Quotes from Condoleezza Rice

When you are going up the corporate ladder or the government ladder, you have to take some risk.

I would like to attract more minorities into the game. But it's extremely important that this golf look like - that golf look like America.

I talked about the need for American leadership, I talked about the importance of the United States to a more peaceful world, a world that has been quite turbulent in recent years, and needs a strong American anchor.

You cannot be on one hand dedicated to peace and on the other dedicated to violence. Those two things are irreconcilable.

Some governments choose to cooperate with the United States in intelligence, law enforcement, or military matters. The co-operation is a two-way street. We share intelligence that has helped protect European countries from attack, helping save European lives.

I think there are still unanswered questions about Benghazi. I think there are unanswered questions, and they could be easily answered. But I think they need to be answered.

What has always made our country special is that it doesn't matter where you come from; it matters where you're going. Our job is to make certain the pathways are open to both our boys and our girls.

I got the chance to be the secretary of state; I'm an international relations specialist. It doesn't get better than that.

One thing that education can do is it can provide us with an opportunity to understand one another better, and so while I've spent a lot of my time in the world of politics, I've always felt that it is really not politics that will solve this for us.

I've always said that I expected to grow up and get married like any nice southern girl, but the fact is you don't get married in the abstract. You find someone that you'd like to be married to.

I know a lot of very stable gay couples.

We will have to stand up for and promote the power and promise of free markets and free peoples, and affirm that American preeminence safeguards rather than impedes global progress.

We need a common enemy to unite us.

Well, there's been plenty of ultimatums, and one thing that we better be very clear is that we can't continue to have the kind of defiance of the United Nations, the defiance of the international community that we've had.

There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 11 September attacks. There was nothing demonstrating or showing that something was coming in the United States. If there had been something, we would have acted on it.

What the United States has done is to be open to people who are fleeing tyranny, who are fleeing danger, but we have done it in a very careful way that has worked for us.

We are not race blind. Of course we still have racial tensions in this country. But the United States of America has made enormous progress in race relations, and it is still the best place on Earth to be a minority.

The essence of America - that which really unites us - is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion - it is an idea - and what an idea it is: That you can come from humble circumstances and do great things.

Let me let you in on a little secret. There is no such thing as an international community. There are self-maximizing, self-interested states that will push their interests as far as possible.

I am a professor at Stanford; I am a happy professor at Stanford. That's where I'm staying.

We were spending American blood and treasure to liberate the people of Afghanistan from one of the most brutal regimes on the face of the earth. That we would not use that moment to press for women's rights seems to me unthinkable.

Great leaders never accept the world as it was and always work for the world as it should be

In America, with education and hard work, it really does not matter where you came from; it matters only where you are going.

If you cannot allow people to do their jobs ... nobody with substance and creativity will work for you.