Quotes from Madeleine K. Albright

Uncontrolled migration produces social friction not because many refugees are criminals and terrorists (they aren't), but because living side by side with strangers requires two precious commodities: goodwill and time. Both are necessary to build trust; neither is as widely available as we would like.

he arrived in the nation's highest office without ever having won a majority vote

Thomas Edison hailed him as the "genius of the modern age"; Gandhi, as a "superman." Winston Churchill pledged to stand by him in his "struggle against the bestial appetites of Leninism." Newspapers in Rome, host to the Vatican, referred to him as "the incarnation of God." In the end, people who had worshipped [Benito Mussolini's] every move hung his corpse upside down next to his mistress's near a gas station in Milan.

As for Hitler, they were not nearly so scared of him as they should have been.

feather by feather, the chicken is plucked.

What the country needs is a plainspoken commitment by responsible leaders from both parties to address national needs together, accompanied by a general plan of action for doing so.

Earlier, I cited Oswald Spengler's chilling century-old prophecy that "the era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them." This is the real danger posed by Putin: that he will be a model for other national leaders who want to retain their grip on power indefinitely, despite political and legal constraints.

In April 1945, immediately before surrendering the construction site, the Germans locked 1,046 of the workers into a barn and burned them alive.

In recognition of his accomplishments, von Braun was publicly congratulated by President John F. Kennedy, whose older brother, Joseph Jr., had died while on a 1944 bombing mission against a doodlebug launch site in France.

Communists, like the Nazis, were manipulating the press, smearing political rivals, demanding total loyalty from their members, and threatening anyone who stood in their way.

ONE REASON, FRANKLY, IS DONALD TRUMP. IF WE THINK OF FASCISM as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab.

If Trump insists that judges are biased and calls the American criminal system a "laughingstock," what is to stop an autocratic leader like Duterte of the Philippines from discrediting his own judiciary?

I felt hemmed in by barriers that men were allowed to climb over or walk around. In this, I shared a desire with many women of my era—and yes, later eras—for greater freedom.

On June 9, 1942, R?žena Spieglová was one of a group of Czechoslovak Jews sent by rail transport to the Nazi concentration camp in Terezín. On June 12, they were transported farther east to a destination we do not know for sure, probably a forested area in occupied Poland. There were no survivors from that transport. My maternal grandmother was fifty-four years old when she was murdered.

The wise response to intolerance is not more intolerance or self-righteousness; it is a coming together across the ideological spectrum of people who want to make democracies more effective.

The death of 500,000 dead Iraqi children was "a very hard choice, but the price-we think the price is worth it

Being accused of having double standards is preferable to being convicted—due to our own refusal to act—of honoring no standards at all.

What are a country's strengths, and where is it vulnerable? Is its political system controlled from the top or driven by pressures from below? Are neighbors friendly or hostile? What is the nation's self-image? Are the people in charge decisive and visionary, or insecure and unable to see beyond the present?

Decades ago, George Orwell suggested that the best one-word description of a Fascist was "bully," and on the day of the Normandy invasion, Franklin Roosevelt prayed to the Almighty for a "peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men." By contrast, President Trump's eyes light up when strongmen steamroll opposition, brush aside legal constraints, ignore criticism, and do whatever it takes to get their way.

What that something might be is for each of us to decide in accordance with our opportunities and talents, but it begins by pushing back harder against the debilitating cancer of cynicism.

In recent years, we have all become familiar with the counterterrorism mantra: "See something, say something." In the pages that follow, I propose an added exhortation—do something. What that something might be is for each of us to decide in accordance with our opportunities and talents, but it begins by pushing back harder against the debilitating cancer of cynicism.

through a judicial process is it possible to establish individual culpability for crimes that might otherwise be attributed to an entire group—and nothing does more to trigger additional cycles of violence than perceptions of collective guilt.

Today, nearly two-thirds of the citizens in EU countries believe immigration has a harmful impact on their societies. Cosmopolitanism, once considered a virtue, is less in vogue than nativism.

Primo Levi added that the critical point can be reached "not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned.