Democracy not only requires equality but also an unshakable conviction in the value of each person, who is then equal

Cultural constraints condition and limit our choices, shaping our characters with their imperatives.

The absence of utopianism in the Constitution, law, and traditional political culture has been ... important in limiting expectations concerning what can be achieved by politics. The history of the last two centuries confirms what the framers of the Constitution understood: that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the search for unalloyed virtue in public life leads to unalloyed terror.

[The American position at the UN is] essentially impotent, without influence, heavily outvoted, and isolated.

I was a woman in a man's world. I was a Democrat in a Republican administration. I was an intellectual in a world of bureaucrats. I talked differently. This may have made me a bit like an ink blot.

Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn't manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared.

It was not malaise we suffered from; it was Jimmy Carter - and Walter Mondale.