Jeane Kirkpatrick famous quotes

A government is not legitimate merely because it exists.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Government #Liberty

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Pain #Thinking #Views

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Men #Intellectual #May

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

#Mistake #Thinking #Justice

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Baby #Important #Bottles

Words can destroy. What we call each other ultimately becomes what we think of each other, and it matters.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Healing #Thinking #Matter

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

#Democracy #Conviction #Unshakable

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

#Program #Democrat

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Civilization #Body #Limits

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

#Taken #President #Kicks

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Ostriches #San Francisco #World

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

#Malaise #Carter #Walter Mondale

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

#Winning #Roles #Bread

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Cutting #Thinking #Government

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
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#War #Class #People

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

#Believe #People #Doubt

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

#Government #Influence #Isolated

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

#Government #Democracy #Assuming

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
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Military #Believe #Mean

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Thinking #Agreement #Years

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

#Fundamentals #Regimes #Hostility

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

#Thinking #Modern #States

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Political #President #Unemployment

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Military #War #Trying

History is a better guide than good intentions.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#History #Good Intentions #Intention

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

#Crime #Civilized

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

#War #Party #Want

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
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Thinking #Government #Self

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

#Effort #Political #Problem

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

#Needs #Matter #Faces

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#People #Democracy #Different

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

#Helping Others #Opportunity #People

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

#War #Wings #Reform

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

#Administration #Chiefs

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 .
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Government #Discipline #People

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

#Thinking #Movement #Solidarity

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 .
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Government #Ideas #Mind

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Mind #Lists #Entitlement

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

#Believe #Heart #Maturity

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Eyebrows #Wipe #Language

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#War #Years #America

They always blame America first!
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#America #Firsts #Blame

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#San Francisco #Issues #United States

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Real #Believe #Giving

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Country #Numbers #Church

There is no pure free-market economy.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Economy #Market Economy #Free Market

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.
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick

#Thinking #Expansion #World

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

#Army #Surprise #Speed