Best 50 quotes of Jeane Kirkpatrick on MyQuotes

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

A government is not legitimate merely because it exists.

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.

Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is.

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.

Cultural constraints condition and limit our choices, shaping our characters with their imperatives.

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

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.

Democracy not only requires equality but also an unshakable conviction in the value of each person, who is then equal

Democrats can't get elected unless things get worse-and things won't get worse unless they get elected.

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

History is a better guide than good intentions.

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

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

I conclude that it is a fundamental mistake to think that salvation, justice, or virtue come through merely human institutions.

I don't think the government (of El Salvador) was responsible. The nuns were not just nuns; the nuns were political activists. We ought to be a little more clear-cut about this than we usually are. They were political activists on behalf of the Frente and somebody who is using violence to oppose the Frente killed them.

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.

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 think that Ronald Reagan wanted to hear other people's views, and he always listened carefully, and from time to time he changed his own mind about a position. And especially he took pains to listen carefully to foreign leaders with whom he was dealing.

I think that there is absolutely no free market in modern industrial states.

It was not malaise we suffered from; it was Jimmy Carter - and Walter Mondale.

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.

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.

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

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

Mr. President, we've taken off our "Kick Me" sign.

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.

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.

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

Society has never barred women from bread-winning roles, but only from economic roles that are profitable and respectable.

Solidarity was the movement that turned the direction of history, I think.

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

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.

The absence of utopianism in the Constitution, law, and traditional political culture has been ... important in limiting expectations concerning what can be achieved by politics. The history of the last two centuries confirms what the framers of the Constitution understood: that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the search for unalloyed virtue in public life leads to unalloyed terror.

[The American position at the UN is] essentially impotent, without influence, heavily outvoted, and isolated.

The real point is that totalitarian regimes have claimed jurisdiction over the whole person, and the whole society, and they don't at all believe that we should give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's.

There is no pure free-market economy.

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

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.

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

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.

We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.

What takes place in the Security Council more closely resembles a mugging than either a political debate or an effort at problem-solving.

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.

When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an afterthought, as they did, they behaved less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich - convinced it could shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand.

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.

...it is a different matter entirely to commit military resources to keep peace in such areas, where often no peace can be kept, or to build nations in our own image before they are ready for our freedoms - or even want them. The military need not do the work of sanctions and diplomacy. As we carry on in this new century, we would do well to remember the importance of balancing the twin goals of our foreign policy: preserving national security and promoting democratic principles. And we must remember that historic conflicts between enemies can be won on moral force, without firing a single bullet or missile; that cultural, market, political, and perhaps religious forces can be far more transformative in areas of the world where chaos and violence reign; and that America can contribute to the building of nations by any and all of these means - while preserving our military and reserving our sovereign right to wage war to maintain true peace.

We have war when at least one of the partes to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.

When we forget, or wilfully choose to ignore, the intractability of human behaviour, the complexity of human institutions, and the probability of unanticipated consequences, we do so at great risk, and often immense human cost.