Quotes from Fiona Hill

The Russians thrive on misinformation and disinformation.

The problem in Pankisi is an extension of broader problems throughout Georgia. The whole system is based on shady deals. The entire government is corrupt.

New ties between Russia and Japan would mark not only a breakthrough in their relations but also a significant shift in Northeast Asia's political dynamic.

I got a PhD from Harvard and a few years later, there was a girl from Sunderland who hadn't got into Oxford or Cambridge, even though she'd got perfect A-levels. Harvard asked me to come and recruit her because I was recruited out of university by Harvard - they were trying to show that people could make it.

I grew up poor with a very distinctive working-class accent. In England in the 1980s and 1990s this would have impeded my professional advancement. This background has never set me back in America.

The capital city of Grozny in Chechnya was reduced completely to rubble, and Putin thought this was worthwhile because it kept the state together.

You see how deviously the institution of marriage threads itself through a woman's life? If she does not marry she is perpetually a child—until she is suddenly an old woman, that is.

Good men have only to do nothing, for evil to conquer" (137).

Historically, polarization and populism--and their close traveling companions, extremism and authoritarianism--emerge from the politics of cultural despair.

Absolutely everything I've done - my research, my training, my book - was made possible due to Harvard opening doors and providing me with connections.

Russia has always been very careful to try to balance the interest of the Gulf states and Iran off against each other.

The real concern for the Russians is that they're going to get closed out, that there's gong to be a new 'Iron Curtain'... for European expansion and all of its institutional forms.

We have politicized the issue of Russia to a point that we can't have a sensible conversation about it.

Putin's treatment of Chechnya became a cautionary tale of what would happen to rebels and terrorists - and indeed to entire groups of people - if they threatened the Russian state.

Russia and China thawed their frosty relationship in the 1990s and signed a friendship treaty in 2001, but China's rise has increased tensions in every regional relationship.

I know Kurt Volker definitely to be a man of integrity.

I tend to look at Trump as a real-estate mogul. You look at a building and say, 'I'm just going to tear that down and build up something new.' He's not exactly Mr. Preservationist.

And Trump isn't exactly the most diplomatic of people.

I don't want to suggest that Trump is emulating Putin. Trump is his own creation.

We've got ourselves into a situation where government service is somehow seen to be a political act rather than an act of civic duty or of public service.

My dad was a coal miner in County Durham.

Obama is under incredible pressure to supply arms to Ukraine.

Our basic problem is how do we stop the hot war on the ground in Ukraine, and not get into a more and more escalatory relationship with Putin.

I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine - not Russia - attacked us in 2016.