Quotes from Tom Malinowski

The advancement of democracy and human rights is as serious a business as anything we do in our foreign policy and cannot be treated as an afterthought in our relations with great powers.

As a Polish American, I grew up hearing the phrase 'nothing about us without us.' To Eastern Europeans, the vow is a painful reminder of how Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt carved up their small countries after World War II, placing them, against their will, under Soviet domination.

Kim Jong Un, like all totalitarian leaders, wants above all to ensure his survival. He is convinced that a nuclear strike capability is necessary to deter the United States and South Korea from threatening his regime, and to extract concessions that might prolong its life.

The president has immense powers, but he cannot spend money unless we, the people's representatives in Congress, have agreed that he can.

Let's face it: much of what we truly value in life is rooted in our experience of repression and conflict.

The American people do not want to waste billions of dollars on a wall that won't stop illegal immigration but will make America look fearful and foolish.

The president is entitled to try to persuade Congress and the American people to pursue whatever policies he thinks are needed. But he is not entitled to shut down the government when he fails to persuade us.

A robotic arms race seems inevitable unless nations collectively decide to avoid one.

TPP is not a leap of faith; it is an instrument of leverage.

Perhaps we could do without tragedy in art - but what about comedy? Is it a coincidence that so many of the best American humorists have been Jewish and African-American?

I will be working with my colleagues in the Congress to ensure that the federal government devotes as much attention to the domestic and transnational threat of white nationalist violence as it rightly has to all forms of terrorism.

Fighting corruption by improving financial transparency may be one of the most effective ways of promoting liberty around the world.

The rule of law that China's dissidents ask for is important to U.S. businesses investing in China as well.

In a totalitarian state like North Korea, a group of neighbors gathering once a week to watch the latest episode of a forbidden soap opera is committing a political act, and forming, with the market traders who deliver them this treasure, a rudimentary civil society.

When I was in government, I urged Congress to require that information about the actual owners of companies registered in the U.S. be disclosed to the Treasury Department, and made available on request to law enforcement.

Few provisions of the Constitution are more plain than Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7: 'No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.'

I recognize that most Americans are tired of U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan after more than 18 years of war. I am, too.

I am categorically opposed to BDS, because it seeks to delegitimize the state of Israel, opposes a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and encourages anti-Semitism.

In a sense, the central problem in U.S.-Russian relations has been a form of psychological projection. Putin views foreign policy as a means of enhancing Russia's - and his regime's - security, power and wealth in a zero-sum competition with other states. He assumes Americans are the same.

In America, we have holidays and monuments that celebrate heroes from our past, most of whom have legacies that are settled.

We are a country where the ancestors of slaves and newcomers escaping tyranny and violence can rise to the highest positions in the land.

The possibility of change in North Korea arose from its greatest calamity - the famine in the 1990s, in which over a million of its citizens died. Until then, according to defectors, most North Koreans were simply unaware that different ways of life or forms of government existed in the world.

The respect for the rights of minorities that China's Tibetan and Uighur activists champion would prevent instability that could spill across China's borders.

Investment in public infrastructure is key to America's greatness and essential to our national security.