Top 70 Fareed Zakaria Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Thanks to the Communist Party of China, we now know the path to poverty alleviation is Capitalism.”

— Fareed Zakaria

2. “It is absolutely clear that government plays a key role, as a catalyst, in promoting long-run growth.”

— Fareed Zakaria

3. “The tallest building in the world is now in Dubai, the biggest factory in the world is in China, the largest oil refinery is in India, the largest investment fund in the world is in Abu Dhabi, the largest Ferris wheel in the world is in Singapore.”

— Fareed Zakaria

4. “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely. – E. O. Wilson.”

— Fareed Zakaria

5. “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

6. “Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn’t mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense – the idea that anyone can make it.”

— Fareed Zakaria

7. “The tallest building in the world is now in Dubai...”

— Fareed Zakaria

8. “It was not the Great Depression that brought the Nazis to power in Germany but rather hyperinflation, which destroyed the middle class by making its savings worthless.”

— Fareed Zakaria

9. “Intelligence is called the world’s second oldest profession for a reason. Everyone does it.”

— Fareed Zakaria

10. “Legitimacy is the elixir of political power.”

— Fareed Zakaria

11. “I am an American, not by accident of birth but by choice. I voted with my feet and became an American because I love this country and think it is exceptional.”

— Fareed Zakaria

12. “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

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

— Fareed Zakaria

14. “Because of the times we live in, all of us, young and old, do not spend enough time and effort thinking about the meaning of life. We do not look inside ourselves enough to understand our strengths and weaknesses, and we do not look around enough – a the world, in history – to ask the deepest and broadest questions. The solution surely is that, even now, we could all use a little bit more of a liberal education.”

— Fareed Zakaria

15. “You know, when the cost of capital goes down, when credit becomes cheap, people start taking greater and greater risks.”

— Fareed Zakaria

16. “In a very weak economy, when you say ‘cut government spending,’ what you mean is you’re laying off school teachers and you’re de-funding various programs that put money into the economy. This means you have more unemployed people that then draw unemployment benefits and don’t pay taxes.”

— Fareed Zakaria

17. “The great drama of Russian history has been between its state and society. Put simply, Russia has always had too much state and not enough society.”

— Fareed Zakaria

18. “No successful political transition can take place without leaders and movements that demand and press for freedom.”

— Fareed Zakaria

19. “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

20. “The crucial challenge is to learn how to read critically, analyze data, and formulate ideas – and most of all to enjoy the intellectual adventure enough to be able to do them easily and often.”

— Fareed Zakaria

21. “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

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

— Fareed Zakaria

23. “What we see today is an American economy that has boomed because of policies and developments of the 1950s and ’60s: the interstate-highway system, massive funding for science and technology, a public-education system that was the envy of the world and generous immigration policies.”

— Fareed Zakaria

24. “The Yale report explained that the essence of liberal education was “not to teach that which is peculiar to any one of the professions; but to lay the foundation which is common to them all.”

— Fareed Zakaria

25. “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

26. “There is no way to turn off this global economy, nor should one try. Every previous expansion of global capitalism has led to greater prosperity across the world.”

— Fareed Zakaria

27. “It’s really difficult to have your voice heard and feared when you both speak softly and carry a twig.”

— Fareed Zakaria

28. “It all looks American because America, the country that invented mass capitalism and consumerism, got there first. the impact of mass capitalism is now universal.”

— Fareed Zakaria

29. “I don’t want to paint a picture of total gloom and doom.”

— Fareed Zakaria

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

— Fareed Zakaria

31. “The people who watch Fox are not going to watch CNN. You know, lets be honest.”

— Fareed Zakaria

32. “Culture follows power.”

— Fareed Zakaria

33. “Alaska itself is an unusual state.”

— Fareed Zakaria

34. “I think it is quite untrue that it is standard journalistic practice to name the interviewer when quoting from an interview.”

— Fareed Zakaria

35. “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

36. “Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask.”

— Fareed Zakaria

37. “Democracy is also a single ideology, and, like all such templates, it has its limits. what works in a legislature might not work in a corporation.”

— Fareed Zakaria

38. “America’s growth historically has been fueled mostly by investment, education, productivity, innovation and immigration. The one thing that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with America’s growth rate is a brutal work schedule.”

— Fareed Zakaria

39. “The education system is an increasingly powerful mechanism for the intergenerational reproduction of privilege.”

— Fareed Zakaria

40. “In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.”

— Fareed Zakaria

41. “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

42. “The American consumer, even today, the weight of the American consumer in the global economy is China plus India doubled. So, it’s tough to replace that.”

— Fareed Zakaria

43. “It hasn’t been easy to find American citizens who are willing to pick fruit in 110 degree weather.”

— Fareed Zakaria

44. “There is a huge crisis of employment in America, in the Western world in general.”

— Fareed Zakaria

45. “I think that liberals need to grow up.”

— Fareed Zakaria

46. “The basic problem for American workers of all ages has been that their hours and productivity keep rising but their wages do not.”

— Fareed Zakaria

47. “For Jefferson, there was one step crucial to creating a genuine natural aristocracy. The poor and rich had to have equal access to a good education.”

— Fareed Zakaria

48. “I grew up in this world where everything seemed possible.”

— Fareed Zakaria

49. “Walter Lippmann was once asked his views on a particular topic, he is said to have replied, “I don’t know what I think on that one. I haven’t written about it yet.”

— Fareed Zakaria

50. “We are now living through the third great power shift of the modern era. It could be called “the rise of the rest.”

— Fareed Zakaria