Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Military force can't defeat ideology.
Trump is no good at deals and never has been.
We may be reaching the end of the liberal world order.
Of course, isolationism will not keep America isolated.
As in nature, so in politics: Every action has a reaction.
Given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy.
Rare is the election campaign that truly hinges on a single issue.
We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires.
Nationalism has nothing to do with the rule of law, justice, or opportunity.
The anti-European Tories were a fringe group - until they took over their whole party.
Sometimes the point isn't to make people believe a lie - it's to make people fear the liar.
America's international broadcasters are an important part of the face we present to the world.
Amazingly, quite a few people, even some American conservatives, are taken in by Russian tactics.
Elections are always a Rorschach test - people look at the results and see what they want to see.
Italians have famously low levels of trust in their government, and a tradition of medical hoaxes.
Epidemics, like disasters, have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.
Nationalism has nothing to do with democratic values: Authoritarians can be nationalists; indeed, most are.
Just shouting about 'facts' will get you nowhere with those who no longer trust the sources that produce them.
In Belarus, the government is a kind of presidential monarchy with no checks, no balances, and no rule of law.
Many people no longer trust major media outlets to give them valuable information - and they may never do so again.
Like wealth, or health, political freedom may simply be something that people don't value if they've always had it.
Inside the noisy and chaotic modern information sphere, the message doesn't matter nearly as much as the messenger.
Politics in Slovakia had long been a battle between egotistical men. Caputova sought to be the anti-ego alternative.
European leaders have learned that there is no point in seeking agreement with Trump, for he doesn't respect those who do.
Americans might not want to intervene in the outside world, but the outside world will still want to intervene in America.
The surge in right-wing populism and the phenomenon of Trump are related. You can think of them together as the same problem.
For some people, loud advocacy of Trump helps to cover up the deep doubt and even shame they feel about their support for Trump.
Independent judges have always frustrated governments that don't see why unelected arbiters of the law should stand in their way.
At different times my children went to Polish, British, and American schools, and they learned about 'the nation' in all of them.
Trump's first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values.
Do not read 'Hard Choices' if you seek a nuanced analysis of the people who run the world's foreign policy, let alone any juicy gossip.
Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.
As a journalist, I know what it is like to incur the self-righteous wrath of people who denounce you for things you didn't say or didn't mean.
Just about every single person who visits me in Poland tells me that everything here is better than they thought it would be - especially the food.
The nationalist right have common views. They hate the EU, they hate NATO, they dislike trade, they admire Russia. Many of them are funded by Putin.
One knows, of course, that Donald Trump behaves differently from the leaders of other countries, especially the leaders of other Western democracies.
Putin is not a mass murderer. But, having said that, he is a product of the KGB, and the KGB was, of course, the secret police force of the Soviet Union.
The evolution of a bourgeoisie is a healthy phenomenon when it grows and prospers thanks to bourgeois values: hard work, honesty, personal responsibility.
False stories can be promulgated more easily when the people trying to tell true stories have been discredited - or when they are battered by rubber bullets.
At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one's nation, of one's ideology, of one's morality, of one's values.
The U.S.S.R. was a totalitarian state in which judges and prosecutors were controlled by the ruling party. The result was injustice, oppression and corruption.
Diplomats bluster and bluff, but democracies don't really have that many tools they can use to push back, effectively, against the seductive ideas of dictators.
The Brexit campaign was transformed from a fringe eccentricity into a mass movement by a handful of people who decided to make it into an argument about identity.
Unlike most European countries, the police in the US are decentralized; even the FBI has regional offices. Amending the constitution is a long and tedious process.
Under Freud's influence, many ambitious biographers - not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians - have sought answers in their subject's childhood.
Everywhere he goes, Trump is bored by working meetings and rude to those who attend them. He can't make deals or negotiate because he doesn't know enough about the issues.
Leon Trotsky, Stalin's worst enemy, was far and away his most influential 20th-century interpreter, shaping the views of a generation of historians, from Isaac Deutscher onward.
Clearly, the qualities Poles admire in a secretary of state - foreign languages, diplomatic experience, even sense of humor - are emphatically not those desired in a head of state: So be it.
There is nothing new about the sudden enthusiasm for aggressive government intervention during a health crisis. Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state.
At times when people fear death, they go along with measures that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will save them - even if that means a loss of freedom. Such measures have been popular in the past.