Fareed Zakaria Quotes

Foreign policy is a matter of costs and benefits, not theology.

— Fareed Zakaria

As John Adams famously wrote during the American Revolution, "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." So maybe today they're writing apps rather than studying poetry, but that's an adjustment for the age.

— Fareed Zakaria

“The central virtue of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to write, and writing makes you think. Whatever you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly, and reasonably quickly will prove to be an invaluable skill.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“Being forced to write clearly means, first, you have to think clearly.”

— Fareed Zakaria

If you listen to the political discourse in America today, you would think that all our problems have been caused by the Mexicans of the Chinese or the Muslims. The reality is that we have caused our own problems. Whatever has happened has been caused by isolating ourselves or blaming others.

— Fareed Zakaria

“Liberal education should give people the skills that will help them get ready for their sixth job, not their first job.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“The solution is not that people need to major in marketing in college, but that their liberal education should be more structured and demanding. Majors should have some required sequence of basic courses, as in economics.”

— Fareed Zakaria

The real challenges that the country faces come from the winners, not the losers, of the new world.

— Fareed Zakaria

“Low interest rates and cheap credit also cause people to act foolishly or greedily ...”

— Fareed Zakaria

“Suppose the elections are free and fair and those elected are racists, fascists, separatists", said the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke about Yugoslavia in 1990s. "that is the dilemma”

— Fareed Zakaria

“In an almost unthinkable reversal of a global pattern, almost every Arab country today is less free than it was forty years ago. There are few places in the world about which one can say that.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“For years many in the oil-rich states argued that their enormous wealth would bring modernizations. They pointed to the impressive appetites of Saudis and Kuwaitis for things Western, from McDonald's hamburgers to Rolex watches to Cadillac limousines. but importing Western good is easy; importing the inner stuffing of modern society - a free market, political parties, accountability, the rule of law - is difficult and even dangerous for the ruling elites”

— Fareed Zakaria

“The test scores used in admissions are a measure of what colleges take in, not what they produce. The fact that an Ivy League school has freshmen with high SAT scores tells us that it is a good magnet for talent but nothing else. What should matter is how students, including those with low SAT scores, improve over the course of their time in school.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“As it enters the twenty-first century, the United States is not fundamentally a weak economy, or a decadent society. But it has developed a highly dysfunctional politics. An antiquated and overly rigid political system to begin with-about 225 years old-has been captured by money, special interests, a sensationalist media, and ideological attack groups. The result is ceaseless, virulent debate about trivia-politics as theater-and very little substance, compromise, and action. A "can-do" country is now saddled with a "do-nothing" political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving. By every measure-the growth of special interests, lobbies, pork-barrel spending-the political process has become far more partisan and ineffective over the last three decades.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“Liberty came to the West centuries before democracy. Liberty led to democracy and not the other way around.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“I should have paid greater attention to my mentor in graduate school, Samuel Huntington, who once explained that Americans never recognize that, in the developing world, the key is not the kind of government - communist, capitalist, democratic, dictatorial - but the degree of government. That absence of government is what we are watching these days, from Libya to Iraq to Syria.
("Why they still hate us, 13 years later," Washington Post, 09/05/2014)”

— Fareed Zakaria

“FOR MOST OF human history, education was job training. Hunters, farmers, and warriors taught the young to hunt, farm, and fight. Children of the ruling class received instruction in the arts of war and governance, but this too was intended first and foremost as preparation for the roles they would assume later in society, not for any broader purpose. All that began to change twenty-five hundred years ago in ancient Greece.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“In 1778, Jefferson presented to the Virginia legislature "A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge," in which he argued that all forms of government could degenerate into tyranny. The best way of preventing this, he wrote, is "to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large." The study of history could serve as an especially effective bulwark, allowing the people to learn how to defeat tyranny from past examples. Jefferson would return again and again to the importance of education in a democracy.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expense of it," [John] Adams wrote. "There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves." Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantage.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by Richard Nixon, described the new interpretation of the Second Amendment in an interview after his tenure as 'one of the greatest pieces of fraud-I repeat the word FRAUD-on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“I should not be judged by a standard that's not applied to everyone else.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“When you're failing, there's a very powerful incentive to put ideology aside and just do what seems to work.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“The Berlin Wall wasn't the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“Politics and power is a realm of relative influence.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“During the Cold War, we were interested because we were scared that Russia and the United States were going to go to war. We were scared that Russia was going to take over the world. Every country became a battleground.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“But as the arms-control scholar Thomas Schelling once noted, two things are very expensive in international life: promises when they succeed and threats when they fail.”

— Fareed Zakaria

I grew up in this world where everything seemed possible.

— Fareed Zakaria

“If a senator calls me up and asks me what should we do in Iraq, I'm happy to talk to him.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“If we didn't have the rest of the world growing, the United States economy would be in much worse shape than it is today.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“One of the great dilemmas for America will be that American companies will do very well while American workers might not.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“Conservatives used to believe in confronting hard truths, not succumbing to comforting fairy tales. Some still do.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“The American dream seems to be thriving in Europe not at home.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“I very much want to be in the business of creating content, of doing stories all over the world rather than figuring out what the business model is for 'Newsweek' on the iPad, although that's very important work as well.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“If you go to India the roads are being built almost entirely with private sector money and by the private sector. If you look at many, many countries in Europe that's how they're doing it.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“One of the things that has been very difficult in Libya is the sense of uncertainty - the sense that they haven't actually finished the revolution, that there was still a great deal of uncertainty. That uncertainty has made Libya harder for business in terms of oil and other things as well.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“What happens in the media is the cult of personality. The brands who have been forced to cut their staff have been forced to take on the brands of journalists.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“Iran is a country of 80 million people, educated and dynamic. It sits astride a crucial part of the world. It cannot be sanctioned and pressed down forever. It is the last great civilization to sit outside the global order.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“Things happening around the world are affecting you and me.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“I'd be kidding if I said that I predicted the financial collapse.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“I'm largely in favor of financial reform.”

— Fareed Zakaria

My friends all say I'm going to be Secretary of State. But I don't see how that would be much different from the job I have now.

— Fareed Zakaria

The situation in Syria is quite different from Libya.

— Fareed Zakaria

“Whenever societies do well, they believe that there is something in their cultural DNA that made it happen.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“CNN is getting smarter, and you can feel it in the stories, you can feel it in the depth with which they're covered, the kinds of people in terms of guests who are brought on air, the way in which issues are discussed.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the United States succeeded in its great and historic mission
it globalized the world. But along the way, they might write, it forgot to globalize itself.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“We have the leading companies and the leading sectors in the advanced industrial world, we have an incredibly dynamic society, and we have high levels of entrepreneurship. And we have the best universities in the world ... We also have impeccable credit. What we don't have is a political system that can take the simple measures to deal with our short-term deficit.”

— Fareed Zakaria

We all accuse Vladimir Putin of Cold War nostalgia, but Washington's elites - politicians and intellectuals - miss the old days as well. They wish for the world in which the United States was utterly dominant over its friends, its foes were to be shunned entirely, and the challenges were stark, moral, and vital. Today's world is messy and complicated. China is one of our biggest trading partners and our looming geopolitical rival. Russia is a surly spoiler, but it has a globalized middle class and has created ties in Europe.

— Fareed Zakaria

America washes its dirty linen in public. When scandals such as this one hit, they do sully America's image in the world. But what usually also gets broadcast around the world is the vivid reality that the United States forces accountability and punishes wrongdoing, even at the highest levels.

— Fareed Zakaria

“If envy were the cause of terrorism, Beverly Hills [and] Fifth Avenue ... would have become targets long ago.”

— Fareed Zakaria