The Future of Freedom Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“In the Middle East today there are too many people consumed by political dreams and too few interested in practical plans. That is why, to paraphrase Winston Churchill's line about the Balkans, the region produces more history than it consumes.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“In thirty years Iraq too has gone from being among the most modern and secular of Arab countries -with women working, artists thriving, journalists writing- into a squalid playpen for a megalomaniac.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“France placed the state above society , democracy above constitutionalism, and equality above liberty. As a result, for much of the nineteenth century it was democratic, with broad suffrage and elections, but hardly liberal. it was certainly a less secure home for individual freedom than was England or America.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“Legitimacy is the elixir of political power. "The strongest is never strong enough to be the master", Jean-Jaques Rousseau observed, "unless he translates strength into right and obedience into duty". Only democracy has that authority in the world today.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“More intriguingly, in poll after poll, when Americans are asked what public institutions they most respect, three bodies are always at the top of their list: the Supreme Court, the armed forces, and the Federal Reserve System. All three have one thing in common: they are insulated from the public pressures and operate undemocratically. It would seem that Americans admire these institutions, preciselly because they lead rather than follow.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“Good programming, like good books, asks a little more of the viewer. But no executive today will risk having the viewer bored for even a minute.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“liberty came to the West centuries before democracy. Liberty led to democracy and not the other way around.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“Eighty years ago, Woodrow Wilson took America into the twentieth century with a challenge to make the world safe for democracy. As we enter the twenty-first century, our task is to make democracy safe for the world.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“In the world of journalism, the personal Web site ("blog") was hailed as the killer of the traditional media. In fact it has become hailed as the killer of the traditional media. In fact it has become something quite different. Far from replacing newspapers and magazines, the best blogs-and the best are very clever- have become guides to them, pointing to unusual sources and commenting on familiar ones. They have become mediators for the informed public.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“Andrew Moraviscik, one of the best American scholars of Europe, points out that once you exclude translators and clerical workers, the European Commission employs 2.500 officials, "fewer than any moderately sized European city and less than 1 percent of the number employed by the French state alone". As for its undemocratic nature, any new law it wishes to pass needs more than 71 percent of the weighted national-government votes - "a larger proportion than the required to amend the American Constitution".”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“The political history of the twentieth century is the story of greater and more direct political participation. And success kept expanding democracy's scope. Whatever the ailment, more democracy became the cure.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“What remains of the old Protestant fundamentalism is politics: abortion, gays, evolution. these issues are what binds congregations together. but even here things have changed as Americans have become more tolerant of many of these social taboos. Today many fundamentalist churches take nominally tough positions on, say, homosexuality but increasingly do little else for fear of offending the average believer, whom one schollar calls the "unchurched Harry". All it really takes to be a fundamentalist these days is to watch the TV shows, go to the theme parks, buy Christian rock, and vote Republican. The Sociologist Mark Shilbey, calls it the Californication of conservative Protestantism.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“For years many in the oil-rich states argued that their enormous wealth would bring modernizations. They pointed to the impressive appetites of Saudis and Kuwaitis for things Western, from McDonald's hamburgers to Rolex watches to Cadillac limousines. but importing Western good is easy; importing the inner stuffing of modern society - a free market, political parties, accountability, the rule of law - is difficult and even dangerous for the ruling elites”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“In an almost unthinkable reversal of a global pattern, almost every Arab country today is less free than it was forty years ago. There are few places in the world about which one can say that.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“Religions are vague, of course. This means that they are easy to follow -you can interpret their prescriptions as you like. but it also means that it is easy to slip up -there is always some injunction you are violating. But Islam has no religious establishment - no popes, no bishops - that can declare by fiat which is the correct interpretation. As a result, the decision to oppose the state on the grounds that is insufficiently Islamic belongs to anyone who wishes to exercise it.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“Russia's fundamental problem is not that it is a poor country struggling to modernize, but rather that it is a rich country struggling to modernize. Schoolchildren in the Soviet era were taught that they lived in the richest country in the world. In this case communist propaganda was true”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“In fact, some have said that the clash between Catholicism and Protestantism illustrates the old maxim that religious freedom is the product of two equally pernicious fanaticisms, each cancelling the other out”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“Democracy is also a single ideology, and, like all such templates, it has its limits. what works in a legislature might not work in a corporation”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“The tragedy for the millions of new lower-caste voters is that their representatives, for whom they dutifully vote en masse, have looted the public coffers and become immensely rich and powerful while mouthing slogans about the oppression of their people.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“immigration, and cultural clashes. Governments have to protect”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

“But looking under the covers of Indian democracy one sees a more complex and troubling reality. In recent decades, India has become something quite different from the picture in the hearts of its admirers. Not that it is less democratic: in important ways it has become more democratic. But it has become less tolerant, less secular, less law-abiding, less liberal. And these two trends—democratization and illiberalism—are directly related.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad