Top 70 Madeleine K. Albright Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The temptation is powerful to close our eyes and wait for the worst to pass, but history tells us that for freedom to survive, it must be defended and that if lies are to stop, they must be exposed.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

2. “The Nuremberg trials established the principle that neither “obeying the law” nor “following orders” is a sufficient legal defense for those accused of violating basic standards of civilization.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

3. “The real question is: who has the responsibility to uphold human rights? The answer to that is: everyone.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

4. “The complexity of immigration as an issue begins with a basic human trait: we are reluctant to share.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

5. “What makes a movement Fascist is not ideology but the willingness to do whatever is necessary – including the use of force and trampling on the rights of others – to achieve victory and command obedience.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

6. “Good guys don’t always win, especially when they are divided and less determined than their adversaries. The desire for liberty may be ingrained in every human breast, but so is the potential for complacency, confusion, and cowardice. And losing has a price.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

7. “Good people do good things and bad people do bad things,” I was told, “but for good people to do bad things, that takes religion.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

8. “Oswald Spengler’s chilling century-old prophecy that “the era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

9. “The advantage of a free press is diminished when anyone can claim to be an objective journalist, then disseminate narratives conjured out of thin air to make others believe rubbish. The tactic is effective because people sitting at home or tapping away in a coffee shop often have no reliable way to determine whether the source of what they are reading is legitimate.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

10. “There are two kinds of Fascists: those who give orders and those who take them. A popular base gives Fascism the legs it needs to march, the lungs it uses to proclaim, and the muscle it relies on to menace – but that’s Fascism from the neck down. To create tyranny out of the fears and hopes of average people, money is required, and so, too, ambition and twisted ideas.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

11. “Fascism did not die with Mussolini,” he warned. “Hitler is finished, but the seeds spread by his disordered mind have firm root in too many fanatical brains.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

12. “This is the first rule of deception: repeated often enough, almost any statement, story, or smear can start to sound plausible. The Internet should be an ally of freedom and a gateway to knowledge; in some cases, it is neither.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

13. “The answer matters because, although nature abhors a vacuum, Fascism welcomes one.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

14. “A Fascist, however, expects the crowd to have his back. Where kings try to settle people down, Fascists stir them up so that when the fighting begins, their foot soldiers have the will and the firepower to strike first.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

15. “The Nazis chased the dream of a racially pure society through occupation and conquest, thus ensuring intimate contact with people of many non-Germanic nationalities and races. The Communists insisted that national identity was irrelevant but obsessively persecuted men and women because of who they were: Latvians, Poles, Ukrainians, Armenians, Finns, Chechens, Koreans, and Turks.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

16. “Both Fascism and Communism had utopian aspirations and both took hold amid the intellectual and social ferment of the late nineteenth century. Each purported to deliver a level of emotional sustenance that liberal political systems lacked.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

17. “This was how twentieth-century Fascism began: with a magnetic leader exploiting widespread dissatisfaction by promising all things.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

18. “Among those welcoming Fascism and shouting “Viva Mussolini” that day were two hundred Jews.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

19. “Fascist is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

20. “Presidents from Roosevelt to Obama have sought to help allies protect themselves and to engage in collective defense against common dangers. We did this not in a spirit of charity but because we had learned the hard way that problems abroad, if unaddressed, could, before long, imperil us.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

21. “Thus was conceived a phenomenon that would split America from right to left and raise ominous questions – of a type we still face – about whether a democratic citizenry can be talked into betraying its own values.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

22. “Unlike a monarchy or a military dictatorship imposed on society from above, Fascism draws energy from men and women who are upset because of a lost war, a lost job, a memory of humiliation, or a sense that their country is in steep decline. The more.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

23. “In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights spelled out a framework for holding governments accountable, followed in three years by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

24. “It is easier to remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps than to kill the ideas that gave them birth.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

25. “A second source of blurriness in Trump’s vision is that it offers no incentive for friendship. If every nation is focused entirely on gaining an edge over every other, there can be no trust, no special relationships, no reward for helpfulness, and no penalty for cynicism – because cynicism is all we promise and all we expect.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

26. “A dictatorship by any other name is still a dictatorship, whether its symbol is the czarist two-headed eagle or the hammer and sickle.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

