Zalmay Khalilzad Quotes

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.

Our constitutions purport to be established by 'the people,' and, in theory, 'all the people' consent to such government as the constitutions authorize. But this consent of 'the people' exists only in theory. It has no existence in fact. Government is in reality established by the few; and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent being actually given.

Our troops are in Burundi. We were requested by African countries who said, look, the United Nations is not moving on this matter, can you people deploy people, so we can move Burundi forward.

I get a lot of death threats. But the way I look at it, I feel I have a moral obligation to do the best I can to make the country better for everybody, and that threatens certain people because they're going to have much less power. I want the power to go back to people making decisions over their own lives rather than some experts making it.

The majority of people in developed countries spend at least some time interacting with the Internet, and Governments are abusing that necessity in secret to extend their powers beyond what is necessary and appropriate.

The government of our great country belongs to all of the people and not just a handful of the wealthy.

There is a vulgar persuasion, that the ignorance of women, by favoring their subordination, ensures their utility. 'Tis the same argument employed by the ruling few against the subject many in aristocracies; by the rich against the poor in democracies; by the learned professions against the people in all countries.

They [people from the Donald Trump cabinet] haven't had experience in the areas that they're being asked to manage in a very complicated world and a very complicated government.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.

Lets all be reminded, 60 million Americans are on Social Security, 60 million. A third of those people depend on 90% of their income from Social Security. Nobody in this country is on Social Security because they made the decision when they were starting work at 14 that they wanted to trust some of their money with the government.

Nonviolent attainment of self-government presupposes a non-violent control over the violent elements in the country.

The Saudis are so happy. People don't understand, the Saudi Arabian government - kingdom - hates Iran. They're scared to death of Iran. That's Shi'a versus Sunni Muslim, and the Iranians are Persians. They're not Arabs. So it's a double whammy. There is no love lost, and the Saudis have been petrified over Barack Obama's peace dance and nuclear dealings with the nation of Iran. They are ecstatic to have Donald Trump.

The Turks ... the Saudis, the Emiratis, etc. What were they doing?

I think young people are recognizing the power of institutions, and we have to really dismantle a lot of the stigma and shame, culturally, but we also have to change things in terms of how government and institutions deal with this.

Maybe Iraq will come back and become the dominant power among Arab countries. That seems to me as conceivable.

We must, therefore, emphasize that 'we' are not the government; the government is not 'us.' The government does not in any accurate sense 'represent' the majority of the people. But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority. No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that 'we are all part of one another,' must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.

We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere.

A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves.

Here in Europe some of the challenges have to do with structures that are so complicated. You've got Brussels, and you've got parliament, you've got councils and then you've got national governments. So people sometimes don't feel as if they know who's making decisions, and the more that we can bring people in and engage them, the better. Some of it is also cultural and social, people's sense of identity.

I know now why confusion in government is not only tolerated but encouraged. I have learned. A confused people can make no clear demands.

Governments arise either out of the people or over the people.

But in this country we have one great privilege which they don't have in other countries. When a thing gets to be absolutely unbearable the people can rise up and throw it off. That's the finest asset we've got - the ballot box.

We are under [government's] control, and if people don't realize that, they haven't looked around. And if they're not paranoid, they haven't thought about it.

Give me a country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a government that does not understand you to let you alone.

So in a sense, that little war in the Levant had a horrendous effect in terms of the stability of countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, over the long term. Because once again, it proved to Muslims that their governments couldn't protect them and would side with the enemy.