Fareed Zakaria famous quotes

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Technology #Envy #Immigration

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

#Doe #World #Reason

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Dubai #Oil #World

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

#Party #Path #Poverty

The Berlin Wall wasn't the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Wall #War #Fall

In a world awash in debt, power shifts to creditors.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Debt #World #Creditors

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Graduation #Loyalty #Honesty

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

#Writing #Enjoy

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Military #Simple #Past

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#America #Innovation #Growth

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Country #Civilization #Iran

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#India #Weight #Today

...foreign policy is a matter of costs and benefits, not theology.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Cost #Benefits #Matter

It all looks American because America, the country that invented mass capitalism and consumerism, got there first. the impact of mass capitalism is now universal.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Country #Impact #America

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Air #Issues #Cnn

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

#Financial #Said #Collapse

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, precisely because they lead rather than follow.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Three #Body #Pressure

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#America #Government #Bmw

A nation's path to greatness lies in its economic prowess and ... militarism, empire, and aggression lead to a dead end.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Lying #Greatness #Empires

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#America #Egypt #Challenges

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

#Voice #Speak #Twigs

Legitimacy is the elixir of political power.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Political #Legitimacy #Elixir

The United States needs serious change in its fiscal, entitlement, infrastructure, immigration, and education policies, among others. And yet a polarized and often paralyzed Washington has pushed dealing with these problems off into the future, which will only make them more difficult and expensive to solve.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Immigration #United States #Needs

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Religious #Two #Said

We have the leading companies and the leading sectors in the advanced industrial world, we have an incredibly dynamic society, and we have high levels of entrepreneurship. And we have the best universities in the world. ... We also have impeccable credit. What we don't have is a political system that can take the simple measures to deal with our short-term deficit.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Simple #Political #Credit

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Fashion #Army #Air

Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Oxygen #Community #Want

Things happening around the world are affecting you and me.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#World #Around The World

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

#Believe #Comforting #Fairy Tale

American influence is not what it used to be.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Influence #Used

Alaska itself is an unusual state.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Alaska #Unusual #States

If we didn't have the rest of the world growing, the United States economy would be in much worse shape than it is today.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#World #Growing #Shapes

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

#Iraq #Should #Call Me

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

#Want #Paint #Doom

Culture follows power.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Culture

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

#Should #Standards #Judged

Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Dream #Moving #Ideas

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

#Creating #Order #House

I grew up in this world where everything seemed possible.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#World #Grew Up #This World

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

#Thinking #Practice #Names

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

#America #Employment #World

The situation in Syria is quite different from Libya.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Different #Libya #Situation

The markets are much more interested in America's long-term trajectory than they are in feeling that there is an acute short-term crisis.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#America #Long #Feelings

Street protests in Saudi Arabia might warm our hearts, but they could easily lead to $250 a barrel oil and a global recession.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Heart #Oil #Arabia

It is absolutely clear that government plays a key role, as a catalyst, in promoting long-run growth.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Running #Keys #Government

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

#Nuclear #Hussein #Soap

I think that liberals need to grow up.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Growing Up #Thinking #Needs

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Teacher #School #Mean

You know, when the cost of capital goes down, when credit becomes cheap, people start taking greater and greater risks.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#People #Risk #Cost

Strip away the usual hot air, and bin Laden's audiotape is the sign of a seriously weakened man.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Men #Air #Usual

The people who watch Fox are not going to watch CNN. You know, lets be honest.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Cnn #People #Watches

The tallest building in the world is now in Dubai...
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Dubai #World #Building

It's not possible for two countries to be the leading dominant political power at the same time.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Country #Two #Political

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Ipads #Creating #Important

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

#Two #Democracy #Deregulation

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Country #Recovery #Past

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
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Jobs #Different #Would Be

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Mistake #Media #Editors

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Iraq #Issues #Arrogance

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Opening Up #America #Long

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Dirty #Reality #America

If you listen to the political discourse in America today, you would think that all our problems have been caused by the Mexicans of the Chinese or the Muslims. The reality is that we have caused our own problems. Whatever has happened has been caused by isolating ourselves or blaming others.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Reality #Thinking #America

The great drama of Russian history has been between its state and society. Put simply, Russia has always had too much state and not enough society.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Drama #Russia #Too Much

Politics and power is a realm of relative influence,
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Influence #Realms #Relative

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

#Strong #Data #Long

California has often led the country, indeed the world, in the technology, consumption, trends, lifestyles, and of course, mass entertainment. It is where the car found its earliest and fullest expression, where suburbs blossomed, where going to gym replaced going to church, where forces that lead so many to assume that direct democracy is the wave of the future - declining political parties, telecommuting, new technology, the internet generation 0 are all most well developed in this vast land.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Country #Party #Technology

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Home #America #Democracy

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Country #Thinking #Feet

I'm largely in favor of financial reform.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Favors #Reform #Financial

It hasn't been easy to find American citizens who are willing to pick fruit in 110 degree weather.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Weather #Fruit #Degrees

One of the things that has been very difficult in Libya is the sense of uncertainty - the sense that they haven't actually finished the revolution, that there was still a great deal of uncertainty. That uncertainty has made Libya harder for business in terms of oil and other things as well.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Business #Oil #Revolution

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Writing #America #Twenties

But as the arms-control scholar Thomas Schelling once noted, two things are very expensive in international life: promises when they succeed and threats when they fail.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Two #Promise #Arms

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

#Successful #Leader #Political

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Religious #Islamic #Mean

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Real #Mean #Men

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.
-- Fareed Zakaria

#Democracy #Might #Corporations