27. “At many levels, contempt has become a defining characteristic of American politics. It makes us unwilling to listen to what others say – unwilling, in some cases, even to allow them to speak. This stops the learning process cold and creates a ready-made audience for demagogues who know how to bring diverse groups of the aggrieved together in righteous opposition to everyone else.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

28. “President Trump’s eyes light up when strongmen steamroll opposition, brush aside legal constraints, ignore criticism, and do whatever it takes to get their way.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

29. “During the Bosnian conflict, an international tribunal was established to prosecute the perpetrators of crimes against humanity. I was a firm advocate of the tribunal because only through a judicial process is it possible to establish individual culpability for crimes that might otherwise be attributed to an entire group – and nothing does more to trigger additional cycles of violence than perceptions of collective guilt.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

30. “The ability of a free and independent press to hold political leaders accountable is what makes open government possible – it is the heartbeat of democracy. Trump is intent on stilling, or slowing down, that heartbeat. This is a gift to dictators, and coming from a chief executive of the United States, cause for shame.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

31. “He used simple words and did not hesitate to tell what he later described as “colossal untruths.” He sought to incite hatred toward those he considered traitors – the “November criminals” whose treachery had cost Germany the war – and he returned each day to what Nietzsche had called the ideology “of those who feel cheated”: anti-Semitism.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

32. “Wages, in real terms, have been stagnant since the 1970s.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

33. “First, he often endorses actions by foreign leaders that weaken democratic institutions.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

34. “He is president because he convinced enough voters in the right states that he was a teller of blunt truths, a masterful negotiator, and an effective champion of American interests. That he is none of those things should put us on edge, but there is a larger cause for unease.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

35. “To reduce the sum of our existence to a competitive struggle for advantage among more than two hundred nations is not clear-eyed but myopic. People and nations compete, but that is not all that they do.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

36. “Falsehood flies,” observed Jonathan Swift, “and the truth comes limping after it.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

37. “There is, however, a tipping point where loyalty to one’s own tribe curdles into resentment and hatred, then aggression toward others. That’s when Fascism enters the picture, trailed by an assortment of woes, up to and including the Holocaust and global war.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

38. “Two months earlier, speaking at Westminster College in Missouri, Winston Churchill had declared that an Iron Curtain was descending across Europe.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

39. “Since early 2017, surveys show a marked decline in respect for the United States. In Germany, belief that the American president can be counted on to do the right thing shrank from 86 percent under his predecessor to 11 percent under Trump. In France, the fall was from 84 percent to 14; in Japan, 74 to 24; in South Korea, 84 to 17.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

40. “Historian Robert Paxton begins one of his books by asserting: “Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

41. “Chamberlain was too timid to take that advice, but he was not entirely blind to the deepening danger. “Is it not positively horrible,” he wrote, “to think that the fate of hundreds of millions depends on one man, and he is half mad? I keep racking my brains to try and devise some means of averting a catastrophe.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

42. “For all their dissimilarities, the two men spoke a common language: violence. Both despised the Jeffersonian ideals of popular governance, reasoned debate, freedom of expression, an independent judiciary, and fair electoral competition. Both struck remorselessly at enemies within and outside their parties.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

43. “I continue to believe that the United States banked enough international goodwill in the interval between George Washington and Barack Obama to recover from the present embarrassment – but I am not sure how extensive or lasting the harm will be, hence the worries.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

44. “No serious politician has proposed putting America second. The goal is not the issue. What separates Trump from every president since the dismal trio of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover is his conception of how America’s interests are best advanced. He conceives of the world as a battlefield in which every country is intent on dominating every other; where nations compete like real estate developers to ruin rivals and squeeze every penny of profit out of deals.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

45. “If an advertiser can use that information to home in on a consumer because of his or her individual interests, what’s to stop a Fascist government from doing the same?”

— Madeleine K. Albright

46. “Why are many people in positions of power seeking to undermine public confidence in elections, the courts, the media, and – on the fundamental question of earth’s future – science? Why have such dangerous splits been allowed to develop between rich and poor, urban and rural, those with a higher education and those without?”

— Madeleine K. Albright

47. “The United States has had flawed presidents before; in fact, we have never had any other kind, but we have not had a chief executive in the modern era whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

48. “Explore the world with an open mind, a sturdy carry-on, and clothes that don’t wrinkle!”

— Madeleine K. Albright

49. “Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must – or at least might – be so.”

— Madeleine K. Albright

50. “Until I am carried out, I will carry on.”

— Madeleine K. Albright