Jeane Kirkpatrick Quotes

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.

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.

Straying off course is not recognized as a capital crime by civilized nations.

Decades, if not centuries are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits. (for democracy) In Britain, the road to (democratic government) took seven centuries to traverse .

And I have no doubt that the American people generally believe the world is safer, and that we are safer, when we are stronger.

And I think detente had manifestly failed, and that the pursuit of it was encouraging Soviet expansion and rendering the world more dangerous, and especially rendering the Western world in greater peril.

For all their faults, right-wing authoritarian regimes more easily accept democratic reforms than left-wing totalitarian states.

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.

I always assume that democracy is the only good form of government, quite frankly, and democracy is always to be preferred.

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.

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.

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.

Tyranny and anarchy are alike incompatible with freedom, security, and the enjoyment of opportunity.

They always blame America first!

Truth, which is important to a scholar, has got to be concrete. And there is nothing more concrete than dealing with babies, burps and bottles, frogs and mud.

The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American Policy makers.

Lesser of two evils.

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 .

Maturity is when we live by the truths that are in our heart and soul, truths we believe to be right for us.

Power ... is not an end in itself, but is an instrument that must be used toward an end.

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.

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.

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.

There is an absolutely fundamental hostility on the part of totalitarian regimes toward religion.

Neither nature, experience, nor probability informs these lists of 'entitlements', which are subject to no constraints except those of the mind and appetite of their authors.

Look, I don't even agree with myself at times.

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.

There is no pure free-market economy.

Jean Kirkpatrick [is] the chief sadist-in-residence of the Reagan Administration