Fareed Zakaria Quotes

If a senator calls me up and asks me what should we do in Iraq, I'm happy to talk to him.

Victoria Principal - she

America's growth historically has been fueled mostly by investment, education, productivity, innovation and immigration. The one thing that doesn't seem to have anything to do with America's growth rate is a brutal work schedule.

The Chinese economy's still not that much of a consumer economy.

This isolation has left Americans quite unaware of the world beyong their borders. Americans speak few languages, know little about foreign cultures, and remain unconvinced that they need to rectify this. Americans rarely benchmark to global standards because they are sure that their way must be the best and most advanced. There is a growing gap between America's worldly business elite and cosmopolitan class, on the one hand and the majority of the American people on the other. Without real efforts to bridge it, this divide could destroy America's competitive edge and its political future.

The United States is going to be a rich country, it is going to be prosperous, but it is not going to be able to take the lead in the next phase of global economic development.

In a very weak economy, when you say 'cut government spending,' what you mean is you're laying off school teachers and you're de-funding various programs that put money into the economy. This means you have more unemployed people that then draw unemployment benefits and don't pay taxes.

Germany is a fascinating role model. The Germans have maintained their manufacturing edge despite being a high-tax, high-regulation economy. Why? Because the government really set about ensuring that it maintained funding for technical training, technical advancements and programs. It made a concerted effort to retain high-end, complex manufacturing
the kind of BMW model, if you will. And they've done that so successfully that Germany, which has a quarter of America's population, exports more than America does.

When you're failing, there's a very powerful incentive to put ideology aside and just do what seems to work.

Having your fiscal house in order and having a more manageable macro-economic future is going to be very useful in creating growth.

Politics and power is a realm of relative influence.

What we need in politics today is not more democracy but less.

In fact, some have said that the clash between Catholicism and Protestantism illustrates the old maxim that religious freedom is the product of two equally pernicious fanaticisms, each cancelling the other out

The problem is that Islam does not have a pope, so there's no one guy to say, 'This isn't kosher' ... Not that he would.

One of the great dilemmas for America will be that American companies will do very well while American workers might not.

I should not be judged by a standard that's not applied to everyone else.

But now, we are becoming suspicious of the very things we have long celebrated - free markets, trade, immigration, and technological change. And all this is happening when the tide is going our way. Just as the world is opening up, America is closing down.

Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantages.

Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by Richard Nixon, described the new interpretation of the Second Amendment in an interview after his tenure as 'one of the greatest pieces of fraud-I repeat the word FRAUD-on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.

There is a huge crisis of employment in America, in the Western world in general.

I very much want to be in the business of creating content, of doing stories all over the world rather than figuring out what the business model is for 'Newsweek' on the iPad, although that's very important work as well.

ISIS is a formidable foe, but the counter forces to it have only just begun and if these forces, the Iraqi army, the Kurdish Peshmerga, American air power, the Syrian Free Army, work in a coordinated fashion, it will start losing ground. Also, please keep in mind that ISIS does not actually hold as much ground as the many maps flashed on television keep showing. Large parts of those territories that ISIS supposedly controls are vacant desert.

CNN is getting smarter, and you can feel it in the stories, you can feel it in the depth with which they're covered, the kinds of people in terms of guests who are brought on air, the way in which issues are discussed.

Liberal education should give people the skills that will help them get ready for their sixth job, not their first job.

In 1778, Jefferson presented to the Virginia legislature "A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge," in which he argued that all forms of government could degenerate into tyranny. The best way of preventing this, he wrote, is "to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large." The study of history could serve as an especially effective bulwark, allowing the people to learn how to defeat tyranny from past examples. Jefferson would return again and again to the importance of education in a democracy.

The most recent edition of the test - called the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) - was conducted in 2012, and it found that among the OECD's thirty-four members, the United States ranked twenty-seventh, twentieth, and seventeenth in math, science, and reading, respectively.

There is very strong historical data that suggests the way societies grow is by making large, long-term investments.

For years many in the oil-rich states argued that their enormous wealth would bring modernizations. They pointed to the impressive appetites of Saudis and Kuwaitis for things Western, from McDonald's hamburgers to Rolex watches to Cadillac limousines. but importing Western good is easy; importing the inner stuffing of modern society - a free market, political parties, accountability, the rule of law - is difficult and even dangerous for the ruling elites

Foreign policy commands attention when it's crisis management. A street revolt breaks out in Egypt or Libya or Kiev and everyone asks, how should the president respond? Now these are important parts of America's role in the world, but they are essentially reactive and tactical. The broader challenge is to lay down a longer-term strategy that endures after the crisis of the moment.

I enjoy writing but I much prefer the experience of having written.

Religions are vague, of course. This means that they are easy to follow -you can interpret their prescriptions as you like. but it also means that it is easy to slip up -there is always some injunction you are violating. But Islam has no religious establishment - no popes, no bishops - that can declare by fiat which is the correct interpretation. As a result, the decision to oppose the state on the grounds that is insufficiently Islamic belongs to anyone who wishes to exercise it.

