Douglas Brinkley Quotes

Could it be that all those reports coming from our own intelligence that Bush ignored was right all along? Could it be that the UN was right all along?

The Bush Administration's failure to be consistently involved in helping Israel achieve peace with the Palestinians has been both wrong for our friendship with Israel, as well as badly damaging to our standing in the Arab world.

I first met Kim Dae Jung when he was a Korean dissident whose life was threatened by the military regime ruling in Seoul. I was Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, and Kim was directed to me because the East Asia Bureau at the State Department had long shunned him.

The fighting in Iraq has clearly demonstrated the strength of the bond between America and the Shiite heretics

Nothing guides Russian policy so much as a desire for friendship with the United States.

It is worth emphasizing that Iran released our hostages in 1981 the day Ronald Reagan was sworn into office.

I think Donald Trump realizes that if the story, in a day or two, is that the United States is in a war of words with Canada, people are going to go - well, good Lord, if he can't get along with Canada, he can't get along with anyone. And I think he realizes that that friendship has to endure and has to continue.

Let us make it clear that we will never turn our backs on our steadfast friends in Israel, whose adherence to the democratic way must be admired by all friends of freedom.

Unless Americans come to realize that they are not stronger in the world because they have the bomb but weaker because of their vulnerability to atomic attack, they are not likely to conduct their policy at Lake Success [the United Nations] or in their relations with Russia in a spirit that furthers the arrival at an understanding.

Mass civil disobedience is like an earthquake, a sort of general upheaval on the political plane.

The United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

The Iranian issue I don't think has much to do with nuclear weapons frankly. Nobody is saying Iran should have nuclear weapons ­nor should anybody else. But the point in the Middle East, as distinct from North Korea, is that this is center of the world's energy resources. Originally the British and secondarily the French had dominated it, but after the Second World War, it's been a U.S. preserve. That's been an axiom of U.S. foreign policy, that it must control Middle East energy resources.

I've always said that I'm open to changes in the relations between Cuba and the U.S., but that Cuba must make changes also.

Iran has made vile comments, anti-Semitic comments, comments about the destruction of Israel. It is precisely for that reason that even before I became president, I said Iran could not have a nuclear weapon.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

It is easier to run a revolution than a government.

When American administration will find that their interest is to follow up with the international conference and to find peace in this area, they will search not only for me, but for any Palestinian to speak with him. And they will say, "We have five million Arabs in the United States. We can't avoid them."

In the United States, revolts tends to be directed against specific situations, rarely against the social structure as a whole.

I think [Republicans] would really like to rip up that [Iran nuclear agreement] and get a new one, but that's going to be very difficult. You, of course, have Russia involved in that.

Scholars have been arguing for a long time whether the Soviet Union could have been turned into some kind of social democracy. I doubt it myself. I think what Gorbachev didn't quite understand, until it was too late, is that his efforts at change unleashed new, certrifical forces he hadn't counted on. He opened the door a crack and a huge wind blew it open.

Bashar Assad is a major cause of the refugees which are now flooding Europe and causing such consternation in the United States.

The fact that we did not give the demonstrators in Iran our moral support when a young woman named Neda bled to death in the streets of Iran will go down as one of the great mistakes of the 21st Century.

If the president Donald Trump had connected the Jerusalem question to some other positions, linking it to Israeli and Palestinian behavior or putting the Jerusalem statement in a larger context of U.S. policy, it could have potentially advanced the peace process. But I don't see how singling it out might help.

Nixon urged Clinton to maintain his relationship with Yeltsin but make contact with other democrats in Russia. He warned Clinton away from some ultranationalists and toward those interested in liberty and reform. He pressed Clinton to replace his ambassador in Kiev and concentrate future U.S. economic aid on Ukraine, where it would matter most.

Often Americans have heard Donald Trump be very hard on China. But that's not how it's heard over there. In China, his message is being interpreted as the sound of an exhausted America, an America that is seeking to withdraw from its commitments to NATO, to holding up, for instance, human rights around the world.