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A government is not legitimate merely because it exists.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

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Jeane Kirkpatrick
Age: 80 †
Born: 1926
Born: November 19
Died: 2006
Died: December 7
Diplomat
Political Scientist
Politician
United States Ambassador To The United Nations
University Teacher
Duncan
Oklahoma
Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick
Jeane Duane Kirkpatrick
Government
Legitimate
Libertarian
Exists
Merely
Liberty
Political

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Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is.
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Truth, which is important to a scholar, has to be concrete. And there is nothing more concrete than dealing with babies, burps and bottles, frogs and mud.
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When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an afterthought, as they did, they behaved less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich - convinced it could shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand.
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Neither nature, experience, nor probability informs these lists of 'entitlements', which are subject to no constraints except those of the mind and appetite of their authors.
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A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created
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The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American Policy makers.
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And I have no doubt that the American people generally believe the world is safer, and that we are safer, when we are stronger
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I think that there is absolutely no free market in modern industrial states.
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Solidarity was the movement that turned the direction of history, I think.
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Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.
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No idea holds greater sway in the minds of educated Americans that the belief that it is possible to democratize governments anytime and anywhere under any circumstances.
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Democrats can't get elected unless things get worse-and things won't get worse unless they get elected.
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And I think detente had manifestly failed, and that the pursuit of it was encouraging Soviet expansion and rendering the world more dangerous, and especially rendering the Western world in greater peril.
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I'm a political scientist and I study these things, and I know that economic problems, with the rising unemployment and inflation and low productivity and so forth, were a factor in that election, in that defeat of President Carter.
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That is simply that Marxism has been tremendously fashionable in our time, so it has infected a very large number of major institutions in many countries of the world. So I suppose that we shouldn't be too surprised that it should infect the church as well.
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There is an absolutely fundamental hostility on the part of totalitarian regimes toward religion.
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Mr. President, we've taken off our Kick Me sign.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
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There is no pure free-market economy.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
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I think that it's always appropriate for Americans and for American foreign policy to make clear why we feel that self-government is most compatible with peace, the well-being of people, and human dignity
Jeane Kirkpatrick
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Look, I don't even agree with myself at times.
Jeane Kirkpatrick