“Respect for the rights of others is a lofty principle; but envy is a primal urge (p114)”

McCarthy fooled as many as he did because a lot of people shared his anxieties.

Fascism, most of the students agreed, is an extreme form of authoritarian rule. Citizens are required to do exactly what leaders say they must do, nothing more, nothing less.

Bill Clinton observed that when people are uncertain, they’d rather have leaders who are strong and wrong than right and weak.

I also think it is important for women to help one another. I have a saying: There is a special place in hell for women who don’t.

Unless you can understand what is motivating them, you are never going to be able to figure out how to solve a particular problem.

We will not be intimidated or pushed off the world stage by people who do not like what we stand for, and that is, freedom, democracy and the fight against disease, poverty and terrorism.

Trump is the first anti-democratic president in modern U.S. history.

In 2016, Fascism was searched on the Merriam-Webster dictionary website more often than any other word in English except surreal, which experienced a sudden spike after the November presidential election.

The Fascist game plan: a single party, speaking with one voice, controlling every state institution, claiming to represent all people, and labeling the entire sham a triumph of the popular will.

A dictatorship by any other name is still a dictatorship, whether its symbol is the czarist two-headed eagle or the hammer and sickle.

When, at a party, a woman (half socialite, half journalist) told me how brave she thought I had been for not getting a facelift, I was tempted to comment on the courage she had shown in dealing with the results of hers.

The greatest thrill in my life was to represent the United States of America.

I once experimented with meditation, cleared my mind, and immediately remembered a phone call I had to make; that was that.

The conservatives saw the Fascist leader as someone they could hide behind, manipulate, and, when convenient, replace.

Good guys don’t always win, especially when they are divided and less determined than their adversaries. The desire for liberty may be ingrained in every human breast, but so is the potential for complacency, confusion, and cowardice. And losing has a price.

Well, the thing that I learned as a diplomat is that human relations ultimately make a huge difference.

I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they’re both amazing ways to understand human nature.

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

I believe that the time has arrived for medical investigation of the problems of manned rocket flight, for it will not be the engineering problems but rather the limits of the human frame that will make the final decision as to whether manned space flight will eventually become a reality.

When Nature her great masterpiece designed,And framed her last, best work, the human mind,Her eye intent on all the wondrous plan,She formed of various stuff the various Man.

Diminish the mass of evils that afflict the human species, increase enjoyment and well-being. And even if the new routes opened up could prolong the average life of mankind by only a few hours, or even a few days, then the scientist, too could aspire.

No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we?

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation.