Quotes from Fareed Zakaria

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

The crucial challenge is to learn how to read critically, analyze data, and formulate ideas—and most of all to enjoy the intellectual adventure enough to be able to do them easily and often.

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely. —E. O. Wilson

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.

Being forced to write clearly means, first, you have to think clearly.

the central virtue of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to write, and writing makes you think. Whatever you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly, and reasonably quickly will prove to be an invaluable skill.

liberal education should give people the skills "that will help them get ready for their sixth job, not their first job.

For Jefferson, there was one step crucial to creating a genuine natural aristocracy. The poor and rich had to have equal access to a good education.

Edmund Burke once described society as a partnership between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn. It is difficult to see in the evolving system who will speak for the yet unborn, for the future.

Suppose the elections are free and fair and those elected are racists, fascists, separatists", said the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke about Yugoslavia in 1990s. "that is the dilemma

Because of the times we live in, all of us, young and old, do not spend enough time and effort thinking about the meaning of life. We do not look inside ourselves enough to understand our strengths and weaknesses, and we do not look around enough - a the world, in history - to ask the deepest and broadest questions. The solution surely is that, even now, we could all use a little bit more of a liberal education.

Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantages.

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

during the Asian financial crisis the United States and other Western countries demanded that the Asians take three steps--let bad banks fail, keep spending under control, and keep interest rates high. In it own crisis, the West did exactly the opposite on all three fronts.

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.

The solution is not that people need to major in marketing in college, but that their liberal education should be more structured and demanding. Majors should have some required sequence of basic courses, as in economics.

What we need in politics today is not more democracy but less.

low interest rates and cheap credit also cause people to act foolishly or greedily ...

This should remind us to value the many people whose jobs do not generate huge incomes but are worthwhile, essential, even noble—from scholars and teachers to janitors and street cleaners. The market may not reward them, but we should respect them.

Frederick Douglass saw the same connection. When his master heard that young Frederick was reading well, he was furious, saying, "Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world. If he learns to read the Bible it will forever unfit him to be a slave." Douglass recalled that he "instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.

The Yale report explained that the essence of liberal education was "not to teach that which is peculiar to any one of the professions; but to lay the foundation which is common to them all.

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.

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.

British rule meant not democracy -colonialism is almost by definition underdemocratic - but limited constitutional liberalism and capitalism