Top 40 Jeane Kirkpatrick Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Words can destroy. What we call each other ultimately becomes what we think of each other, and it matters.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

2. “For all their faults, right-wing authoritarian regimes more easily accept democratic reforms than left-wing totalitarian states.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

3. “Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

4. “Solidarity was the movement that turned the direction of history, I think.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

5. “History is a better guide than good intentions.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

6. “There is no pure free-market economy.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

7. “Democracy not only requires equality but also an unshakable conviction in the value of each person, who is then equal.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

8. “I believe that detente was having almost the opposite effect of what was intended. What was intended was to sort of end the contest for power and to stop Soviet expansion, especially by military means and the military build-up, the military contest.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

9. “Cultural constraints condition and limit our choices, shaping our characters with their imperatives.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

10. “I was a woman in a man’s world. I was a Democrat in a Republican administration. I was an intellectual in a world of bureaucrats. I talked differently. This may have made me a bit like an ink blot.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

11. “A government is not legitimate merely because it exists.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

12. “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 .”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

13. “I think that Ronald Reagan wanted to hear other people’s views, and he always listened carefully, and from time to time he changed his own mind about a position. And especially he took pains to listen carefully to foreign leaders with whom he was dealing.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

14. “When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn’t blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

15. “What takes place in the Security Council more closely resembles a mugging than either a political debate or an effort at problem-solving.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

16. “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.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

17. “Mr. President, we’ve taken off our “Kick Me” sign.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

18. “We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

19. “Tyranny and anarchy are alike incompatible with freedom, security, and the enjoyment of opportunity.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

20. “Look, I don’t even agree with myself at times.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

21. “They always blame America first!”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

22. “Society has never barred women from bread-winning roles, but only from economic roles that are profitable and respectable.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

23. “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.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

24. “I always assume that democracy is the only good form of government, quite frankly, and democracy is always to be preferred.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

25. “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.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

26. “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

27. “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.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

28. “Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn’t manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

29. “Lesser of two evils.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

30. “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.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

31. “When we forget, or wilfully choose to ignore, the intractability of human behaviour, the complexity of human institutions, and the probability of unanticipated consequences, we do so at great risk, and often immense human cost.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

32. “The real point is that totalitarian regimes have claimed jurisdiction over the whole person, and the whole society, and they don’t at all believe that we should give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

33. “Democrats can’t get elected unless things get worse-and things won’t get worse unless they get elected.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

34. “There is an absolutely fundamental hostility on the part of totalitarian regimes toward religion.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

35. “I think that there is absolutely no free market in modern industrial states.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

36. “And I have no doubt that the American people generally believe the world is safer, and that we are safer, when we are stronger.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

37. “I conclude that it is a fundamental mistake to think that salvation, justice, or virtue come through merely human institutions.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

38. “Maturity is when we live by the truths that are in our heart and soul, truths we believe to be right for us.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

39. “Straying off course is not recognized as a capital crime by civilized nations.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

40. “It was not malaise we suffered from; it was Jimmy Carter – and Walter Mondale.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

41. “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.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

42. “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.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

43. “All of us confront limits of body, talent, temperament. But that is not all. We are, all of us, also constrained by our time, our place, our civilization.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

44. “The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American Policy makers.”

— Jeane Kirkpatrick