The twentieth century was marked by two broad trends: the regulation of capitalism and the deregulation of democracy. Both experiments overreached.

The one show that I will continue to be a guest on is 'The Daily Show' with Jon Stewart, if he'll have me. It's not competitive with CNN and it's too much fun.

Iran is a country of 80 million people, educated and dynamic. It sits astride a crucial part of the world. It cannot be sanctioned and pressed down forever. It is the last great civilization to sit outside the global order.

It is likely that human beings will find fulfillment and will be rewarded for the same qualities that they have been rewarded for for 5,000 years. And that is intelligence, hard work, honesty, a sense of character, loyalty to family and friends, and above all, love and faith. If you are trying to decide what you should do, those are the things you should do. And you know it.

What remains of the old Protestant fundamentalism is politics: abortion, gays, evolution. these issues are what binds congregations together. but even here things have changed as Americans have become more tolerant of many of these social taboos. Today many fundamentalist churches take nominally tough positions on, say, homosexuality but increasingly do little else for fear of offending the average believer, whom one schollar calls the "unchurched Harry". All it really takes to be a fundamentalist these days is to watch the TV shows, go to the theme parks, buy Christian rock, and vote Republican. The Sociologist Mark Shilbey, calls it the Californication of conservative Protestantism.

I think it is quite untrue that it is standard journalistic practice to name the interviewer when quoting from an interview.

I don't want to paint a picture of total gloom and doom.

We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one.

I am an American, not by accident of birth but by choice. I voted with my feet and became an American because I love this country and think it is exceptional.

Things happening around the world are affecting you and me.

The technological revolution at home makes it much easier for computers to do our work.

The Yale report explained that the essence of liberal education was not to teach that which is peculiar to any one of the professions; but to lay the foundation which is common to them all.

Walter Lippmann was once asked his views on a particular topic, he is said to have replied, I don't know what I think on that one. I haven't written about it yet.

If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.

Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the United States succeeded in its great and historic mission
it globalized the world. But along the way, they might write, it forgot to globalize itself.

Civically engaged, business oriented, technology obsessed, and socially skilled, Franklin was "our founding Yuppie," declares the New York Times columnist David Brooks. Franklin "would have felt right at home in the information revolution," Walter Isaacson writes in his biography of the statesman. "We can easily imagine having a beer with him after work, showing him how to use the latest digital device, sharing the business plan of a new venture, and discussing the most recent political scandals or policy ideas." The essence of Franklin's appeal is that he was brilliant but practical, interested in everything, but especially in how things work.

The test scores used in admissions are a measure of what colleges take in, not what they produce. The fact that an Ivy League school has freshmen with high SAT scores tells us that it is a good magnet for talent but nothing else. What should matter is how students, including those with low SAT scores, improve over the course of their time in school.

More intriguingly, in poll after poll, when Americans are asked what public institutions they most respect, three bodies are always at the top of their list: the Supreme Court, the armed forces, and the Federal Reserve System. All three have one thing in common: they are insulated from the public pressures and operate undemocratically. It would seem that Americans admire these institutions, preciselly because they lead rather than follow.

Liberty came to the West centuries before democracy. Liberty led to democracy and not the other way around.

Foreign policy is a matter of costs and benefits, not theology.

But looking under the covers of Indian democracy one sees a more complex and troubling reality. In recent decades, India has become something quite different from the picture in the hearts of its admirers. Not that it is less democratic: in important ways it has become more democratic. But it has become less tolerant, less secular, less law-abiding, less liberal. And these two trends - democratization and illiberalism - are directly related.

The tallest building in the world is now in Dubai, the biggest factory in the world is in China, the largest oil refinery is in India, the largest investment fund in the world is in Abu Dhabi, the largest Ferris wheel in the world is in Singapore.

As John Adams famously wrote during the American Revolution, "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." So maybe today they're writing apps rather than studying poetry, but that's an adjustment for the age.

The Romans saw loss of virtue all around them. The Victorians decried the decline in religiosity in the next generation.

The world is changing very profoundly.

My friends all say I'm going to be Secretary of State. But I don't see how that would be much different from the job I have now.

Democracy is also a single ideology, and, like all such templates, it has its limits. what works in a legislature might not work in a corporation

There is no way to turn off this global economy, nor should one try. Every previous expansion of global capitalism has led to greater prosperity across the world.

In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.

On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq, [Bush's] assumptions and policies have been wrong. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw.

Intelligence is called the world's second oldest profession for a reason. Everyone does it.

I grew up in this world where everything seemed possible.

Thanks to the Communist Party of China, we now know the path to poverty alleviation is Capitalism.

Frederick Douglass saw the same connection. When his master heard that young Frederick was reading well, he was furious, saying, "Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world. If he learns to read the Bible it will forever unfit him to be a slave." Douglass recalled that he "instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.

FOR MOST OF human history, education was job training. Hunters, farmers, and warriors taught the young to hunt, farm, and fight. Children of the ruling class received instruction in the arts of war and governance, but this too was intended first and foremost as preparation for the roles they would assume later in society, not for any broader purpose. All that began to change twenty-five hundred years ago in ancient Greece.

