Condoleezza Rice

We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

The U.S. has since the end of World War II had an answer - we stand for free peoples and free markets, we are willing to support and defend them - we will sustain a balance of power that favors freedom.

That was a sin: to consider yourself victimized or not able to control your destiny or your fate - that was the one cardinal sin in our community.

Our work has only begun. In our time we have an historic opportunity to shape a global balance of power that favors freedom and that will therefore deepen and extend the peace. And I use the word power broadly, because even more important than military and indeed economic power is the power of ideas, the power of compassion, and the power of hope.

What has always made our country special is that it doesn't matter where you come from; it matters where you're going. Our job is to make certain the pathways are open to both our boys and our girls.

When I talk to students - and I still think of myself more than anything as a kind of professor on leave - they say, 'Well, how do I get to do what you do?'... And I say, 'Well, you have to start out by being a failed piano major.' And my point to them is don't try to have a 10-year plan. Find the next thing that interests you and follow that.

There are those who would draw a sharp line between power politics and a principled foreign policy based on values. This polarized view - you are either a realist or devoted to norms and values - may be just fine in academic debate, but it is a disaster for American foreign policy. American values are universal.

People are tired of being kept from the dignity that allows them to make their own choices.

People have the right to protest - that's what democracy is all about. I have no problem with people exercising their democratic rights.

The day has to come when it's not a surprise that a woman has a powerful position.

Great powers can't get tired, because the international order is not self-governing.

What you know today can affect what you do tomorrow. But what you know today cannot affect what you did yesterday.

Great leaders never accept the world as it was and always work for the world as it should be

Power is nothing unless you can turn it into influence.

After all, when the world looks to America, they look to us because we are the most successful political and economic experiment in human history.

Differences can be strength rather than a handicap.

I firmly believe you never should spend your time being the former anything.

This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can threaten its neighbors, occupy a capital, overthrow a government, and get away with it. Things have changed.

You cannot be on one hand dedicated to peace and on the other dedicated to violence. Those two things are irreconcilable.

It is a dangerous thing to ask why someone else has been given more. It is humbling - and indeed healthy - to ask why you have been given so much.

Education is transformational. It changes lives. That is why people work so hard to become educated and why education has always been the key to the American Dream, the force that erases arbitrary divisions of race and class and culture and unlocks every person's God-given potential.