Quotes from Fareed Zakaria

Lenin is supposed to have once said

China pledged $2 billion to the global response to Covid-19 while the US moved to cut funding for the World Health Organization and withdraw from the agency altogether.

It turns out that in any system, of these three characteristics—open, fast, stable—you can have only two.

we could view this global pandemic as a spur to global cooperation and action.

Today's self-professed socialists want greater government investment, new and expanded safety nets, a "Green New Deal" to address climate change, and higher taxes on the rich. Bernie Sanders himself makes clear his

When markets shower you with cash, you consider it your just rewards, but when they withdraw their blessings, you holler that the game is rigged.

As many as 1 million plant and animal species (of 8 million total) are threatened with extinction, some within a few decades.

War almost always meant taxation, which ended up putting pressure on government to provide more services for its people. One of the reasons that tiny Britain became such a formidable modern state and then built a global empire was that its many conflicts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries helped it develop not only a superb navy but also an impressive fiscal machine.

The highly unequal access to health care is part of a larger dynamic of a "pay-to-play" society, in which everything has become dominated by the market. Hospital executives and university presidents are seen not as societal leaders but as CEOs, and are paid to behave like them as well.

terrorism is the weapon of the weak

80 billion animals are slaughtered for meat every year around the world. (And that doesn't even count fish.)

Most livestock—an estimated 99% in America, 74% around the world—comes from factory farms.

I should have paid greater attention to my mentor in graduate school, Samuel Huntington, who once explained that Americans never recognize that, in the developing world, the key is not the kind of government — communist, capitalist, democratic, dictatorial — but the degree of government. That absence of government is what we are watching these days, from Libya to Iraq to Syria. ("Why they still hate us, 13 years later," Washington Post, 09/05/2014)

The top 20 centimeters of soil is all that stands between us and extinction.

FOR MOST OF human history, education was job training. Hunters, farmers, and warriors taught the young to hunt, farm, and fight. Children of the ruling class received instruction in the arts of war and governance, but this too was intended first and foremost as preparation for the roles they would assume later in society, not for any broader purpose. All that began to change twenty-five hundred years ago in ancient Greece.

The Balkan wars, the Asian financial collapse, the 9/11 attacks, the global financial crisis, and now Covid-19. While they are all different, they have something crucial in common. They are all asymmetric shocks—things that start out small but end up sending seismic waves around the world.

Even though the roots of the crash lay in the excesses of the private sector, in many countries, people did not move to the left economically; they moved to the right culturally.

For at least ten years, the revenues of the video gaming industry have exceeded those of Hollywood and the music business put together.)

students in affluent suburban U.S. school districts score nearly as well as students in Singapore, the runaway leader on TIMSS math scores.

But looking under the covers of Indian democracy one sees a more complex and troubling reality. In recent decades, India has become something quite different from the picture in the hearts of its admirers. Not that it is less democratic: in important ways it has become more democratic. But it has become less tolerant, less secular, less law-abiding, less liberal. And these two trends—democratization and illiberalism—are directly related.

Other educational systems teach you to take tests; the American system teaches you to think.

Animal products provide only 18% of calories worldwide, yet take up 80% of the earth's farmland.

Hyperinflation is the worst economic malady that can befall a nation. It wipes out the value of money, savings, assets, and thus work. It is worse even than a deep recession. Hyperinflation robs you of what you have now (savings), whereas a recession robs you of what you might have had (higher standards of living if the economy had grown).

through preparation, early action, and intelligent responses, we can quickly flatten its trajectory.