Fareed Zakaria > Quotes

“We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

“...foreign policy is a matter of costs and benefits, not theology.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

“The crucial challenge is to learn how to read critically, analyze data, and formulate ideas—and most of all to enjoy the intellectual adventure enough to be able to do them easily and often.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely. —E. O. Wilson”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“Being forced to write clearly means, first, you have to think clearly.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“It all looks American because America, the country that invented mass capitalism and consumerism, got there first. the impact of mass capitalism is now universal.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

“This isolation has left Americans quite unaware of the world beyong their borders. Americans speak few languages, know little about foreign cultures, and remain unconvinced that they need to rectify this. Americans rarely benchmark to global standards because they are sure that their way must be the best and most advanced. There is a growing gap between America's worldly business elite and cosmopolitan class, on the one hand and the majority of the American people on the other. Without real efforts to bridge it, this divide could destroy America's competitive edge and its political future.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World 2.0

“the central virtue of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to write, and writing makes you think. Whatever you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly, and reasonably quickly will prove to be an invaluable skill.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“You could choose to live in either America or Denmark. In high-tax Denmark, your disposable income after taxes and transfers would be around $15,000 lower than in the States. But in return for your higher tax bill, you would get universal health care (one with better outcomes than in the US), free education right up through the best graduate schools, worker retraining programs on which the state spends seventeen times more as a percentage of GDP than what is spent in America, as well as high-quality infrastructure, mass transit, and many beautiful public parks and other spaces. Danes also enjoy some 550 more hours of leisure time a year than Americans do. If the choice were put this way—you can take the extra $15,000 but have to work longer hours, take fewer vacation days, and fend for yourself on health care, education, retraining, and transport—I think most Americans would choose the Danish model.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“liberal education should give people the skills “that will help them get ready for their sixth job, not their first job.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“As John Adams famously wrote during the American Revolution, “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” So maybe today they’re writing apps rather than studying poetry, but that’s an adjustment for the age.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“For Jefferson, there was one step crucial to creating a genuine natural aristocracy. The poor and rich had to have equal access to a good education.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantages.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“Suppose the elections are free and fair and those elected are racists, fascists, separatists", said the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke about Yugoslavia in 1990s. "that is the dilemma”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“Edmund Burke once described society as a partnership between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn. It is difficult to see in the evolving system who will speak for the yet unborn, for the future.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“Because of the times we live in, all of us, young and old, do not spend enough time and effort thinking about the meaning of life. We do not look inside ourselves enough to understand our strengths and weaknesses, and we do not look around enough - a the world, in history - to ask the deepest and broadest questions. The solution surely is that, even now, we could all use a little bit more of a liberal education.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“The Yale report explained that the essence of liberal education was “not to teach that which is peculiar to any one of the professions; but to lay the foundation which is common to them all.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“...during the Asian financial crisis the United States and other Western countries demanded that the Asians take three steps--let bad banks fail, keep spending under control, and keep interest rates high. In it own crisis, the West did exactly the opposite on all three fronts.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

“Frederick Douglass saw the same connection. When his master heard that young Frederick was reading well, he was furious, saying, “Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world. If he learns to read the Bible it will forever unfit him to be a slave.” Douglass recalled that he “instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“If you listen to the political discourse in America today, you would think that all our problems have been caused by the Mexicans of the Chinese or the Muslims. The reality is that we have caused our own problems. Whatever has happened has been caused by isolating ourselves or blaming others.”
― Fareed Zakaria

“The twentieth century was marked by two broad trends: the regulation of capitalism and the deregulation of democracy. Both experiments overreached.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“What we need in politics today is not more democracy but less.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“... low interest rates and cheap credit also cause people to act foolishly or greedily ...”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

“We are now living through the third great power shift of the modern era. It could be called “the rise of the rest.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

“The solution is not that people need to major in marketing in college, but that their liberal education should be more structured and demanding. Majors should have some required sequence of basic courses, as in economics.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“A nations path to greatness lies in its economic prowess and that militarism, empire, and aggression lead to a dead end.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World 2.0

“British rule meant not democracy -colonialism is almost by definition underdemocratic - but limited constitutional liberalism and capitalism”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“This should remind us to value the many people whose jobs do not generate huge incomes but are worthwhile, essential, even noble—from scholars and teachers to janitors and street cleaners. The market may not reward them, but we should respect them.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“Change in society must take place organically; when forced too fast, the ensuing disruption, chaos, and backlash can often break civilization itself.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

“California has often led the country, indeed the world, in the technology, consumption, trends, lifestyles, and of course, mass entertainment. It is where the car found its earliest and fullest expression, where suburbs blossomed, where going to gym replaced going to church, where forces that lead so many to assume that direct democracy is the wave of the future - declining political parties, telecommuting, new technology, the internet generation 0 are all most well developed in this vast land.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad