Jeane Kirkpatrick Quotes

A government is not legitimate merely because it exists.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.