A Quote by Condoleezza Rice

What surprised me was the angst at our democracy. And I understand it - I teach at a university and feel it in my students - but what I've tried to say to people is that we have amazing institutions, but nobody ever said we were perfect. We struggled before and we're struggling now, and we're going to struggle every day. We're a work in progress. That's why the American experience is so important for us to remember, and for us to be a beacon for others to enjoy those same rights.
The United States was founded on the idea that all people are endowed with inalienable rights, and that principle has allowed us to work to perfect our union at home while standing as a beacon of hope to the world. Today, that principle is embodied in agreements Americans helped forge - the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and treaties against torture and genocide - and it unites us with people from every country and culture.
My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not."
A lot of people write and tell us what The B-52s meant to them - straight, straight-A students, those who were a little awkward, weren't always the ones who fit in. People have told us that just having us and our music was beyond important and really made me feel that what we were doing was worth something big.
The biggest problem for my generation is that people who were born years before us have no concept of us at all. There's a massive gap. I don't know why, but we were really like orphans. Those people competed against us, they hated us and fought for things, and yet they had no interest in our work.
The fact is we're always going to be interwoven with the American economy, and that's why it's important to have a good, strong, constructive relationship with whoever the American President is and whatever administration it is, whatever their priorities. We will always work constructively together. But at the same time, Canadians expect us to stand up for our own values, to make our own choices, whether it's around climate or multilateral institutions, and that's exactly what we're going to keep doing.
My experience came before most of you were born. My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn't normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge. But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge. So, half a dozen of us tried - not all of us in history - and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
And they can appreciate, through personal experience, that the really decisive battleground of American freedom is in the hearts and minds of our own people... Each day we must ask that Almighty God will set and keep His protecting hand over us so that we may pass on to those who come after us the heritage of a free people, secure in their God-given rights and in full control of a Government dedicated to the preservation of those rights.
You are a child of God, small games do not work in this world. For those around us to feel peace, it is not example to make ourselves small. We were born to express the glory of God that lives in us. It is not in some of us, it is in all of us. While we allow our light to shine, we unconsciously give permission for others to do the same. When we liberate ourselves from our own fears, simply our presence may liberate others.
The Islamists started this war. They explained to us as clearly as General Giap and Ho Chi Minh explained to us why they were fighting us, and we have ignored it. Mrs. Clinton has ignored it, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama. The idea that they're attacking us because of our culture is insane. We are now waging a war against them culturally. We're trying to impose democracy, women's rights, parliamentary systems on a people who don't want it. They're going to fight that.
My favorite advice that I always go to is ever since I was in middle school is from my mom. Every day before I left the house, she would say "Remember who you are." Every day. So when I started getting into music, every day she sends me a text saying, "Remember who you are and remember why you're doing this."
If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter--as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.
At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us how to behave in the world. You teach us to not fight with others, to work things out, to respect others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share - not be greedy: then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do?
American society was economically ill-run in the 1980s. Our society has been on a consumption binge. If the American people had a town meeting and said, 'What do we care about posterity? Posterity hasn't done anything for us; we're going to whoop it up now,' that is a rational judgment. But nobody ever did that.
I read recently that all of us can be defined in adult life by the way others perceived us in high school. I know [people] who had the popular, good-looking path in high school; they tend not to do so well. It was a little bit too easy for them, where for those of us who struggled in every sense, perhaps our determination and self-reliance and discipline were reinforced by that.
I am sure we should not shut our hearts against the healing influences that nature offers us. But I understand your feeling. I think we all experience the same thing. We resent the thought that anything can please us when someone we love is no longer here to share the pleasure with us, and we almost feel as if we were unfaithful to our sorrow when we find our interest in life returning to us.
Literally, no man ever sees himself as others see him. No photograph or reflection ever gives us the same slant on ourselves that others see. It has often been proved on the witness stand that no two people ever see the same accident precisely the same way. We see through different eyes and from different angles. But if we could see things as other people see them, we could come closer to knowing why they do what they do and why they say what they say.
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