. To create tyranny out of the fears and hopes of average people, money is required, and so, too, ambition and twisted ideas.