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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
Merely
Liberty
Political
Government
Legitimate
Libertarian
Exists

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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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Solidarity was the movement that turned the direction of history, I think.
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There is an absolutely fundamental hostility on the part of totalitarian regimes toward religion.
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Words can destroy. What we call each other ultimately becomes what we think of each other, and it matters.
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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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Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is.
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Look, I don't even agree with myself at times.
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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
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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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I think that there is absolutely no free market in modern industrial states.
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In the years just before... during the Carter years, the Soviets regularly violated, if you will, both the spirit and theletter of arms control agreements, I think, that they had negotiated during the period of detente.
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There is no pure free-market economy.
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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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I always assume that democracy is the only good form of government, quite frankly, and democracy is always to be preferred
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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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Cultural constraints condition and limit our choices, shaping our characters with their imperatives.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
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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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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.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
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Mr. President, we've taken off our Kick Me sign.
Jeane Kirkpatrick