Jeane Kirkpatrick

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

There is no pure free-market economy.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

A government is not legitimate merely because it exists.

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

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

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

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

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

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.