People didn't think that a woman could be the Secretary of State, when my name was out there...but then the Arab Ambassadors at the UN said 'We have no problem dealing with Ambassador Albright, and we would have no problem dealing with Secretary Albright.'

There are a lot of similar aspects in all the religions. The question is which side of it you hold up.

I do think that one needs to have respect for people who are older. And I really do love the idea that one can respect generations.

One of the things I write about a bit in my Madam Secretary memoir is on Rwanda, where I was an instructed ambassador at the U.N., and my instructions were to not vote for increased forces there, and I didn't like my instructions. So I got up and called Washington and said, "Change my instructions," and they didn't.

Why, since man and woman were created for each other, had He made their desires so dissimilar? Why should one class of women be able to dwell in luxurious seclusion from the trials of life, while another class performed their loathsome tasks? Surely His wisdom had not decreed that one set of women should live in degradation and in the end should perish that others might live in security, preserve their frappeed chastity, and in the end be saved.

I have always seen the United States as a force of good. And I have learned that there is the idealistic part about what we can do at the U.N. and there is a doable part. And I have learned what is more doable.

I did go to Wellesley, a women's college. And I am of a kind of strange generation which is transitional in terms of women who wanted to go out and get jobs.