Today's headlines and history's judgment are rarely the same.
My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects a personal experience of political affiliation influenced by the struggle for voting rights and racial injustice.
In this quote, Condoleezza Rice shares a personal family history that illustrates how political alliances can be shaped by societal injustices. Her father’s decision to join the Republican Party, after facing discrimination from Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama, highlights the significance of voter registration and the broader implications of race relations in America. This narrative underscores how personal and historical contexts can influence political identities and decisions.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a seminar discussing the impact of race on political choices, this quote can illustrate a personal perspective on voter discrimination.
More from Condoleezza Rice
All quotes →I think my father thought I might be president of the United States. I think he would've been satisfied with secretary of state. I'm a foreign policy person and to have a chance to serve my country as the nation's chief diplomat at a time of peril and consequence, that was enough.
What the United States has done is to be open to people who are fleeing tyranny, who are fleeing danger, but we have done it in a very careful way that has worked for us.
For the United States, supporting international development is more than just an expression of our compassion. It is a vital investment in the free, prosperous, and peaceful international order that fundamentally serves our national interest.
Today's headlines and history's judgment are rarely the same. If you are too attentive to the former, you will most certainly not do the hard work of securing the latter.
Does anybody think these people were just sitting around drinking tea?
Similar quotes
If we can't have a public debate because the information space is so polluted, or because people are afraid of the reactions of organized trolls, then we can't really have meaningful elections anymore, either.
I don't think we can have democracies that work where most of the people are not benefiting economically, where most of the people are worried about their job security.
The effect of that is to poison the flow of information to the President himself and to create a situation where a President can be almost, to use a metaphor, psychotically divorced from the realities in which he is acting.
The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.
Because so many voters happen to be illiterate, India invented the party symbol, so that voters who could not read the name of their candidate could vote for him or her anyway by recognizing the symbol under which they campaigned.
In short, killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy, so long as the goose does not die before the next election and no one traces the politicians’ fingerprints on the murder weapon.