Edmund Burke once described society as a partnership between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn. It is difficult to see in the evolving system who will speak for the yet unborn, for the future.

American influence is not what it used to be.

The political history of the twentieth century is the story of greater and more direct political participation. And success kept expanding democracy's scope. Whatever the ailment, more democracy became the cure.

America washes its dirty linen in public. When scandals such as this one hit, they do sully America's image in the world. But what usually also gets broadcast around the world is the vivid reality that the United States forces accountability and punishes wrongdoing, even at the highest levels.

A nations path to greatness lies in its economic prowess and that militarism, empire, and aggression lead to a dead end.

I'd be kidding if I said that I predicted the financial collapse.

Eighty years ago, Woodrow Wilson took America into the twentieth century with a challenge to make the world safe for democracy. As we enter the twenty-first century, our task is to make democracy safe for the world.

The central virtue of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to write, and writing makes you think. Whatever you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly, and reasonably quickly will prove to be an invaluable skill.

During the Asian financial crisis the United States and other Western countries demanded that the Asians take three steps
let bad banks fail, keep spending under control, and keep interest rates high. In it own crisis, the West did exactly the opposite on all three fronts.

Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are far more important symbols than any politician today, and they occupy the space that iconic political figures did in earlier eras.

As the United States continues its slow but steady recovery from the depths of the financial crisis, nobody actually wants a massive austerity package to shock the economy back into recession, and so the odds have always been high that the game of budgetary chicken will stop short of disaster. Looming past the cliff, however, is a deep chasm that poses a much greater challenge
the retooling of the country's economy, society, and government necessary for the United States to perform effectively in the twenty-first century.

Media reporters have pointed out that the paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore's essay in the April 22nd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers.

It's really difficult to have your voice heard and feared when you both speak softly and carry a twig.

Suppose the elections are free and fair and those elected are racists, fascists, separatists", said the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke about Yugoslavia in 1990s. "that is the dilemma

What we see today is an American economy that has boomed because of policies and developments of the 1950s and '60s: the interstate-highway system, massive funding for science and technology, a public-education system that was the envy of the world and generous immigration policies.

If envy were the cause of terrorism, Beverly Hills [and] Fifth Avenue ... would have become targets long ago.

Repeatedly proposed that the state pay for universal primary education as well as fund education at later stages. He was met with opposition from many quarters, mostly those wary of big government or higher taxes. Yet interestingly, one of his most ardent supporters was an old friend and political opponent, the conservative John Adams.

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expense of it," [John] Adams wrote. "There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves." Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantage.

No successful political transition can take place without leaders and movements that demand and press for freedom.

Alaska itself is an unusual state.

France placed the state above society , democracy above constitutionalism, and equality above liberty. As a result, for much of the nineteenth century it was democratic, with broad suffrage and elections, but hardly liberal. it was certainly a less secure home for individual freedom than was England or America.

We all accuse Vladimir Putin of Cold War nostalgia, but Washington's elites - politicians and intellectuals - miss the old days as well. They wish for the world in which the United States was utterly dominant over its friends, its foes were to be shunned entirely, and the challenges were stark, moral, and vital. Today's world is messy and complicated. China is one of our biggest trading partners and our looming geopolitical rival. Russia is a surly spoiler, but it has a globalized middle class and has created ties in Europe.

Good programming, like good books, asks a little more of the viewer. But no executive today will risk having the viewer bored for even a minute.

During the Cold War, we were interested because we were scared that Russia and the United States were going to go to war. We were scared that Russia was going to take over the world. Every country became a battleground.

If you go to India the roads are being built almost entirely with private sector money and by the private sector. If you look at many, many countries in Europe that's how they're doing it.

Conservatives used to believe in confronting hard truths, not succumbing to comforting fairy tales. Some still do.

The American consumer, even today, the weight of the American consumer in the global economy is China plus India doubled. So, it's tough to replace that.

Because of the times we live in, all of us, young and old, do not spend enough time and effort thinking about the meaning of life. We do not look inside ourselves enough to understand our strengths and weaknesses, and we do not look around enough - a the world, in history - to ask the deepest and broadest questions. The solution surely is that, even now, we could all use a little bit more of a liberal education.

Politically Incorrect was the name of the show Bill Maher hosted in the 1990s. It's also an apt description of the man himself. Now host of
HBO's hit show Real Time, I find Maher to be one of the sharpest observers of American politics and life in general out there. It doesn't mean I always agree with him. I always find him funny, though.

In 2010, foreign students received more than 50 percent of all Ph.D.'s awarded in every subject in the United States. In the sciences, that figure is closer to 75 percent. Half of all Silicon Valley start-ups have one founder who is an immigrant or first-generation American. America's potential new burst of productivity, its edge in nanotechnology, biotechnology, its ability to invent the future - all rest on its immigration policies.

I'm largely in favor of financial reform.