Condoleezza Rice > Quotes

“Education is transformational. It changes lives. That is why people work so hard to become educated and why education has always been the key to the American Dream, the force that erases arbitrary divisions of race and class and culture and unlocks every person's God-given potential.”
― Condoleezza Rice

“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. That it doesn’t matter where you came from but where you are going.”
― Condoleezza Rice

“... it's good to have female or minority role models. But the important thing is to have mentors who care about you, and they come in all colors.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

“Prejudice and bigotry are brought down...by the sheer force of determination of individuals to succeed and the refusal of a human being to let prejudice define the parameters of the possible.”
― Condoleezza Rice

“...if you are overdressed, it is a comment on them. If you are under dressed, it is a comment on you.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

“Race is a constant factor in American life. Yet reacting to every incident,real or imagined, is crippling, tiring, and ultimately counterproductive.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

“You never cede control of your own ability to be successful to something called racism.”
― Condoleezza Rice

“People may oppose you, but when they realize you can hurt them, they'll join your side.”
― Condoleezza Rice

“Societies that treat women badly are dangerous societies. The empowerment of women is not only morally right it is also practical in the positive impact it has on so many social ills.”
― Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

“For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.”
― Condoleezza Rice

“One of the hardest things about diplomacy is to put yourself into someone else's shoes without compromising your own principles.”
― Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

“Today’s headlines and history’s judgment are rarely the same. If you are too attentive to the former you will most certainly not do the hard work of securing the latter”
― Condoleezza Rice in her memoir No Higher Honour

“I would rather be ignored than patronized, I said, pointing to the tendency of the Democratic party to talk about women, minorities and the poor. I hated identity politics and the self-satisfied people who assume that they were free of prejudices when in fact they too could not see beyond color to the individual.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Condoleezza Rice: A Memoir of My Extraordinary, Ordinary Family and Me

“I'm an American, nothing is impossible.”
― Condoleezza Rice

“In theory, America was more equal than ever before, but the reality continued to tell a different story. Lyndon Johnson argued that the country could not be satisfied with this paradox. As he put it, “You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom

“[T]hat afternoon, Sergei Lavrov called me for the second time during the crisis. [...] “We have three demands,” he said.
“What are they?” I asked.
“The first two are that the Georgians sign the no-use-of-force pledge and that their troops return to barracks,” he told me.
“Done,” I answered.

[...] But then Sergei said, “The other demand is just between us. Misha Saakashvili has to go.” I couldn’t believe my ears and I reacted out of instinct, not analysis.

“Sergei, the secretary of state of the United States does not have a conversation with the Russian foreign minister about overthrowing a democratically elected president,” I said. “The third condition has just become public because I’m going to call everyone I can and tell them that Russia is demanding the overthrow of the Georgian president.”

“I said it was between us,” he repeated.
“No, it’s not between us. Everyone is going to know.” The conversation ended. I called Steve Hadley to tell him about the Russian demand. Then I called the British, the French, and several others. That afternoon the UN Security Council was meeting. I asked our representative to inform the Council as well.

Lavrov was furious, saying that he’d never had a colleague divulge the contents of a diplomatic conversation. I felt I had no choice. If the Georgians wanted to punish Saakashvili for the war, they would have a chance to do it through their own constitutional processes. But the Russians had no right to insist on his removal. The whole thing had an air of the Soviet period, when Moscow had controlled the fate of leaders throughout Eastern Europe. I was certainly not going to be party to a return to those days [688].”
― Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

“The fact is, race is a constant factor in American life. Yet reacting to every incident, real or imagined, is crippling, tiring, and ultimately counter productive. I grew up in a family that believed that you might not be able to control your circumstances, but you can control your reaction to them. There was no room for being a victim or depending on the white man to take care of you.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

“somewhat vague) new relationship between the United States”
― Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honour

“I would rather be ignored than patronized”
― Condoleezza Rice, Condoleezza Rice: A Memoir of My Extraordinary, Ordinary Family and Me

“The Arab Spring of 2011 revealed just how transformative communications technology can be in powering collective action. The protest movements that swept the Middle East and North Africa and led to the downfall of the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes all started with a rural Tunisian fruit seller named Mohammed Bouazizi.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Risk has two components: likelihood and impact.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“We all know we should exercise regularly, sleep well, and eat fruits and leafy green vegetables instead of fried and processed foods. But few of us actually do these things.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Nothing in the past can convincingly point to [a black swan’s] possibility.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: Facing the Threat of Global Insecurity in the Twenty-First Century

“The foreign ministers were unsettled too by the buzz around the report’s insistence on a new diplomatic push that would involve talking to Iran—a kind of regional solution to the Iraq problem. They were rightly suspicious that the Iranians would use their enhanced diplomatic perch that would come with U.S. consultations to further their influence in the region, and the ministers wanted a promise that the United States was not about to sell out to Tehran to end the war in Iraq.”
― Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

“Beware of geeks bearing formulas.” —Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Black swans are consequential events for which the underlying probability distribution is simply not known, or at least not known with any degree of certainty or reliability. In Taleb’s words, “Nothing in the past can convincingly point to [a black swan’s] possibility.”43”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Democratic transitions do not succeed suddenly, and, conversely, they do not fail in one moment either. There are, in retrospect, important inflection points that might have taken a different turn.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom

“Perhaps the most important thing to remember about supply chain vulnerability to political actions is cumulative risk: The risk of disruption in any one node of a supply chain may be low, but the cumulative risk of disruption across the entire supply chain is much higher.”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity

“Realists ran to the barricades to sound the alarm that “interests,” not “idealism,” should guide the United States’ interactions with the world. What they failed to see was that the Freedom Agenda was not just a moral or idealistic cause; it was a redefinition of what constituted realism, a change in the way we viewed U.S. interests in the new circumstances forced on us by the attacks of that horrible day. We rather quickly arrived at the conclusion that U.S. interests and values could be linked together in a coherent way, forming what I came to call a distinctly American realism.”
― Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

“All terrorists deliberately target innocents. And all terrorists seek to instill fear, terrorizing societies and their leaders. There is a strong psychological component to terrorism, which is why terrorists often strike victims and targets that have symbolic significance”
― Condoleezza Rice, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity